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Comment by Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on crimes committed by Australian military personnel in Afghanistan

16 June 2023 12:08
1181-16-06-2023

We have taken note of the ruling by an Australian court in the defamation case brought by retired Corporal of Australia's Special Air Service (SAS) Benjamin Roberts-Smith against Fairfax Media. He filed the suit following the publication of a journalistic inquiry which concluded that the SAS corporal committed war crimes during his deployment with the Australian forces in Afghanistan. Having scrutinised the journalists' story, the court ruled that they reliably proved their information about the crimes committed by Benjamin Roberts-Smith, including the murder of three unarmed Afghans. It is notable that before the compromising information was made public, the former corporal was hailed as a national hero for his mission in Afghanistan and was awarded the Victoria Cross, Australia's highest military decoration, in 2011.

Back in 2020, when the media began reporting about the war crimes committed by the Australian military in Afghanistan, Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Paul Brereton published the results of an in-house investigation (the Brereton Report), according to which 25 current or former special forces personnel were involved in the murder of 39 civilians or prisoners in Afghanistan. He recommended turning the materials over to the police for launching a criminal investigation and calling the guilty to account. To date, only former SAS soldier Oliver Schulz has been charged with the murder of an unarmed Afghan citizen. Consequently, the ruling taken in the case of Benjamin Roberts-Smith will not necessarily lead to charges of criminal liability.

It is obvious that the ruling establishment of the "green continent" is doing its best to sweep the damaging issue of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan under the rug. At least, this is how we see the actions, or rather the inaction, of the previous liberal cabinet led by heavily criticised Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his obnoxious defence minister, Peter Dutton. Members of the veterans' organisations, media and several political groups that do not associate themselves with the current government have angrily protested the attempts to close the Afghan file by blaming all the crimes on soldiers and sergeants of the Australian special forces. For example, during the parliamentary hearings in May, Senator Malcom Roberts from the One Nation opposition party called on Australian Defence Force chief General Angus Campbell to surrender his Distinguished Service Cross, which he received in 2012 as commander of the Australian forces in the Middle East.

The new facts that have come to light about the war crimes committed by the Australian military show that it is a deep institutional problem of the country's elite forces. The attempts by the establishment to dampen public outcry exclusively with palliative measures is evidence of the double standards and hypocrisy of the Australian political class, which refuses to recognise its own mistakes when accusing others of "non-compliance with Western standards."