Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

I commend the previous speakers and, in particular, I commend the member for Bradfield for having initiated this motion about the 1972 Munich massacre. In doing so, the member for Bradfield has done a very fine thing and I am proud that we can unite in supporting this motion.

It is a sad day, as the member for Kooyong has mentioned, for the families of the 11 athletes and the German policeman killed by the Black September terrorists. It is as well to remember that some of those victims were survivors of the Holocaust—people like Yaakov Springer, the weightlifting judge, whose entire family was annihilated in the Holocaust but who himself managed to survive it. The Munich massacre was a double tragedy in that respect. The murdered athletes were there in support of the Olympic ideal we have heard referred to. There was one poignant incident exemplifying the attitude of these fine athletes at the games—Andre Spitzer approaching members of the Lebanese team, saying, 'I want to reach out to these people, exchange pleasantries as athletes and build a bond.' To him, that was what the Olympics were all about. That was the spirit in which these athletes entered into those Olympic Games.

The 1972 games mark a loss of innocence for the Olympics. After that, for many years, the Olympics were regularly used as a platform for politics and they were further perverted by the doping scandals that followed as well. Instead of being a place of coming together, a place of celebration of diversity and common humanity, the 1972 Olympics became a scene or carnage. The irony is that the Black September group which perpetrated this massacre were named after an event in Jordan in September 1970 in which Jordanian forces massacred large numbers of Palestinians—an event Israel had nothing to do with.

The complicity of other nations in the Munich massacre should be recalled as well. The terrorists trained in Libya—and how appropriate it was that Colonel Gaddafi finally met the same end he had effectively meted out to so many others through his support for terrorist groups over the years. The terrorists were facilitated in their penetration of Europe by the Bulgarian intelligence service, who became the outsourcing mechanism for the KGB in supporting international terrorism. They were also facilitated in their reconnaissance of the village by the athletes on the East German team. For many years, these were the mechanisms of the KGB at work.

The incompetence of the German authorities has been commented upon. At that time—and what took place was shameful—they rejected an offer from the Israeli authorities to provide a rescue team and they demonstrated a cavalier approach to the operation. In doing so, they failed their own personnel, many of whom were injured—and one was killed—on the night. The athletes could well have been saved by a more effective approach to that operation. The incompetence of the Germans extended to allowing their first attempts at an approach to be filmed by the television channels; to allowing the roads to be blocked, preventing the armoured vehicles from getting there; to positioning their snipers badly; to not being properly equipped; and, ultimately, to the personnel positioned on the aircraft, the one the terrorists and the hostages were moving towards, taking a vote on abandoning the mission because they felt they were too much at risk and walking off the plane a couple of seconds before the terrorists were to enter that aircraft—thus triggering what occurred. As mentioned by the member for Melbourne Ports, that was followed by revelations about the neo-Nazi connection and, after that, by the German government orchestrating a Lufthansa hijacking so that they could hand over the remaining three terrorists with plausible deniability cover. That was a shameful episode—the Germans trying to avoid future terrorist attacks through this mechanism.

This did give rise to the formation of the GSG 9 and many other counterterrorist units around the world, including ours in 1978 through the assigning of a counterterrorism mission to the SAS. In addition, the Munich experience drove me to try and achieve the reforms we needed for own counterterrorism response in the lead-up to the Sydney Olympics of 2000. I am proud to say that the Labor and coalition members of parliament at that time collaborated to produce that result, a result that was opposed at the time by the Greens, saying that Australia would never be a terrorist target and that we would never have to worry about terrorism. So I am proud of the work that we did together and the bipartisan approach to achieve that reform. It also goes to show, of course, that nations must be prepared and ready to face these threats at any time.

We must have a minute's silence in London to remind the world of the loss of these fine Israeli athletes and to inspire our rededication to the implacable fight against terror, the attainment of peace in the Middle East and our pursuit of the Olympic ideal.

Debate adjourned.

See this speech in context