Brisbane: The mother of WikiLeaks founder
Julian Assange on Friday accused Australia's government of failing
her son, and said an ex-colleague who wrote a tell-all book
was just out to make money.
Christine Assange said Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd,
the former prime minister, had failed to keep promises to
offer diplomatic assistance to her son, who is fighting
extradition from Britain to Sweden over rape claims.
"Julian did not even get the laptop you had publicly
promised him which he needed to prepare for his case while he
was in Wandsworth Prison," Assange wrote in an eight-page
letter she hand-delivered to Rudd's Brisbane office.
"As far as I am aware you have made no diplomatic
protest to Sweden for their abuse of my son's legal and human
rights, nor have you protested to the US for their incitements
to kidnap and murder."
She called for Rudd's resignation if he does not
appeal to Sweden to halt the extradition proceedings and tell
the United States to prosecute anyone making threats against
her son, who is an Australian citizen.
Christine Assange also dismissed the newly released
"Inside WikiLeaks" by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former employee
of the whistleblowing site, saying "there's a lot of money to
be made out of Julian at the moment".
"Inside WikiLeaks" describes Julian Assange as
"brilliant" but "paranoid" and also a "megalomaniac" whose
personal hygiene and eating habits suggest he was "brought up
more by wolves rather than humans".
Last week Julian Assange urged Prime Minister Julia
Gillard to try to bring him back to Australia, condemning
Canberra's "diplomatic silence".
"There has been outrageous and illegal calls to have
me and my staff killed, clear cases of incitement to violence.
Yet the Australian government has condoned this behaviour by
its diplomatic silence," he said, in a video posted on the
Sydney Morning Herald website.
"Julia Gillard should be taking active steps to bring
me home and to protect our people. She should be contacting
the US embassy and demanding that it back off."
Assange has become a polarising figure after
WikiLeaks' publishing of thousands of classified military and
diplomatic documents, with some calling for his punishment and
others saying he should be given the Nobel Peace Prize.
PTI
First Published: Friday, February 11, 2011, 22:55