Gough’s Betrayal

Whitlam and the Vietnamese

SIR: In his failure to rescue—indeed to actively prohibit the rescue of—South Vietnamese at the time of the fall of Saigon, Gough Whitlam stands self-condemned. In a letter to Gerard Henderson of December 30, 2002, Whitlam states: “RAAF planes brought more than 200 Vietnamese war orphans to Sydney on Saturday 5 April 1975. On the front pages of the SMH and Australian of 7 April there are large photographs of me nursing a 7-month orphan at North Head quarantine station …”

On April 5, 1975, the fall of Saigon was not inevitable. It held out to the end of the month. In early April its army, notably the 18th Division at Xuan Loc, was fighting hard and it was not known that the Democrat-controlled US Congress would betray it by cutting off its supplies.

Orphans were in little danger. Life for them would plainly be hard, but it was to be expected that the communists in Vietnam, in the event of a communist victory, would at least feed them and try to rear them as little communists.

Those in danger of execution were government officials, army and police personnel, Viet Cong defectors, Vietnamese who had worked for the Australian and American embassies, businessmen, kulaks and so on—the type Whitlam described when Foreign Minister Don Willesee begged him unavailingly to rescue them, as “f***ing Vietnamese Balts with their political and religious hatreds against us”. Not only were these people not evacuated, but Whitlam specifically prohibited their rescue. Giant RAAF Hercules transports took off from Vietnam empty.

The jungle re-education camps where hundreds of thousands died through starvation, slavery and deliberate murder, and where some are still dying and rotting, know the rest of the story.

Hal G.P. Colebatch
Nedlands, WA

Rights and the Left

Sir: Your November Chronicle about the exaggerated fears about national security legislation was worth reading. It struck a chord with me, as I used to be involved with a civil liberties council and Amnesty. The hysterical commentary from Baby Boomer leftists is not surprising in missing the point. Most of their efforts are pure grandstanding, not substance. They are cynical beyond belief, but they still have believers!

For these leftists Edward Snowden is a hero, as is Julian Assange. The fact that Snowden is protected in Moscow by Putin, who is waging war against surrounding states, kills opponents, abducts and tortures them, is an inconvenient truth. It is similarly inconvenient that Julian Assange is protected by the Ecuadorian regime that shoots strikers and jails journalists.

I coincidentally had been reading Time magazine (before reading Quadrant), which referred to the abduction and torture of a Chechen critic of Putin, Said-Emin Ibragimov, in France. His latest “offence” was to accuse Putin of war crimes in Chechnya at the International Court of Justice. Others have been killed over the years, so he is lucky. Do I expect these leftists to be concerned about that? Not really, just as I expect they will not be concerned about the Estonian security officer who was abducted in September and charged with espionage in Moscow.

Keep exposing the hypocrisy.

Martin Gordon
Flynn, ACT