Twitter yesterday rebuffed Australian calls to remove a Beijing official’s incendiary post targeting Australian troops, as China doubled down on criticism in the face of mounting international condemnation.
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian (趙立堅) sparked outrage in Canberra on Monday when he posted a staged image of a man dressed as an Australian soldier holding a bloody knife to the throat of an Afghan child holding a sheep, with other body shapes hidden below a large Australian flag.
Zhao’s post seized on the findings of a recent report from a four-year-long official investigation into the conduct of Australian special forces soldiers in Afghanistan, but included the digitally altered image.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The post came just days after Australian prosecutors launched an investigation into 19 members of the nation’s military over alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016.
Twitter said it had marked the post as “sensitive,” but added that comments on topical political issues or “foreign policy saber-rattling” by official government accounts were generally not in violation of its rules.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Monday had called the post “repugnant,” holding a virtual news conference from quarantine to demand Twitter take it down and China apologize.
He said Beijing should be “totally ashamed” of the “outrageous and disgusting slur” against the Australian armed forces.
Some Australian allies expressed concern over the tweet, including New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
“In this case an image has been used that is not factually correct, that is not a genuine image, so we have raised that directly with Chinese authorities,” she told reporters.
The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the post was “unworthy of the diplomatic standards we have the right to expect from a country like China.”
A spokesperson said the image was “insulting for all the countries whose armed forces have been engaged in Afghanistan for the last 20 years.”
In a restrained statement, Kabul said it was “jointly working” with Canberra to investigate the alleged misconduct of Australian troops, adding that both Australia and China were “key players” in maintaining international consensus on peace and development in Afghanistan.
There was further embarrassment for Australia yesterday when the Guardian published an image purporting to show an Australian soldier chugging beer from a dead Taliban fighter’s prosthetic leg.
A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Canberra accused the Australia government of making too much of the incident and said that local politicians had “misread” the post, perhaps stoking the issue for domestic political purposes.
“The rage and roar of some Australian politicians and media is nothing but misreading of and overreaction to Mr Zhao’s tweet,” the spokesperson said.
Zhao’s post was yesterday pinned to the top of his social media account, and China’s Global Times, known for nationalistic views, wrote in a Twitter post that Australia “can’t even be counted as a paper tiger, it’s only a paper cat.”
Former senior Australian foreign affairs official Richard Maude said there was no end in sight to the rift in the relationship with Beijing, and it was a “pretty lonely and tough battle for a middle power to be in on its own.”
“What we really need is enough countries to be willing to publicly take a stand,” Maude said.
“Multilateralizing pushback against China, where this is possible, might help. It’s a good place to start the China discussion with the incoming [US president-elect Joe] Biden administration, and with Europe,” he said.
“At the moment China’s not really bearing any cost, from their perspective, from leaning on us so hard. It would help us if that cost is a little higher,” Maude said.
Additional reporting by the Guardian
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Russian hackers last year targeted a Dutch public facility in the first such an attack on the lowlands country’s infrastructure, its military intelligence services said on Monday. The Netherlands remained an “interesting target country” for Moscow due to its ongoing support for Ukraine, its Hague-based international organizations, high-tech industries and harbors such as Rotterdam, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) said in its yearly report. Last year, the MIVD “saw a Russian hacker group carry out a cyberattack against the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands,” MIVD Director Vice Admiral Peter Reesink said in the 52-page
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS