Lost Valour: How Australia's most decorated soldier fell from grace

An Australian judge has ruled that the country’s most high-profile and decorated war veteran unlawfully killed prisoners and committed other war crimes in Afghanistan. The judge dismissed the claims of Ben Roberts-Smith, a Victoria Cross recipient, and former Special Air Service Regiment corporal, that he was defamed by three newspapers and journalists. The ruling has already sent shockwaves through Australia and prompted some to predict a reckoning for the country in years ahead. Let’s take a closer look: Who is Roberts-Smith? According to ABC, Roberts-Smith is the son of a former justice of the Western Australia Supreme Court and the brother of an opera singer. Roberts-Smith was brought up in Perth. He joined the army at the age of 18. In 2011, Roberts-Smith became a national hero after being awarded the Victoria Cross – Australia’s highest award recognising gallantry in the presence of an enemy.

He met Queen Elizabeth II several times as a distinguished Australian.

He was awarded the medal for attacking a machine gun nest during a battle at Tizak, Kandahar, in 2010. Roberts-Smith was credited with killing two machine-gunners and an insurgent about to launch a rocket grenade. According to ABC, Roberts-Smith shifted to Queensland after leaving the armed forces. [caption id=“attachment_12684122” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Queen Elizabeth II greets Ben Robert-Smith at Buckingham Palace in 2011. AP[/caption] He then got a job as a general manager of Seven West Media in Queensland in 2015. He was also chair of the National Australia Day Council from 2014 to 2017. Reports of war crimes emerge Then, in 2018, reports of war crimes by Australian armed forces in Afghanistan began to emerge. According to Financial Times, three newspapers The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times that published a series of articles outlining the atrocities. According to ABC, while the newspapers initially codenamed the soldier involved in the incidents ‘Leonidas’ – for the Spartan warrior king – they eventually named Roberts-Smith. The newspapers reported that in 2009, while serving with the Special Air Service Regiment in Afghanistan, Roberts-Smith used a machine gun to shoot a prisoner with a prosthetic leg in the back at a Taliban compound codenamed Whiskey 108 in the village of Kakarak in Uruzgan province. According to Financial Times, Robert-Smith shot the man around 15 times.

He kept the man’s prosthetic as a novelty beer-drinking vessel.

The man was one of two unarmed Afghans that Roberts-Smith’s patrol had dragged from a tunnel. Roberts-Smith then pressured a “newly deployed and inexperienced” soldier to kill the second, older man to “blood the rookie,” the court found. Roberts-Smith also killed an unarmed, handcuffed farmer named Ali Jan by kicking him from a cliff top and into a riverbed at the Afghan village of Darwan in 2012. Roberts-Smith then directed a soldier under his command to shoot Jan dead to ‘put him out of his misery’, as per ABC. The newspapers reported that 6-foot-seven-inch Smith would also bully soldiers and assault Afghan civilians. They also claimed Roberts-Smith had punched a woman he was seeing. Roberts-Smith then sued the newspapers and investigative journalists Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters and David Wroe for defamation. The media outlets during the hearings accused Roberts-Smith of six murders, intimidating his colleagues, coercing them to commit murder, beat a woman he had an affair with, tried to hide evidence from the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force, and threatening fellow soldiers of speaking out about what happened in Afghanistan. According to CNN, elite troops – both current and former – presented evidence at the trial. Federal Court Justice Anthony Besanko ruled that the articles published in 2018 were ‘substantially true’. [caption id=“attachment_12684142” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] The uniform worn by Ben Roberts-Smith is on display at the Australian War Memorial. AP[/caption] Besanko found Roberts-Smith, who was also awarded the Medal of Gallantry for his Afghanistan War service, “broke the moral and legal rules of military engagement” and disgraced Australia through his conduct. Two of six unlawful killings Roberts-Smith was accused of involvement in were not proven to the civil court standard of balance of probability, the judge found. Reports of domestic violence allegedly committed by Roberts-Smith were also found to be unproven and defamatory. But the judge found the unproven allegations would not have further damaged the veteran’s reputation. Had such war crime allegations been made in a criminal court, they would have had to be proven to a higher standard of beyond reasonable doubt. Roberts-Smith, 44, had denied any wrongdoing. His lawyers blamed “corrosive jealousy” by “bitter people” within the SAS who had run a “poisonous campaign against him.” The case’s legal costs were underwritten by billionaire Kerry Stokes. Stokes is executive chair of Seven West Media – from which Ben-Smith has resigned. Stokes has stood by Roberts-Smith, saying in a statement: “The judgment does not accord with the man I know.” “I know this will be particularly hard for Ben who has always maintained his innocence,” Stokes said. Roberts-Smith had attended every day of his trial but did not appear at the Sydney court for the decision. Media have published a photo of him sunning himself by a swimming pool Wednesday on the Indonesian resort island of Bali. What’s the significance of the ruling for Australia? The ruling is regarded as a significant win for press freedom against Australia’s extraordinarily restrictive defamation laws following a hard-fought trial over 110 court hearing days that is estimated to have cost more than $16 million in legal fees.

The ruling also comes in the backdrop of an allegations of a ‘warrior culture’ of the Australian armed forces.

More from Explainers

Is Russia giving India more discount on oil after Trump tariffs? Why is New Zealand allowing golden visa holders to buy luxury homes?

Roberts-Smith is one of several Australian military personnel under investigation from Australian Federal Police for alleged war crimes in Afghanistan. The first criminal charge for an alleged illegal killing in Afghanistan was made in March. Former SAS trooper Oliver Schulz was charged with the war crime of murder in the death of an Afghan who was shot in 2012 in a wheat field in Uruzgan province. In 2020, a four-year investigation into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan known as the Brereton Report was released. The report found that Australian elite forces unlawfully killed 39 civilians and prisoners in Afghanistan in an environment of ‘blood lust’ and ‘competition killings’. “People express great pride in the way in which Australia has fought - this is what’s known as the Anzac legend,” Peter Stanley, the former principal historian at the Australian War Memorial, told the BBC. James Connor, a military sociologist at the University of New South Wales told BBC the responsibility must be shared. [caption id=“attachment_12684152” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Arthur Moses, lawyer for Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith, and his legal team walk past waiting media into the Federal Court in Sydney. AP[/caption] “That’s not to diminish their actions… but the culture is rotten and the cover-up which has flowed from that is also rotten,” he said. “We cannot put people into harm’s way repeatedly without appropriate support and oversight of what they’re doing and how,” Connor added. Connor accused the Australian armed forces of having a decades-long cultural problem that allowed secrecy, tribalism and “misguided loyalty” to run rampant. “Defence has tried to argue that it’s a few bad apples, or perhaps even a bad barrel here and there… but overall, the culture needs to change and change rapidly,” Connor added. McKenzie, one of the reporters responsible for the contentious articles, praised the SAS veterans who had testified against the national hero. “Today is a day of justice. It’s a day of justice for those brave men of the SAS who stood up and told the truth about who Ben Roberts-Smith is — a war criminal, a bully and a liar,” McKenzie told reporters outside court. “Australia should be proud of those men in the SAS. They are the majority in the SAS and they stood up for what was right and they have been vindicated,” McKenzie added. Roberts-Smith’s lawyer, Arthur Moses, asked for 42 days to consider lodging an appeal to the Full Bench of the Federal Court. Australian Special Air Service Association chair Martin Hamilton-Smith described the ruling as a “very disappointing day” for the elite regiment. He said if more veterans were to be prosecuted for war crimes, they should be charged without delay. “The only way you’ll get to the real truth of this is to get it into a criminal court where both sides of the story can be told and the facts established beyond reasonable doubt,” Hamilton-Smith said. “The Roberts-Smith saga is far from over and is part of a broader, and very uncomfortable, look at the culture of the Australian armed forces, how we prepare and what we expect of the men and women who face the horrors of war without crossing a moral line,” a piece in the Financial Times noted. The piece added that while this hearing might be over, the reckoning for Roberts-Smith, the SAS and Australia has only just begun. With inputs from agencies Read all the  Latest News,  Trending News,  Cricket News,  Bollywood News,  India News and  Entertainment News here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.