FED: Ex Army Major no spy say CARE colleagues

AAP General News (Australia)
04-12-1999
FED: Ex Army Major no spy say CARE colleagues

By Stephen Spencer, Diplomatic Correspondent

CANBERRA, April 12 AAP - Steve Pratt, the 49-year-old ex-army major shown confessing to
being a spy on Serbian state television, is a veteran of many of the great humanitarian crises
of the 1990s.

After spending half his life in the army, which he joined straight from school as a
teenager, he moved to CARE Australia in 1993, reportedly at the personal behest of former
prime minister and now CARE chairman Malcolm Fraser.

Even before then he had experience with disaster relief at home, as part of the relief
effort in Darwin in the wake of Cyclone Tracy.

His first overseas aid posting was as area manager for CARE International in Iraq, managing
the distribution of food and supplies among Kurdish refugees.

He then moved to Yemen where as a logistics coordinator for CARE Australia he met and
married his second wife Samira, a Yemeni national and fellow aid worker.

In 1995, the Rwandan genocide and subsequent refugee crisis saw Mr Pratt move to central
Africa, including a dangerous stint in Goma where massacres took place even as aid workers and
UN troops watched.

Since May 1997 he has been CARE Australia's representative in Yugoslavia, helping refugees
from all ethnic groups.

He was also one of the first aid workers to draw attention to the Serb ethnic cleansing in
Kosovo, which may have marked him out to Yugoslav authorities.

However, he also criticised the NATO bombing, and publicly attacked the destruction of a
CARE-run refugee camp which killed nine people.

But now Yugoslavia is using his past career in the army to back its claim that Mr Pratt is
a spy, calling him Major Steve Pratt during the televised confession.

"So what?" was the response from CARE today which went on to point out that Mr Pratt's
former career was not in intelligence, but in logistics - in short he was a quartermaster.

Not the most exciting job in the army but the perfect background for aid work, which is
mostly about ensuring resources get to those who need them most.

And despite claims by Mr Pratt's mother that her son was a spy for the UN in Iraq, his CARE
boss in Iraq, Brian Doolan, said the charge was as absurd as the Serb claims he had spied in
Kosovo.

AAP ss/sc/ms/de

KEYWORD: KOSOVO PRATT (PROFILE)

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