Bulletin: The Sydney Siege

As Sydney recovers from its traumatic hostage drama earlier this week, we look back at what happened and the lessons learned.

All eyes were on the Lindt Chocolate Cafe on Martin Place in Sydney when gunman Man Haron Monis took 17 staff and patrons hostage earlier this week. The terrifying ordeal lasted 16 hours and resulted in the deaths of two hostages and Monis.

The siege began at 9.45am local time on Monday; half an hour later, Australian television stations had broadcast images of the hostages holding their hands against the cafe window.

At about 4pm, three men escaped through the fire exit; another two women made it through the same door an hour later. Monis’ demands had included a conversation with Prime Minister Tony Abbott and broadcast of videos shot of hostages from within the cafe. When neither were met, he became agitated.

After gunfire was heard at 2.30am on Tuesday, commandos stormed the building, and New South Wales police declared the siege over shortly afterwards. A 34-year-old man and a 38-year-old woman, both hostages, and Monis were later confirmed as the three people killed. (Guardian Australia has a timeline of events.)

LISTEN: Radio New Zealand National’s Simon Mercep speaks to 2GB radio host Ray Hadley, who received several calls from a hostage while they were being held captive.

Now that the siege is over, questions are being asked whether it could have been prevented.

Tony Abbott says authorities should have stopped the Monis from obtaining a weapon and roaming the Sydney streets, but Australians can not expect his government to “monitor everyone all the time”. “We’ve got to always be better at this because if we aren’t good at this, our people suffer. And the tragedy of this atrocity is that two delightful Australians, two very decent people are dead, others are injured, others are traumatised because of a madman who was roaming our streets.”

An Iranian who was granted political asylum in Australia in 1996, Monis is now widely understood to have been a “lone wolf” acting of his own accord, undermining early speculation that he was affiliated with a terrorist group or responding to Australia’s involvement in conflict in the Middle East.

The BBC reports that Monis was a fringe figure, who had been rejected by both Sunni and Shia members of the Sydney Muslim community. He was known to police and had a string of serious convictions and charges to his name; at the time of the siege was on bail for allegedly being an accessory to the killing of his former wife.

LISTEN: Nine to Noon speaks to the former lawyer for Man Haron Monis, Manny Conditsis.​

Writing in the Guardian Australia, Yassir Morsi confirms that Monis “had no deeper ‘political’ motivation behind his use of the [Islamic] flag [and] he did not belong to any official terror organisation”: “The pack he belongs to is the group of isolated people who are brought together by a sense of alienation, frustration, a breakdown in social bonds, and their use of the symbolism and language of violence.”

But Sydney’s Muslim community remains fearful of backlash. During the siege, one woman offered to escort a Muslim woman she’d seen removing her hijab on public transport through the city. The gesture spurred a social media campaign, where people used the #IllRideWithYou hashtag to offer Australian Muslims support and solidarity during the siege.

Though it attracted global attention, it was criticised by some as being patronising. “It’s the race relations equivalent of a popular, cool friend who takes you to the front of the queue outside an exclusive club, mentions to the bouncer “it’s cool, they’re with me” and both get access beyond the velvet rope,” wrote Melbourne-based blogger Oliver Chan. “That’s not equal and implies dependence on someone else’s goodwill for access to the same opportunities that we take for granted.”

The media has come in for both criticism and praise. At Crikey, Bernard Keane argues that the  events in Sydney showed the media isn’t up to the task of calm, well-informed coverage of terrorism events. But The Guardian’s Amanda Meade praised the Channel 7 newsroom – positioned directly across from the Lindt cafe – and the rest of the media for showing restraint. “Across the media there were erroneous reports early on Monday about raids in Lakemba and unrelated arrests, but in the main most journalists exercised caution."

In the Sydney Morning Herald, Waleed Aly writes that maybe these kinds of attacks can’t be stopped. “Think about what we've seen lately, from Australia to North America: a knife, an axe, a couple of guns, even a car.  Perhaps the most profound aspect of our age is that the power to inflict carnage is now shared with the small to the invisible to the otherwise insignificant.”

But Monis was acting alone: both on bail and the cusp of imprisonment for a series of convictions, maybe it wasn’t so much that he was pushed over the edge, but that he jumped.

Writing in the New Zealand Herald, Brian Rudman says the siege sends “a clear signal” that Prime Minister John Key should not send New Zealand troops to Iraq. “Australian Prime Minister Mr Abbott couldn’t resist the urge to go to war and the mayhem in Sydney’s Lindt Chocolat Cafe was a direct consequence. It pushed a mentally unstable man over the edge.”

But Monis was acting alone: both on bail and the cusp of imprisonment for a series of convictions, maybe it wasn’t so much that he was pushed over the edge, but that he jumped.

If you must make a case for something out of this tragedy, it’s possible to argue that tougher penalties for violence against women will prevent other crime.

But there’s still plenty that’s not known by the authorities, and to a certain extent, Monis’ motivations are besides the point, as Martin Chulov pointed out in Guardian Australia: “To many Australians, regardless of the suspect’s motivations, the siege was the sum of all fears – an event that has moved from being considered fanciful in the post-9/11 days to almost inevitable just over a decade later.”