UN Anti-Racism Committee Slams Apartheid Australia Racism
By Dr Gideon Polya
29 August, 2010
Countercurrents.org
Australia 's explicitly racist policies against Indigenous Australians and refugees have been slammed by a recent Report from the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in Geneva . The human rights-abusing Rudd-Gillard Labor Government violated the Australian 1975 Racial Discrimination Act in relation to Northern Territory Indigenous Australians, Afghan refugees fleeing the Afghan Genocide and Tamil refugees fleeing the Tamil Genocide in Sri Lanka . Australia 's own Race Discrimination Commissioner says the next federal government must amend the constitution to make impossible further such racist suspension of Australia 's Racial Discrimination Act.
In 2006 the conservative Liberal-National Party Coalition Government under PM John Howard implemented, with bipartisan support from the Labor Opposition, a quasi-military so-called Intervention in the Northern Territory in response to the Northern Territory Government's publication of the “Little Children are Sacred” Report about sexual abuse of Aboriginal children.
In reality the “Little Children are Sacred” Report found (p57) that “it is not possible to accurately estimate the extent of child sexual abuse in the Northern Territory's Aboriginal communities”, but nevertheless the Indigenous Community was specifically and extensively singled out and defamed in this respect in the Mainstream media and Parliament. In contrast, the massive sexual abuse of Australia children as a whole was of course ignored, even though the “Little Children are Sacred” Report reported that 34% of Australian women and 16% of men have been subject to sexual abuse as children. (see p235, the “Little Children are Sacred” Report: http://www.inquirysaac.nt.gov.au/pdf/bipacsa_final_report.pdf ). Further, the Howard Government implemented only two out of ninety-seven of the Report's recommendations.
The quasi-military Northern Territory Intervention initially involved over 600 uniformed Australian soldiers. The Major Party-supported Federal Parliamentary legislation specifically and in a race-specific fashion excluded Northern Territory Indigenous Australians (Aborigines, Aboriginals) from the provisions of the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act that had been passed by the reformist Whitlam Labor Government. The Liberal–National Party and Labor Party (aka the Lib-Labs) who voted for the Intervention secured about 90% of the vote in the 2007 elections that yielded a massive victory to Labor. Thus the Northern Territory Intervention measure was supported by an overwhelming democratic majority of Australians (noting that voting is compulsory in Australia ). In the 2010 federal elections that yielded a hung parliament, support for the Lib-Labs totalled 82% - a further demonstration of the overwhelming politically correct racism (PC racism) in Australia, a condition involving the assertion that “we are not racists” while supporting egregious and deadly race-based policies.
The race-based Northern Territory Intervention meant that Indigenous Australians were prohibited form using, buying, selling, transporting, trading, seeing or consuming things available to all other Australians; their welfare payments were taken over by the Government; services available to all other Australians were made conditional on long-term surrender of land rights; and Indigenous Australians could be removed from homes, Community and Sacred Land on the say so of White officials without recourse to legal protection.
All this is egregious racism that is quite analogous to that in US- , UK- , Apartheid Israel- and Apartheid Australia-backed Apartheid South Africa and in US- , UK- and Apartheid Australia-backed Apartheid Israel today. The big difference is that whereas the racist South African Apartheiders openly expressed their hatred and contempt for their non-European subjects and the Apartheid Israelis openly express their genocidal contempt and hatred for Indigenous Palestinians, the politically correct racist (PC racist) Apartheid Australians endlessly declare their sympathy and love for their down-trodden Indigenous brothers and sisters.
Some amendment to this racist legislation was made recently by the Rudd-Gillard Labor Government – but at the cost of extending this ugly human rights abuse to more Australians. Further, the human rights-abusing Labor Government in 2010 extended this violation of the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act to include suspension of the asylum claims of imprisoned Afghan refugees fleeing the Afghan Genocide and of Tamil refugees fleeing the Tamil Genocide in Sri Lanka i.e. contemptible suspension of the human rights of these desperate refugees for reasons of political expediency in the face of looming elections.
Not all Australians are party to these racist abominations – in the recent federal elections about 12% of Australians voted for the anti-war, pro-environment, pro-human rights Greens, and 6% voted informally (defacing their ballot or voting incorrectly), with about 82% of Australians nevertheless voting for the pro-war, pro-coal, pro-Zionist, war criminal, climate criminal, human rights abusing, politically correct racist (PC racist), neocon Lib-Labs.
The PC racist majority of Australians seem to think that convenient perception is reality and that if they ignore horrendous reality then the Awful Truth will simply go away – but it won't and the World is watching.
Thus a new Report from the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in Geneva slams Australia 's racist and human rights-abusing treatment of Indigenous Australians and refugees and one of the authors has said that such racial discrimination has become "embedded" in the Australian way of life. The UN CERD committee criticised what it called the "unacceptably high level of disadvantage and social dislocation" of Indigenous Australians and race-based, inhumane treatment of Afghan and Tamil refugees (see “UN says racism “embedded” in Australia”, ABC News, 28 August 2010: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/08/28/2996007.htm ).
The Australian Race Discrimination Commissioner Graeme Innes has commented thus on the UN Report: “The actions that needed to be taken in the Northern Territory could have been done on a non-discriminatory basis. So what the committee is recommending to Australia is not only we completely remove the suspension - which we haven't yet done - but we entrench in the constitution a provision so that never again can race discrimination law be suspended in Australia…We need to do much better in terms of having a national multicultural policy, which we haven't had for almost 15 years, which includes an anti-racism strategy. I think the problem for Australia is that we try to pretend that racism isn't there. What we need to do is face the facts that there are elements of racism in this country and take some positive action to address it" (see “ Australia pretending racism isn't there”, ABC News, 29 August 2010: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/08/29/2996351.htm ).
Australian denial of racist Australian policies at home and abroad comes at a very high human price. It is estimated that 9,000 Indigenous Australians die avoidably every year out of an Indigenous population of 0.5 million (see “Aboriginal Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/aboriginalgenocide/ ). In the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories post-invasion violent deaths and non-violent avoidable deaths from deprivation total 2.5 million and 4.5 million, respectively – carnage that merits the terminology Iraqi Genocide and Afghan Genocide, respectively, with genocide here defined as per Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention (see “Iraqi Holocaust, Iraqi Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/iraqiholocaustiraqigenocide/ and “Afghan Holocaust, Afghan Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/afghanholocaustafghangenocide/ ).
When one considers the awful atrocities of Apartheid South Africa the worst incident was the notorious Sharpeville Massacre on 21 March 1960, when South African police opened fire on a crowd of black protesters, killing 69 people (see “Sharpeville Massacre”, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharpeville_massacre ). Indeed the crude death rate in South Africa (in units of deaths per 1,000 of population per year) declined steadily under the racist Apartheid regime from 20.3 in 1950-1955 to a minimum of 8.4 in 1990-1995 but then rose dramatically in post-Apartheid South Africa from 9.9 (1995-2000) to 15.1 (2005-2010), this being substantially due to post-Apartheid governmental incompetence and the spread of HIV/AIDS (UN Population Division: http://esa.un.org/unpp/index.asp?panel=2 ).
In contrast, Apartheid Australia has been involved in all post-1950 US Asian wars, wars that have been associated, so far, with avoidable deaths totalling 24 million, the breakdown being 1 million (Korea), 13 million (Indo-China), 4.4 million (Iraq, 1990-2010), 4.5 million ( Afghanistan , 2001-2010) and 0.8 million global opiate drug-related deaths (3,000 in Australia) since 2001 due to US Alliance restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry. Indeed Australia has a secret genocide history – there are 22 holocausts and genocides in which Australia has been or still is complicit (see “ Australia 's secret genocide history”: https://sites.google.com/site/muslimholocaustmuslimgenocide/australia-s-secret-genocide-history ).
Sanctions and Boycotts were used successfully against Apartheid South Africa and must be also applied to ‘look the other way”, PC racist Apartheid Australia to help stop the racist carnage in which it is complicit – the Aboriginal Genocide (9,000 Indigenous Australian excess or avoidable deaths annually), the Iraqi Genocide (about 60,000 excess deaths annually) and the Afghan Genocide (440,000 excess deaths annually). Silence kills and silence is complicity – please inform everyone you can.
Dr Gideon Polya currently teaches science students at a major Australian university. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). He has recently published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ); see also his contribution “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” in “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics” (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007): http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1445960.htm ). He has just published a revised and updated 2008 version of his 1998 book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” (see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a greater famine catastrophe than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/
bengalfamine_programme.html ). When words fail one can say it in pictures - for images of Gideon Polya's huge paintings for the Planet, Peace, Mother and Child see: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ and
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/ .
