France’s ambassador to Australia has said the two countries can share the same certainty of moral purpose in fighting jihadist-inspired terrorism as they did in fighting nazism.
Christophe Lecourtier told Guardian Australia, “we can be pretty sure we are on the good side” of history because the two countries stood for values flouted by Islamic State forces in the Middle East.
Lecourtier spoke after a ceremony in Brisbane on Friday where he awarded the Légion d’honneur, the French government’s highest accolade, to 18 Australian second world war veterans whom he called “liberators” of occupied France.
He said Australians and French forged common values in the trenches in the first world war, meaning that “our soldiers knew why they were fighting against this enemy because they were protecting the idea of democracy, freedom of speech, civil rights and the rights of women”.
Lecourtier said this was repeated 30 years later, when “your diggers were called again to Europe because another war had started and we needed a hand, we needed the courage and the efficiency of the Australians to help us get rid of an enemy that had been occupying most of Europe over four years”.
“Since that time we know exactly what our common values are and they are still as living as they were at the time,” he said.
“When we talk about terrorism, when you look at the way some people are behaving in the Middle East – the way they are treating women, the way they are treating prisoners, the way they are treating cities they have captured – you understand why and probably support the idea that France and Australia are fighting exactly on the same side together, with the Americans.
“Of course nobody loves war. [But] we are proud to be together and we are pretty sure we are on the good side because of these values.”
Lecourtier told the 18 veterans and their families: “It is sometimes said that war is the business of men.”
“In your case honorable veterans, it was mainly the business of adolescent youth. When you signed up on the eve of the second world war, none of you had reached the age of 20,” he said.
“In 1944 – the year that brought you to France in the footsteps of your elders who 30 years before had been thrown into the hell of trench warfare – that year you became heroes. You were no longer only fighters. You had become liberators. No longer men but living symbols of our common values, the spirit of resistance, the spirit of liberty, and the spirit of mateship.”
Among the veterans was former bomber Lawrence Woods, who was involved in more than 35 air missions in France to enable the allied advance.
Asked if he still believed in the the idea of the just war, Woods said: “Every war is just or unjust. The winner is usually considered to be just, the loser is considered to be unjust.”
“But it’s the freedom that counts. If someone doesn’t fight for the freedom, where do you end up?”
