WE must credit Australia for setting up a war crimes inquiry to look into the atrocities allegedly committed by its special forces in Afghanistan.
Led by New South Wales Court of Appeal justice Paul Brereton, it was the most damning war crimes inquiry in Australian history, opines Australia's The Age.
Brereton's report, released in November 2020, unearthed 39 cold-blooded killings of civilians, including children, one such committed by Australia's most decorated soldier.
As a further complication to the war crimes inquiry, the soldier is suing a few newspapers, including The Age, for defamation. There was also a parallel war crimes inquiry set up by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) in June 2018.
This is where our kudos to Australia ends. It has been over a year since the Brereton report was released and four years since AFP swung into action, yet there is no prosecution.
Brereton is suitably disturbed. In a lecture delivered last month to the Military History Society titled "War Crimes in Australian History: From Boer War to Vietnam War", The Age quoted him saying thus: Australian laws prohibiting war crimes are pointless if they are not enforced and if a law is not enforced it becomes a dead letter.
Australia must know that its reputation as a law-abiding nation will be at stake if it opts for no further action. Besides, if Australia fails to prosecute when there is a case for it to do so, then it is an open invitation to the International Criminal Court (ICC), a court of last resort, to investigate and prosecute Australians.
The Rome Statute, the treaty that created the ICC, envisages such an intervention through its principle of complementarity.
War crimes investigation in Britain is doing worse. If Australia's is stalling, Britain's is refusing to even launch a war crime inquiry. BBC's Panorama's report released last week may be even more damning than Brereton's report.
The sum of the BBC's investigation is this: Britain's Special Air Service (SAS) operatives repeatedly killed detainees and unarmed men in suspicious circumstances. Based on newly obtained military reports, the BBC says: "One unit may have unlawfully killed 54 in one six-month tour."
Panorama also speaks of a pattern of suspicious killings emerging as it pieced together operational accounts by SAS operatives.
Afghan men were escorted into a house and asked to pull down the curtains and as they pulled AK-47 rifles or hand grenades from behind curtains or some furniture, they were shot dead.
How were they able to reach for the AK-47 rifles or grenades after they were detained? If they were so armed, why did none of the SAS operatives sustain any injuries? AK-47 rifles did appear in some of the cases. But it could have been drop weapons planted in the premises to justify the killings, the report suggests.
Brereton's report, too, mentions drop weapons. But all the British Defence Ministry will say to the BBC is that it had carried out extensive investigations and found no evidence to prosecute.
Panorama viewers will disagree. Brereton, who himself served the armed forces at the highest level, has this to say to Australia and by implication, Britain: "A nation's preparedness to investigate war crimes on its own is a mark of a mature civilisation and one way in which it can remedy the stain on its reputation occasioned by the commission of crimes in its name by its service personnel."