Thirty-nine defenseless and innocent Afghans have been killed in blood curdling war crimes by Australian Special Forces from 2005 to 2016 in the US-NATO led war in Afghanistan.

Civilians, including teenagers, have been tortured, their throats slit. Unarmed working farmers have been gunned down for no apparent reason. Spectacles of dead Afghan’s artificial legs have been used as drinking mug trophies.

An estimated 10,000 Afghan civilians are killed every year since the start of the war.

 The Afghan War started with President George W. Bush using the 2001 World Trade Center twin towers plane-crashing attack as pretext for the US “War on Terror”. The Americans eventually invaded Afghanistan, dragging its allies into the longest US war ever since.

France, Australia and New Zealand are among the troops that have spent years in Afghanistan.

A four-year probe resulting from whistleblowers’ testimonies and sociological investigations on Australian Special Forces military misconducts and barbaric attitudes has exposed the major scandal.

 Thanks also to some whistle-blowing of some conscience-stricken and disgusted Australian Special Forces soldiers who witnessed their comrades’ war crimes, as well as investigative reporters who stand out in their courage to report the crimes led to the official investigation by the Australian Defense Force (ADF) and brought forth the revelations and truth about the atrocities in the past few months.

Unfortunately for Australia they are not represented well by their Prime Minister.

It took a Chinese foreign ministry tweet to bring the Aussie war crimes to the world’s attention, but Australia’s PM Scott Morrison and allies New Zealand and France are now trying to distract world condemnation by accusing China of “bullying” and coercion.

This latest Twitter incident was in the midst of at least four years of Australian bad-mouthing of China, starting in 2017 when Australia’s principal overlord the US tagged China as its “strategic competitor.

Australia under Scoot Morrison interfered on issues where it has no business in such as the South China Sea discussion to support the US in demonizing China and weighing in on the side of the lawfare hoax of the one-sided arbitration foisted by the Americans.

 As the US propaganda war on China heightened with the troubles of President Donald Trump in the midst of the coronavirus in 2020, Aussie PM Scott Morrison chimed in with the totally spurious “China virus” meme and the baseless WHO-China conspiracy, and so on. And when China justifiably reacted with a graduated trade payback for calumnies from Morrison and confederates in the West they cry “bullying”!

Last November23 however, Australia began to show some light through the dark clouds. Sure that sinophobe Donald Trump would be exiting after losing reelection, Morrison apparently saw an opening to lighten up on China. In a speech he praised China’s success in its anti-poverty crusade, economic recovery from the virus crisis. The prime minister also said Australia shouldn’t take sides in the US-China spat.

Morrison’s change of tone seemed to be too good to be true and China’s unofficial talk back newspaper the Global Times published a commentary entitled “Hope Morrison govt will talk the talk, and walk the walk”.

But no sooner than the climate started warming up, Morrison starts igniting the situation again after November 30 when Zhao Lijian used the Ministry of Foreign Affairs official twitter account expressing he was “Shocked by the murder of Afghan civilians & prisoners by Australian soldiers. We strongly condemn such acts, & call for holding them accountable.”

Accompanying the tweet was a photo artwork by a nationalist artist “Crowd Kylin” featuring a grinning Aussie soldier about to slit the throat of a child holding a kid (young goat).

 The photo art had a caption, “don’t be afraid, we are coming to bring you peace!” which to me and millions of social media denizens or netizens depict exactly what the US, NATO and its allies have been claiming in all its wars since 2001, but delivering exactly the opposite.

They’ve killed up to a million civilians in Iraq, they’ve destroyed Libya, they’ve killed 500,000 in Syria, up to 85,000 deaths in Yemen, and on and on.

Chinese artist “Crowd Kylin” was expressing a perfectly accurate emotions in image, and his caption clearly represented not only his view of the Afghan atrocities of the Australian Special Forces but more importantly the universe of Western-led wars, the farce of its pretext of protecting democracy and spreading peace.

The Western media meanwhile wants to depict it as a “doctored image” which misses the real intent of the piece of sardonic art.

 Of course, the duplicity and inhumanity of US-led wars for their so-called democracy stretches further back to all the post-WWII wars initiated by the West. In the Korean War there was the No Gun Ri where the US killed up to 300 Korean civilian or in My Lai in Vietnam where 500 men, women and children were slaughtered by US forces, and the list can stretch to many pages.

The Philippines has in the past decades also been dragged into wars where it acted as mercenaries of the US and the West. The country has also built up false narratives making the exploits out to be heroic, a defense of fellow Asian countries struggling against communism. Now that communist parties have proven to be better for some of those countries, we should correct our narratives and make appropriate apologies for those interventions too.

Russia followed China a day later in criticizing Australia and expressing skepticism on Australia’s commitment to a rules-based world order and cannot be taken seriously following the release of the damning findings of alleged war crimes committed by the special forces in Afghanistan.

The West has lashed back at Russia calling it hypocritical.

Clearly, the guilty countries in these wars felt the sting of China’s criticism of the Australian war crimes in Afghanistan, and apparently instructions were issued again by the powers-that-be in the West to Australia to make an about face in thawing relations with China and go on the offensive once more.

This time for New Zealand to join with UN Security Council member France to lend some credibility.

Macron and Jacinda Ardern (sainted by the Western media for supposed low Covid deaths of 25 in a country of 5 million as against Vietnam with 35 deaths in a population 96-million) have come out to defend Morrison’s reaction to Zhao Lijian tweet and Russia’s criticism, obviously fearing the potential global fallout in the West’s global image as champions of “rules based order” for global peace, security and prosperity.

 China, and Russia, should be wholly supported by the rest of the world in its condemnation of the Australian Special Forces atrocities in Afghanistan, and denounce this move by other Western countries complicit in the almost countless illegal wars they have engaged in to destabilize nations and regions of the world.

The Philippines having been a victim itself should be at the forefront with China and Russia.

 The attempts of the Western Powers and their media to divert and mute the criticisms of the Western-led wars and acts of atrocities and war crimes in those illegal wars of aggression should never be forgotten or swept under the rug.

China is right in denouncing these latest efforts at muting or whitewashing the West and allies’ war crimes and we should thank it for doing so.

Significantly, the Afghan government has sent its appreciation to the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs for condoling with its people in this war crimes case, news that the Western media does not report or downplays.

Twitter, however, has refused demands for the Zhao Lijian tweet to be taken down.

(Join: “Power Thinks” with Ka Mentong Laurel and guests: Every Wednesday 6pm Live on Global Talk News Radio (GTNR) on Facebook and Talk News TV on YouTube; and Every Sunday 8 to 10am on RP1 738 on your AM radio dial.) ###