British diplomats walk out over 'terror state' rant by ex-Prime Minister
British and American diplomats walked out of a human rights conference in Malaysia today, after the country’s former prime minister called their countries terrorist states and said coalition pilots whose bombs killed Iraqi civilians were murderers.
The diplomats left in protest at Mahathir Mohamad’s broadside against their countries during a speech at the conference in Kuala Lumpur.
Mahathir, who ruled majority-Muslim Malaysia for 22 years before retiring in 2003, also defended his human rights record in government.
He was often criticised for detaining suspects without trial under a security law and for the imprisonment of former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim.
Mahathir decried the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians as a result of the US-led military invasion and occupation. He compared American and British actions in Iraq to rocket attacks by Israel on Palestinians and referred to the countries as “these terrorist nations”.
“The British and American bomber pilots came, unopposed, safe and cosy in their state of the art aircraft, pressing buttons to drop bombs, to kill and maim,” Mahathir said of the Iraq invasion.
“And these murderers, for that is what they are, would go back to celebrate ‘mission accomplished’.”
“Who are the terrorists? The people below who were bombed or the bombers? Whose rights have been snatched away?”
Mahathir also questioned why there was no tally of Iraqi deaths while every US soldier's killing was documented.
“These are soldiers who must expect to be killed. But the Iraqis who die because of the US action or the civil war in Iraq that the US has precipitated are innocent civilians who under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein would be alive,” he said.
Mahathir, who when in power was a US ally in the fight against terrorism although he opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, noted that Washington’s reason for invading Iraq invasion was that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
“As we all know it was a lie,” he said.
“Worse still, the powers which are supposed to save the Iraqi people have broken international laws on human rights by detaining Iraqis and others and torturing them at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere,” he said, referring to US prison camps.
British High Commissioner Bruce Cleghorn and several unidentified US officials attending the conference walked out midway through Mahathir’s speech. British and US diplomats were not immediately available for comment.
Hamdan Adnan, a senior official with the state-backed National Human Rights Commission, described the diplomats’ action as “very distasteful. If they claim to subscribe to the democratic process, why can’t they listen?” he told The Associated Press.
The speech was typical of Mahathir, who regularly launched visceral attacks on the West and Israel while in power, accusing rich countries of holding back developing nations and of discriminating against Muslims.
The US accused Mahathir of human rights abuses when he fired Anwar as his deputy in 1998.
Anwar was arrested after leading anti-government rallies, and sentenced to 15 years in prison on corruption and sodomy charges. He was freed on appeal last year, after serving the corruption sentence.
But Washington largely stopped criticising Malaysia’s use of a security law that allows indefinite detention without trial after the government used it to lock up dozens of terrorist suspects, some with alleged links to the September 11 attacks.
