Next week marks three years since the release of the Brereton Report, which shed light on Australia's clandestine operations in Afghanistan and allegations of heinous war crimes.
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The Albanese government should be marking the occasion with action that ensures accountability and puts an end to impunity. Instead, on Monday a whistleblower will be on trial, for his role helping to expose so much of what we now know about unlawful killings and serious, systemic problems in the Australian Defence Force.
When David McBride appears at the ACT Supreme Court in Canberra, he will be the first person to stand trial in relation to the war crimes committed by Australian special forces in Afghanistan - the whistleblower, not an alleged war criminal.
McBride has said he blew the whistle internally and then to oversight agencies. It was only as a last resort that he is alleged to have leaked documents to the media that formed the basis of the ABC's Afghan Files - chronicling multiple accounts of unlawful killings of unarmed Afghan men and children, and revealing "ingrained problems" within the special forces, including a "warrior culture", "desensitisation" and "drift in values".
In one incident that took place in September 2013 during a house raid in Uruzgan, Australian soldiers shot to death a man named Bismillah Azadi and his six-year old child Sadiqullah while they were asleep.
To date, only one war crimes charge has been issued, and no compensation plan has been released. Instead, it is McBride who is facing trial. Despite consistent calls from Afghan and Australian human rights groups and former whistleblowers, the Attorney-General has refused to discontinue the case.
At the heart of McBride's trial is a question about the Australian government's priorities. Does the government value the punishment of whistleblowers over accountability for war crimes, secrecy over transparency, the right of the public to know over keeping the public in the dark?
When the Brereton Report was handed down three years ago, Australia introduced a reckoning process to address war crimes allegations. In some respects it was a welcome surprise - internationally Australia has been praised for being the first and only Western country to have an ongoing accountability process for the war crimes allegations levelled against its forces.
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The government should prioritise implementing the recommendations of the Brereton Inquiry and addressing the legacy of Australia's military involvement in Afghanistan. But here we are today, shooting the messenger. The efforts to reform the ADF are significantly undermined.
For more than a decade, a pervasive culture of silence, secrecy, and cover-ups within the special forces, including the fabrication of reporting and the planting of weapons at scenes of operations and dead bodies to show apparent compliance with the rules of war, concealed wrongdoing and prevented the crimes from surfacing.
The people of Afghanistan have suffered from decades of violent conflict and mass atrocity crimes at the hands of various perpetrators - with little domestic and international efforts to ensure accountability and end impunity.
The prosecution and possible imprisonment of a whistleblower will perpetuate this culture of secrecy and silence in the ADF, which contributed to the failure to detect, prevent and respond to the war crimes in the first place. And it will do nothing to break the cycle of impunity, instead punishing those who helped to expose wrongdoing and pushed for accountability.
It will only serve as a glaring warning to current and future members of the Australian Defence Force that they must not speak out about internal failures, misconduct, and criminality, otherwise they will face repercussions.
The Brereton Report was alive to the importance of whistleblowers. "The implementation of cultural change in a military unit will be significantly facilitated by demonstrable support for those who are the agents of change," it found. "Too often, not only in the military, have the careers of whistle-blowers been adversely effected.
"Perhaps the single most effective indication that there is a commitment to cultural reform is the demonstration that those who have been instrumental in the exposure of misconduct, or are known to have acted with propriety and probity, are regarded as role models. It is crucial that their careers be seen to prosper."
These salient words should be borne in mind this week. Whistleblowers should be protected, not punished.
- Kobra Moradi is a legal analyst at the Afghanistan Human Rights & Democracy Organisation. Rawan Arraf is executive director of the Australian Centre for International Justice.
