China’s jab ill-considered
The doctored image purporting to show an Australian soldier holding a bloodied knife to the throat of an Afghan child is in itself a squalid piece of Chinese propaganda. But as propaganda sometimes does, it has seized upon a discomforting measure of truth to inflate and contort to its own ends.
Australia’s military and Government have accepted amortifying inquiry finding that 39 Afghan prisoners and civilians were executed as part of a grotesque ‘‘blooding’’ exercise for junior soldiers in rogue special forces. Some 19 Special Air Service troops could face murder prosecutions and a further 13 soldiers have been sent notice of their likely dismissal.
It is a shaming exercise for Australia, but potentially an honourable one too.
The gratuitous provocation from a senior Chinese official who tweeted the fake image has deliberately inflamed tensions between the two countries. Yet that is not all.
The extent to which the awful image may have fanned anti-Australian sentiment is offset by the distaste it invites among the many countries whose leaders and citizens will detect, with concern, that China’s so-called ‘‘wolf warrior diplomats’’ are willing to resort tomore than mere bombast and hyperbole.
None of which positions Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison on a high horse from which to retaliate. His evident fury, shared by so many of his citizens, needed to be filtered through a chastened acknowledgement of the credible charges of execution-style murders, however inaccurately the manner of the deaths may have been fictionalised in this case.
Morrison wasn’t really in a position to ignore the offensiveness of the post, and there was certainly validity in his efforts to have Twitter take it down. However, his message should have been a swift, scornful dismissal. It was naive for him to splutter for an apology, which merely invited the response that the Chinese provocateurs duly and fatuously delivered – that he was huffing and puffing in denial of the harms done.
New Zealand, for its part, has reacted appropriately. Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta said this country ‘‘doesn’t support disinformation that tends to be inflammatory, both domestically and internationally’’. That’ll do.
Neither Australia, nor the US, UK or ourselves, can flinch from honestly investigating reports of war crimes when they arise – as they do. Yet this must not blind us to parallel truths, such as the day-to-day professionalism, decency and heroism that uncorrupted troops have shown, and continue to show.
It bears repeating that, although New Zealand has seen its own inquiry into civilian deaths during an SAS raid, there was never any suggestion that our troops deliberately executed civilians.
It has been a strange week for Morrison, with the China offence playing out just as he’s being praised for the engineered release of AustralianBritish academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert, detained in Iran for more than two years. How it must stick in his craw to be accused of hypocrisy, and scolded as if his country wasn’t confronting its wrongdoings, by Chinese diplomats whose own government has detained up to amillion Muslim Uighurs in reeducation camps, and has been shredding the freedoms of democracy in Hong Kong.
The world is awash with legitimate reasons for reproach and accountability, within nations and among them. Amid this, strategic and mean mendacities, such as China has employed here, need to be called out.
Morrison wasn’t really in a position to ignore the offensiveness of the post.