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
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