War Criminals Welcome

Australia, a Sanctuary for Fugitive War Criminals Since 1945

Mark Aarons

• Editorial: Black Inc.
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781743821633
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Military & Maritime History

For more than seventy years, Australia has been a safe haven for war criminals. After World War II, hundreds of Nazi war criminals illegally entered this country. Governments, both Labor and Liberal, decided to turn a blind eye. Some known killers were even recruited by Australian intelligence in the Cold War battle against communism. Others became active in Australian party politics.Half a century later, nothing has changed. Australia continues to be a sanctuary for war criminals - including members of the Khmer Rouge, the Afghan and Chilean secret police, and Serbs and Croats who committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in the 1990s Balkans wars. Why is this still happening? Why did the federal government close the Special Investigations Unit set up to investigate war criminals? In War Criminals Welcome, Mark Aarons reveals a history that successive Australian governments would prefer forgotten, and puts the case for offical action.

PART ONE: AUSTRALIA, 2001

Murderers Among Us

The first war criminals to find sanctuary in Australia arrived in 1947. They were hidden among the first shipments of the Displaced Persons immigration scheme. Most of those arriving on the ships were genuine refugees from Hitler and Stalin who could not return home, either because there was nothing to go back to, or their very lives would have been at risk.

The government soon gathered evidence that a number of mass killers were among the migrants but decided to bury the scandal. For the next forty years, nothing was done about the problem – which officially did not even exist. By the time a concerted effort to repair this state of affairs was made in the mid-1980s in the aftermath of allegations made by this author on ABC Radio National, it was almost too late. Probable defendants in war crimes trials – as well as eyewitnesses – had either died or were too old to be tried or testify. The handful of mass murderers brought to trial escaped justice, largely because of the lapse of time.

In 2020, the United States and Germany continue to prosecute Nazi mass killers. To our eternal shame our government abandoned justice for such criminals almost 30 years ago. Consequently, the last Nazi in the world may well die peacefully in his bed somewhere in Australia. This will not, however, end Australia’s war criminals’ problem. Over the past forty-five years, new generations of mass killers have found sanctuary in Australia. Our government is once again denying the problem and refusing to take action, just as it did for forty years about the Nazis in our midst.

In this first section, I canvass some evidence that modern war criminals are living freely in Australia. In particular, case studies demonstrating that Serbs and Croats who committed crimes in the Balkans wars of the 1990s have found sanctuary here. Many of these war criminals were Australian citizens travelling back to the homelands of their parents, who had settled in Australia over the previous forty years. Others came in the waves of Serbian and Croatian refugees accepted as migrants from the mid-1990s onwards. Mostly, these war criminals joined irregular paramilitary units which carried out the programs of forced relocations, imprisonment, rape, torture and mass killings that were called, generically, ethnic cleansing.

Similar criminals who made Australia home include former senior officials of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, who served in the communist administration between 1975 and 1979 when millions of Cambodians were murdered. There are also a large number of senior officers of the Soviet-controlled Afghan administration in Australia, including members of the dreaded secret police, the armed forces, even high-ranking government ministers. Other torturers and murderers among us include officers of Pinochet’s secret police and of the various Stalinist secret police units, which operated in Central and Eastern Europe from the 1940s till the late 1980s.

Australian governments have consistently ignored these mass killers and taken no steps to investigate them systematically or legislate to deal with them. A range of measures is urgently required if we are not to repeat the mistakes we made in the case of Nazi mass killers. These include conducting an inquiry to assess the extent of the problem, establishing a small, specialist standing unit to deal with serious claims of war crimes and genocide, and introducing laws consistent with the Genocide Convention of 1948 and Additional Protocol II of 1977 (on non-international armed conflicts) to cover crimes perpetrated prior to 2002 to enable the trial of such people in our own courts, or their extradition to other countries providing a prima facie case of their guilt.

Chapter One

War Criminals ‘Welcome’

In January 2000, Justice Minister Amanda Vanstone announced that Nazi war criminal, Konrads Kalejs – since deceased – was ‘welcome’ to return to Australia. A week earlier, Kalejs had been discovered in Britain, which followed the lead of America and Canada and immediately moved to deport him. As a result of her comments, Vanstone was caught in a maelstrom of media and public criticism about the Australian government’s inaction. Many Australians wanted to know why the minister had failed to prosecute our best-known Nazi mass killer, or even take any form of action to sanction him for belonging to the notorious Arajs Kommando. Named after its bloody commander, convicted war criminal Viktors Arajs, this unit had murdered tens of thousands of Jews, Gypsies and other innocent civilians during World War II. To be fair, though, Vanstone’s statement was a gaffe of the kind for which the loose-lipped minister was famous. The reporter who described it as ‘a grossly insensitive expression to use about a man accused of killing Jews for the Nazis’ was, nevertheless, accurate.¹

Sadly, Vanstone’s statement also tellingly epitomised the approach of successive federal governments for most of the second half of the twentieth century. Since the first Nazi mass killer was officially recorded by Australian intelligence agencies in 1947, war criminals have, in effect, been welcome to settle in Australia. As we shall see, many mass killers were also welcome to take out citizenship with the full knowledge of immigration and intelligence officers, and went about their business as though they were lawful Australians with no stain on their characters. Most have died peacefully without facing justice for the organised mass killing of innocent civilians: men and women, including the elderly, and children, even the youngest babies. Technically, of course, Vanstone was correctly applying Australian law. Kalejs was, after all, an Australian citizen. As such, he was free to come and go as he pleased, as were Australia’s many other Nazi mass killers. To say nothing of the numerous war criminals from Serbia, Cambodia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Croatia and Chile who are also Australian citizens. Most of these modern mass killers and torturers have been naturalised in the last forty years.

As this was written in March 2001, the Latvian government had requested Kalejs’s extradition, and the fugitive war criminal has finally been arrested by Australian police and brought before a court. His passport was seized, and he was on bail pending further hearings later in 2001. It is an experience he has had many times before, in America, Canada and Britain. It was, however, his first time in Australia, the country which should have taken the most responsibility for dealing with this mass murderer. Kalejs’s lawyer indicated that he would fight extradition with the same determination with which he resisted deportation from America and Canada. Even if he was ordered to be extradited to Latvia he would undoubtedly have appealed, and the case could have dragged on for several years. After all, time and Kalejs’s considerable wealth – made from property deals in the United States – were on his side. By the time he exhausted all the avenues of appeal, with the best barristers that his fortune could buy, he would have been almost ninety, if he lived that long. Vanstone and her government surely had their fingers crossed behind their backs, desperately hoping the problem would go away and that sooner rather than later Kalejs would simply die. In fact that was what actually happened: he died in November 2001 in a Melbourne retirement village.

For the hard fact is that Kalejs’s generation of mass killers were at that time about to pass on. The statistical probability is, however, that the last Nazi will die peacefully in his bed, somewhere in Australia. He will leave behind a legacy of official deceit, incompetence and indifference. It could have been Kalejs himself, or his Latvian comrade, Karlis Ozols whose cases are detailed in Chapters Three and Four. It could have been the Croatian war criminal, Srečko Rover, whose senior post in a mobile killing squad is outlined in Chapter Five. Or perhaps it could have been the Lithuanian Leonas Pazusis, who is discussed in Chapter Twenty-Three, or the Byelorussian Nikolai Alferchik, who is dealt with in Chapter Six. Indeed, it could be any one of the several hundred Nazis still living in Australia in 2001, only some of whom are discussed due to constraints imposed even on a book of this size.

In a very real sense, it did not matter which of these mass killers was the last to die, or when it happened. The time for justice for Nazis was virtually at an end. Action to bring them to justice was only of symbolic value by 2001 when this book was first published and could never redress the crimes they committed in killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. The Nazis’ policies of mass slaughter of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and political and religious opponents have almost completely passed into history. The stark reality in 2020 is that there are almost no living perpetrators or witnesses left, either to bring to trial or bear witness. The lies told by successive Australian governments to protect Nazis from justice have also passed into history, together with the bureaucratic games played by Immigration and Foreign Affairs officials to implement this policy of amnesty, documented in Chapters Eleven to Seventeen. Even the Nazi agents employed by Australia’s spies in clandestine intelligence operations – detailed in Chapters Eight and Nine – are now little more than historical footnotes to one of the most amoral episodes in Australian history. Like the Nazis, most of the political leaders, bureaucrats and spies who perpetrated these crimes against Australia’s good name are either dead, or soon will be. Their legacy of moral and legal failure, however, casts a shadow over their commitment to justice and the rule of law.

In other words, by 2020 every aspect of Australia’s Nazi scandal is merely a matter for historical discussion. The question of what to do about these mass killers has, in effect, become a dead letter. Australia’s war criminal problem has, finally, ceased to exist.

Except for one small problem. Even when the last Nazi is dead there will still be many mass murderers and torturers from other conflicts living freely in Australia. Since the crimes recounted in this book were carried out almost eighty years ago, many others have copied the Nazis’ blueprint for racial, religious and political mass killings. The Cambodian Khmer Rouge, the secret police of Soviet-controlled Afghanistan, the Serbs and Croats who carried out the Balkans genocide of the early-to-mid-1990s and Pinochet’s Chilean secret police are just some of the many mass killers of the last fifty years. Each of them has at least three things in common with the Nazi era and its aftermath. First, the calculated and planned rounding up of civilians because of their race, religion or political beliefs, usually accompanied by the separation of men from women and children, followed by the systematic torture, rape and mass killing of the victims. The second common feature is that perpetrators of these crimes have found sanctuary – even an official ‘welcome’ – in Australia, where many have become citizens. Thirdly, the Australian government neither wants to know about these latter-day criminals, nor seems to care about the problem. Indeed, in line with past policies towards Nazi mass killers, the government does nothing. War criminals are ‘welcome.’ Tragically, history has repeated itself.

*

The seeds of Australia’s modern war crimes scandal were, in many ways, planted in the fertile soil of the Nazi scandal that began in 1947 when the first Latvian war criminals arrived among the early shipments of the post-war immigration program. The continuity between the two eras is best illustrated by the Balkans genocide of the 1990s, when the Serb regime of Slobodan Milošević launched aggressive wars on its Yugoslav neighbours, first against the Croats and then against the Bosnians, both Croat and Muslim. According to Graham Blewitt, the Australian Deputy Prosecutor of the United Nations International Tribunal investigating these crimes, there is a sizeable Australian connection that the federal government continues to ignore. Blewitt also headed the government’s Nazi-hunting team, the Special Investigations Unit, established in 1987 in response to a series of ABC radio programs produced by this author the previous year.²

Even before the Balkans wars began in mid-1991, Blewitt had gathered evidence that Australians were being recruited to fight. ‘It was apparent that the conflict was going to occur and people were arming and gearing up for it.’ By September 1992, the federal government had wound up the Nazi inquiries, despite the abundant evidence that there was plenty of ongoing work investigating modern war crimes. By then, however, Blewitt was certain that Australians were directly implicated in the Balkans genocide. ‘It’s very clear there are Australian citizens who have gone over there to take up arms and have been involved in fighting. And I’ve got some authorities who indicate that Australian citizens have been involved in atrocities.’ According to Blewitt, this involved both Australian Serbs and Australian Croats.³

Graham Blewitt did not, of course, keep this a secret. ‘I’ve indicated this to the Attorney General’s department and the Attorney himself, and the attitude is that the Australian Federal Police can handle that.’ At the time, Blewitt had advised Attorney General Michael Duffy that a standing war crimes unit should be established to deal with these and similar claims about other war criminals. Indeed, this was a key recommendation of his final report on the Nazi investigations. Nearly thirty years on, nothing has been done. The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has taken no concerted action against these modern Balkans war criminals. To be fair, investigating crimes against humanity is not a mainstream AFP operation. Nor is the AFP adequately funded to undertake war crimes investigations, even if it wanted to give them operational priority. As Blewitt pointed out in 1992, ‘it’s true that these Serbs and Croats have committed offences against the Crimes Act by taking up arms in Yugoslavia.’ Three decades on, however, even these lesser offences have not been prosecuted by the AFP. Of course, taking up arms in a foreign war as a mercenary is a serious crime under Australian law. But as Blewitt commented, ‘those crimes are one thing, but it’s another thing to commit genocide, which these people have been doing.’ Then, as now, however, they cannot be punished for genocide because Australia has no legal framework to prosecute them. The War Crimes Act only covers one group of war criminals in one theatre of one war. Nearly all other war criminals therefore have a permanent sanctuary in Australia.⁴

By early 1994, Blewitt had monitored several cases which confirmed ‘that there are Australian citizens who went and participated in the fighting in the former Yugoslavia, that those people have been involved in atrocities and have come back to Australia.’ As will be seen, this was, in fact, part of an international movement. By late 1994, Blewitt confidently stated that a ‘number of mercenaries from around the world, including Australia,’ had joined and fought with the various units carrying out genocide and crimes against humanity in the Balkans.⁵ Some of these latter day Balkan war criminals had actually been indoctrinated and trained by the previous generation of Yugoslav Nazi mass killers, who had found sanctuary in Australia forty years earlier.

For the first time in history, however, the minute details of these crimes were recorded at the time they occurred, unlike previous mass killing campaigns which happened behind a veil of official secrecy and disinformation. Indeed, the media daily beamed it into our living rooms, and Blewitt’s Tribunal subsequently investigated the crimes with meticulous attention to detail. The first intensive campaign of genocide – for which the world came to use the euphemism ‘ethnic cleansing’ – was carried out in 1991 and 1992 in Krajina, a region of Croatia with a majority Serb population. The aim of this Serbian operation was to kill a significant number of Croats and to force the rest to flee through a campaign of terror and intimidation, thus making the region ethnically pure and preparing it for political union with Serbia. To carry out this program, the Serbs used not only the Yugoslav army and security force...