The existence of “criminal behaviour” within the ranks of the Australian Defence Force’s elite troops has yet to have any consequences further up the chain of command. Senator Jacqui Lambie calls it a cover-up. Lisa-Jane Roberts reports.
Tasmanian independent senator Jacqui Lambie has lambasted the “culture of cover-up at the highest levels of the Australian Defence Force” in Federal parliament and called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate senior defence force personnel in relation to the war crimes allegedly carried out by members of the Special Forces in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016.
Senator Lambie, a former ADF member, spoke of a “shocking lack of accountability at the top of our Defence Force” and alerted the Senate that she had filed a complaint under article 15 of the Rome Statute with the Prosecutor of the ICC in the Hague, “asking him to look at Australia’s higher commanders through the lens of command responsibility.”
This comes on the heels of the Senator’s repeated requests for Chief of Defence Force (CDF) General Angus Campbell to release redacted copies of up to 24 letters sent to command-level personnel warning that in keeping with recommendations made by the Brereton Inquiry into the actions of Australian defence forces in Afghanistan, they may be stripped of certain awards and medals due to a failure in “command accountability.”
Justice Paul Brereton found that 25 current and former ADF personnel were implicated in the alleged killing of 39 Afghans but close to three years since his report, no senior ranks have been held accountable. No one has been demoted or sacked and all retain their medals for distinguished service.
Campbell himself served as Commander of the Joint Task Force 633 from 2011 to 2012 and was deployed in Afghanistan, earning a Distinguished Service Cross for his service. The general offered to return the medal in 2020 following Brereton’s release, but his offer was refused by then defence minister Linda Reynolds.
The Brereton recommendation that honours awarded during the period in which alleged war crimes occurred be revoked sparked indignation among several groups.
An impassioned plea
The Hon Martin Hamilton-Smith, a former South Australian MP, is the chairman of the Australian Special Air Services Association (ASASA). Earlier this year, the former SAS officer made an impassioned plea to Campbell to “desist from any action founded in a presumption of guilt or designed to punish or constructively dismiss from ADF employment any soldier not proven to have done something wrong.”
Neither Oliver Schulz, who recently became the first Australian soldier to be charged with a war crime in the aftermath of the Afghanistan conflict, nor Ben Roberts-Smith, by then deep into his defamation battle with three newspapers, are mentioned in Hamilton-Smith’s letter. He refers instead to the apparent “lack of a duty of care by senior command and by Ministers for Defence,” manifest in the unsustainable demands placed upon Special Forces soldiers acting in the Afghanistan conflict.
Despite Brereton and the evidence in the BRS case, no military or government leaders have been publicly held to account for allowing a “warrior-hero culture” to flourish in Afghanistan, fomenting an environment in which a handful of elite soldiers came to be regarded as “demi-gods,” and military prowess became enmeshed with “a sense of entitlement” and “exceptionalism.”
As Professor David Whetham explains in Annex A to Chapter 3 of the Brereton, it is a culture born of the “gradual erosion of standards” that, in this case, he largely attributes to “the character and tempo of the deployments (and redeployments); inadequate training and support; inappropriate metrics of success […]; a lack of clarity about purpose […]; a fractured, compartmentalised and dysfunctional leadership; and a general lack of oversight aided and abetted by the very people who should have been providing it.”
Those “very people” are the military commanders and responsible government ministers who have, so far, evaded any meaningful public scrutiny as the media (justifiably, though perhaps to the detriment of potential criminal investigations) focuses on the actions of individual foot soldiers such as Roberts-Smith and Schulz.
Command accountability
Will command be brought to book? Will we see fundamental cultural changes implemented to ensure that unruly elements within the ADF – the so-called “rotten apples” – are not permitted to destroy the reputation of our armed forces and undermine public confidence in the thousands of men and women in the forces who maintain their integrity, regardless of the pressures placed upon them?
It seems unlikely, given that the Brereton Inquiry found no evidence “that there was knowledge of, or reckless indifference to, the commission of war crimes, on the part of commanders at troop/platoon, squadron/company or Task Group Headquarters level, let alone at higher levels such as Commander Joint Task Force 633, Joint Operations Command, or Australian Defence Headquarters.”
A further obstacle to investigating command accountability arose in 2021, when, in a letter to General Campbell, the then-Minister for Defence and now leader of the Opposition, Peter Dutton, expressed his “very strong view” that the Office of the Special Investigator, set up to examine potential post-Brereton disciplinary actions, should “take precedence over other disciplinary actions”. He asked the General to “suspend administrative action […] in relation to personnel who held command positions relevant to the scope of the Afghanistan Inquiry.”
The present government has given General Campbell permission to recommence these investigations, so there is hope that we may see fundamental changes that reflect Australia’s adherence to the Rome Statute, Article 28 of which states that military commanders are ultimately responsible for crimes committed by forces under their command where the “military commander or person either knew or, owing to the circumstances at the time, should have known that the forces were committing or about to commit such crimes.”
Failed in their duty of care
Clearly, it was not the commanders who pulled the triggers, wielded the knives, or barbarically deployed their heavily booted feet in any of the war crimes that allegedly took place in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016; however, leaders with the ADF and the government do appear to have failed in their duty of care, their duty to know and their duty to oversee.
While there is no doubt that individual soldiers who have acted inappropriately should be properly investigated, charged and tried for any acts of cruelty, murder, or other criminal conduct that contravenes the Laws of Armed Conflict, there must also be repercussions for those who, through wilful ignorance, lack of foresight or a laissez-faire attitude towards questionable practices within highly effective regiments, so spectacularly fail to meet their fundamental obligations with such terrible consequences.
In response to Lambie, Labor’s defence minister Richard Marles promised the government would hold defence commanders accountable for war crimes committed on their watch. A number of recommendations were “sitting on his desk” and would be acted on in “due course”, he said.
‘Rogue heroes’: body cameras alone won’t fix the likes of Ben Roberts-Smith
