When politicians should step aside

So questions remain as to why Australian troops were sent to Rwanda.

In order to get an understanding of the Keating government’s rationale for getting involved in the almost guaranteed UN failure in Rwanda, immediately after our successful involvement with the UN in Cambodia, I applied on June 17, 2007 through the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) to obtain the briefing notes of Greg Turnbull, the Prime Minister’s then media advisor but got nowhere fast.

I was a serving soldier in a Sydney-based infantry battalion in 1997, and remember speaking to a short, tough, wiry Corporal, a former surfer in civilian life, who had been on the Rwanda mission.

“We shouldn’t have been there in the first place,” he said. “It was absolute bloodthirsty savagery. But the politicians wanted us there even though we weren’t allowed to stop the massacres.”

This Corporal, who is probably a Sergeant or a Warrant Officer in the Special Forces by now, also revealed that there were elite (Special Air Service Regiment) SAS soldiers putting their hands up, without even being prompted, to undertake a rescue mission in Cambodia to rescue (kidnapped) Australian backpacker David Wilson, and his two traveling companions, Englishman Mark Slater and Frenchman Jean-Michel Braquet. After been kidnapped from a train on July 26, 1994, they were held for ransom by the Khmer Rouge in southern Cambodia. However, our SASR undertaking such a rescue mission had been vetoed by the civilian heads of Foreign Affairs and Defence in Canberra against the military advice and recent experience in Cambodia.

“The SASR were itching to go and could’ve pulled off the rescue mission successfully,” he said "... but were not called in".

David Wilson and his two companions were killed by their Khmer Rouge kidnappers a few weeks later.

Australia, at Gareth Evans’s urging, had sent a large UN peacekeeping force to Cambodia in 1991-93 and was an influential player in that part of the world when Wilson was taken from a train along with two other westerners.

Cambodia had been ruled by the murderous Pol Pot and his communist Khmer Rouge regime which killed millions and was finally toppled by neighbouring Vietnam in 1979. Decades of instability followed until a western brokered peace deal in 1991.

A 1998 Victorian State Coroner's Inquest into the death of Wilson headed by then State Coroner Graeme Johnston heard the testimony of an Australian Foreign Affairs official who had served as a diplomat in Cambodia in 1994-95, Alastair Gaisford:

“Evans was advised to use his direct personal connections with senior Cambodian officials, (particularly Hun Sen and Ranariddh,) to secure Wilson's safe release (but would not do so.)

"He (Evans) did not pick up the phone, as we advised him to do, to (tell them), 'Stop this military build up, stop now or we will cancel our aid or punish you in a diplomatic meaningful way'."