Bulletin from Sydney: For Australian soldier hero Ben Roberts-Smith, the longest war is far from over
Ben Roberts-Smith: Australia’s most-decorated living soldier faces a war crimes investigation. Photo / Getty Images
It is difficult to recall criminal charges that have conflicted Australians more than the mid-April arrest of the Afghanistan war hero, Ben Roberts-Smith. The case is rivalled by the charging of the New Zealand-born mother Lindy Chamberlain, in 1982, for the murder of her infant daughter Azaria, whom Chamberlain said had been snatched by a dingo while her family was camping at Ayers Rock (now Uluru). Lindy Chamberlain was convicted and imprisoned but later exonerated and declared innocent.
Unlike Lindy Chamberlain, Roberts-Smith, 47, faces years in limbo until courts decide the five charges laid against him by Australian police over his alleged involvement in the murders of five unarmed Afghan men. All the victims were allegedly under the control of Australian soldiers during Roberts-Smith’s multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan with the SAS.
There is much about the case that sits uncomfortably with many Australians, not least the actions of the Australian Federal Police, who elected to ostentatiously arrest the Victoria Cross recipient as he walked off a commercial flight to Sydney with his two teenage daughters. Prosecutors later admitted Roberts-Smith had made repeated offers to cooperate should he be charged.
His arrest followed an insatiably publicised civil defamation case that three years ago found Roberts-Smith, on the balance of probabilities, likely had been involved in the unlawful killings of several unarmed Afghan detainees. That outcome followed years of investigation and reporting by The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s The Age newspapers, which Roberts-Smith unsuccessfully sued.
The criminal case against the towering, chiselled veteran – now set to be tested to a far higher judicial standard – has become the face of Australia’s reckoning over the conduct of its much-vaunted and secretive special forces. They stayed years in the mountains of Afghanistan – 20 rotations involving some 3000 personnel – contesting a shadowy enemy of farmers and fighters. Some, like Roberts-Smith, were deployed there six times.
After rumours and allegations first surfaced in 2016 of unlawful killings by Australian special forces, the Australian Defence Force inspectorate ordered an investigation conducted by Paul Brereton, a Supreme Court judge and army reservist. Brereton found “credible evidence” that elite soldiers unlawfully killed 39 people, recommending 19 current or former Australian soldiers be investigated. Roberts-Smith is the second to be charged.
His case will be fraught with prosecutorial difficulties and still-raw emotions among those who served in Afghanistan. It has also polarised political leaders. Former prime minister John Howard, who first sent Australian troops to Australia’s longest war in Afghanistan in 2001, said in a statement issued after Roberts-Smith’s arrest in mid-April that the veteran was “the modern personification of the great Anzac tradition” whose arrest “will tug at the heart strings of millions of Australians”. Tony Abbott, another conservative PM, said it was a mistake “to judge the actions of men in mortal combat by the standards of ordinary civilian life”.
Prosecutors and investigators have admitted they cannot go to Afghanistan and there will be little physical evidence against Roberts-Smith. “We don’t have access to the crime scenes … we don’t have photographs, site plans, measurements, the recovery of projectiles, blood spatter analysis … there’s no post-mortem,” said Ross Barnett, director of investigations at the Office of Special Investigations set up to bring those suspected of war crimes to trial.
Instead, they will have to rely on the evidence of the men who served alongside Australia’s most decorated living war veteran to convict him of war crimes. For some, the longest war is far from over.