Word: kavieng
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...responsible for the strangling of his grandfather in New Guinea had been tried and sentenced. He knew that 64-year-old John William Bell had been among a party of 23 Australian nationals, including a 14-year-old boy, who were rounded up and garrotted on New Ireland's Kavieng wharf in 1942. War crimes investigators indicted six Japanese over the massacre in the late 1940s. But what Bell didn't know was that the Australian government dropped the case against a seventh man, the officer who decreed that the victims be strangled. "I think it would have been proper...
...Australian officials, under pressure to shut down the trials, decided to slash the remaining cases from 45 to 20, mainly because they did not relate to Australian servicemen, because the identities of the victims were unclear, or because prosecution might not have resulted in the death penalty. The Kavieng case was just one example. "The cold war considerations had imposed themselves, and the new Menzies government decided that it needed to accept Japan as an ally,'' says historian Michael Carrel, who recently completed a Ph.D. thesis on the subject...