Page 3187 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 18 August 2009
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If you consider the damage that has been done to national reputations in places like the former Yugoslavia and some of the atrocities that were carried out there, in the Second World War by the Germans and by the Japanese, these are things that take decades, if not centuries, to recover from. So that is a very good reason for adhering to the Geneva conventions.
The other reason, from a purely pragmatic circumstance, is that, if you are fighting a war, then you must have the nation’s will behind you. What we refer to in the military now is a strategic corporal. The actions of a corporal on an outpost can have strategic ramifications. If he behaves improperly, if a young private soldier does something that is stupid, he reacts improperly to a civilian, he shoots a civilian, he does something that causes harm, the nation’s will behind the ADF will collapse. So there are some very good reasons to adhere to the Geneva conventions from a humanist point of view. We also find that modern militaries, the professional armies, will adhere to the Geneva conventions because it actually makes good military sense to do so.
The problem is that we are fighting nowadays an adversary who has a different standard. We are fighting people like the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Shiite militias in Iraq and previously militias in East Timor, who, by their very way of fighting wars, basically are the exact opposite of what the Geneva conventions are set up to implement. If you consider what they do, they target civilians. If you think about the way the Taliban operate, the way al-Qaeda operates, they deliberately target civilians. They commit atrocities. And they do so to try to provoke Western nations, people who are signatories to the Geneva conventions, to overreach the mark. So if you are in a position where you are adhering to the Geneva conventions but fighting an adversary who is deliberately and at all times trying to provoke you into committing atrocities, it is a remarkably difficult situation to be in.
We would all condemn a number of the things that we have seen in Iraq and in Afghanistan in very limited numbers. But I think it is also worthy of reflecting on the fact that what has happened as an exception to the rule by Western forces is actually the standard rule or method of operation by our adversary. It is important to note that, where there have been atrocities in places like Abu Ghraib, that has been investigated. The armies and the nations in which that occurred have condemned it soundly. People have been convicted and people have been punished.
It is always worthy, I think, to reflect on where we do go wrong. But if we are honest we must also recognise that we are doing an extremely good job in very difficult circumstances, both in the ADF and with our allies.
I would like to highlight a couple of personal examples, if I could. Firstly, in terms of training, when I was in Papua New Guinea in 1990 we were training the Papua New Guinea defence force to go and operate in Bougainville. We were hearing stories about atrocities which were coming out of Bougainville which unfortunately were committed in some cases by the PNGDF. They were not verified but certainly there were some pretty horrific stories.
We then changed the training regime for the people we were training there. I must say that we altered it to the point where a large focus of the training that we conducted
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