Fighting for recognition
MISSION FOR VETS TO GET THEIR DUES
THEY carried guns with live ammunition and were told of a “clear and present danger” threat of attack from armed China-backed jungle insurgents threatening to overrun the allied airfield they were tasked to defend.
But the 9000 Australian Defence Force troops deployed to protect the allied Butterworth Air Base during a Communist insurgency in Malaysia have had their quest for recognition shot down by Defence, with their actions formally declared not “warlike” enough.
Indeed some of those personnel have been told the threat was just exaggerated to make their overseas “training” deployment feel more real.
The low-key Defence declaration in July this year should have closed a 30-year campaign by Australian Army Rifle Company Butterworth veterans to have their 1970 to 1989 Malay crisis service recognised.
It also would dash hopes of an active service medal and veteran gold card privileges including healthcare, housing services and other concessions.
But now a trove of military intelligence cables, witness statements, maps and memos some marked “top secret” and released under Freedom of Information laws could reverse that.
Newly-released documents suggest successive Federal Governments and ADF hierarchy had publicly sought to class the deployment for “training purposes” essentially to ensure the Malaysian public were not upset by the then presence of foreign troops in potential armed conflict on their soil.
It was also designed to downplay the regional stability threat from the Chinabacked Communist revolutionary rebels in their armed conflict with Malaysian federal security forces.
That threat only dissipated in 1989 when a formal peace accord was signed between the Malaysian Government and the rebels.
Now the vexed question whether to declare a threat – perceived or actual – ever existed will come down to a team of bureaucrats from the Defence Honours and Awards Appeals Tribunal (DHAAT) to classify the armed deployment.
They are being asked – was it “warlike” or “peacetime service”?
A decision was expected this year but such has become the political sensitive historic review and emerging mass of evidence, a ruling is now not expected before mid-2023.
Previous reviews had only attracted appeals by individual troops who had been aged in their late teens or 20s but now senior officers directly involved in either intelligence briefings or command have come forward to join their ranks to set the record straight.
“There is no way they can argue it was peacetime service,” Rifle Company Butterworth veteran Ray Fulcher, 65, said.
He was a private, aged 20, when he deployed and said he knew why he was going and his arrival briefing confirmed it. “They knew what we were
there for, we knew what we were there for, it was not training, it was to protect the base and protect the RAAF. We were part of the shared defence plan with Malaysian forces, there to defend the base against an insurgency that was happening in Malaysia throughout that entire period.”
“Here is the stupidity of Defence, they argue quite seriously that the enemy threat was exaggerated to us to make our training more realistic. Now when you consider they gave us live ammunition and told us we could shoot people and there was an enemy that was going to try to get onto the base that does not make any sense. Why would you do that? It goes against all the safety
rules of ( ADF) training. The stuff they’ve come up with over the years is mind blowing in its blatant stupidity and nonsense in calling black white.”
He said there was contemporary evidence showing the Department of Veterans Affairs had sort to scotch the prospect of greater recognition due to the impact the move would have on its budget should veteran benefits have to be extended.
The DHAAT was this year directed to make a redetermination in the wake of a New Zealand Government decision to extend eligibility of the NZ Operational Service Medal to a larger proportion of members who served in Malaysia up to 1974.
In his 72-page July 2022
submission to the tribunal on behalf of the Defence Department, ADF chief Angus Campbell welcomed the reexamination of the determination the Australian deployments were peacetime service only under non warlike conditions.
He noted the NZ ruling only brought it into line with Australia and its previous determinations which broadly recognised the ADF’S deployment in South East Asia with a service medal and clasp as appropriate recognition as distinct to an Australian Active Service Medal.
“Defence and successive Australian Governments have consistently held that ADF service at Butterworth between 1970 and 1989 and since that time is appropri
ately classified as peacetime service,” the submission concludes, citing three previous reviews into the issue.
Under legislation and descriptions updated in 1993, warlike operations were described as only declared so in writing by the Defence Minister of the day and include application of force and an expectation of casualties.
In Butterworth’s case, Gen Campbell said Malaysia did not formally request assistance, activities by Communist terrorists were “incidental” to the ADF’S deployments, Malaysia never declared a “Second Emergency” after the officially recognised Malayan Emergency (1948-60) and the Aussies were essentially there for training.