Racial Violence Continues in Australia

[Bozur]

Racial Violence Continues in Australia

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 12, 2005
Filed at 7:24 p.m. ET

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- Violence spilled into a second night Monday as scores of youths drove through predominantly white suburbs of Sydney, smashing windows of cars, homes and stores and raising fears of spreading racial unrest.


AFP -- Getty Images
Young men attacked a man who appeared to be Middle Eastern descent on a train in Sydney.


AFP -- Getty Images
Thousands of white youths attacked people they believed were of Arab descent at a Sydney beach. Later, Arabs retaliated in the suburbs.

Prime Minister John Howard called the violence ''sickening,'' but denied it was rooted in racism. Arab community leaders said the unrest would heighten racial tensions as cell phone text messages warned of retribution by the Arab community and attacks by neo-Nazi groups.

About 5,000 white men, many of them drunk, targeted people believed to be of Arab or Middle Eastern descent on Cronulla Beach on Sunday after rumors spread that Lebanese youths assaulted two lifeguards earlier this month.

Police, who had stepped up patrols on the beach after learning of cell phone text messages urging people to retaliate for the attack on the lifeguards, fought back with batons and pepper spray.

Young men of Arab descent struck back in several Sydney suburbs Sunday, fighting with police for hours and smashing dozens of cars with sticks and bats, police said. They said 31 people were injured, including a white man who was allegedly stabbed in the back, and 16 arrested.

Carloads of youths also tore through the suburbs Monday night, attacking vehicles and throwing bottles through windows. While only one person was reported injured and six arrested, there appeared to be more damage to cars and stores than on Sunday.

Television images of Sunday's riot shocked Australians, who pride themselves on tolerance and credit an influx of immigrants with helping build up the country after World War II.

Tensions between youths of Arabic and Middle Eastern descent and white Australians have been rising in recent years, fueled by the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States and deadly bombings on Bali that killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.

Many Muslims also were angered over Howard's decision to contribute troops to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The president of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia, Keysar Trad, said the violence was ''bound to happen'' following angry calls to radio talk shows after the attack on the lifeguards. Police have denied the assault on the lifeguards was racially motivated.

The unrest recalled three weeks of rioting in France that began in the suburbs of Paris on Oct. 27 and spread nationwide, baring frustration in communities with high immigrant and Muslim populations.

Police spokesman Paul Bugden said he did not have descriptions of those involved in Monday night's rampage, but said it was linked to Sunday's rioting.

Witnesses told an Associated Press photographer that some youths involved in the attacks were Middle Eastern or Arabic in appearance and others wore ski masks. Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported that police said men of Middle Eastern appearance were involved.

New text messages calling for more violence reportedly were being circulated. ''We'll show them!'' one message said, according to The Australia newspaper.

Howard defended Australia's policy of tolerance, noting that the nation has successfully absorbed millions of foreigners. ''I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country,'' he said.

His comments were clearly aimed at immigrants and their families. Howard repeatedly has come under criticism for refusing to apologize for past government abuses of Aborigines, Australia's poorest and least educated minority group.

Morris Iemma, premier of New South Wales state, said police would find those behind the violence. ''Let's be very clear, the police will be unrelenting in their fight against these thugs and hooligans,'' he said.

About 300 people of Arab descent demonstrated against Sunday's attack outside one of Sydney's largest mosques, amid tight security.

''Arab Australians have had to cope with vilification, racism, abuse and fear of a racial backlash for a number of years, but these riots will take that fear to a new level,'' said Roland Jabbour, chairman of the Australian Arabic Council.

In the 2001 census, nearly a quarter of Australia's 20 million people said they were born overseas. The country has about 300,000 Muslims, most in lower income suburbs of large cities.

A resident of the predominantly white suburb of Brighton-Le-Sands, Steven Dawson, said a bottle thrown through his apartment window Monday showered his 5-month-old son with glass, but did not hurt the boy.

Horst Dreizner said a car was rammed through the front doors of his denture store. ''Personally, I think it is only the beginning,'' he said by telephone.

The violence distressed residents of Sydney.

''What we have seen yesterday is something I thought I would never see in Australia,'' Community Relations Commission chairman Stepan Kerkyasharian told Sky News.

Religious leaders urged calm, with Roman Catholic Archbishop Cardinal George Pell urging people to ''reject the extremists in both camps and work together so that this is the end of major disturbances, not the beginning of something worse.''

[Bozur]

Cronulla Journal
Australia Asks if Racism Was Behind Riots on a Beach

By RAYMOND BONNER
Published: December 16, 2005

CRONULLA, Australia, Dec. 15 - It is normally hard to find a place on this beach this time of the year, the beginning of the summer holidays. But on Thursday, a bright summer day with the temperature in the 80's, it was largely empty, with fewer than 50 swimmers, surfers and sun worshipers.


Newspix, via Agence France-Presse
On Sunday, a mob of whites attacked people thought to be of Lebanese descent on a beach in Australia.

In the aftermath of the riots last Sunday, in which a mob of drunken white Australians set upon anyone thought to be Lebanese, local residents are wary and outsiders are staying away.

The third floor of the white North Cronulla Beach Life Saving and Surf Club has been taken over by the police as a command post, and at times Thursday more police cars, some unmarked, were in the parking lot than those belonging to bathers.

In an emergency session, the State of New South Wales gave the police broad new powers to stop and search vehicles, lock down neighborhoods and confiscate cellphones. On Thursday, text messages, many hate-filled, swamped cellphones, as they did in the days before the violence.

"Nightclubs and outdoor venues may be potential for drive-by shootings this week," Mauricio Mejia, a 24-year-old personal trainer, read on his cellphone. "Stay home, please." He said that he would not stay away, and that the general sense here was that the worst was over, that the riots would not multiply the way they had in Paris.

Those who were at the beach Thursday expressed views and attitudes, sometimes guardedly, that shed some light on the causes of the attacks. The general view was that the riots reflected not a clash of cultures, but a clash of gangs - white Australian skinheads and neo-Nazis against young Lebanese toughs who show no respect for women or authority.

But beneath all the discussion of proximate causes, the lurking issue that Australians collectively seem to be grappling with is whether Australia is a racist country.

When the prime minister, John Howard, appeared on a current affairs television program the day after the riots, the first question was, "If it's not racism, what is it?"

"I don't believe Australia is a racist country," he said, which hardly settled the matter.

The debate goes on against a history of an official "whites only" policy that lasted until the 1970's.

Although increasing numbers of Asians have been allowed in, the country of 20 million is still roughly 92 percent Caucasian. Critics of Mr. Howard, leader of the center-right Liberal Party, say he has fueled the country's ethnic tensions. He has refused to issue an official apology to the country's Aborigines for the manner in which they were treated for generations.

Four years ago, during a tough re-election battle, he raised fears that the country was being swamped by hordes of boat people from the Middle East, calling out the military to repel the ostensible invaders. Presumably to dehumanize them and dampen public sympathy, he accused one group of asylum seekers of throwing their children overboard.

More recently, he has campaigned for tough antiterrorism laws by creating fears of another terrorist attack by Islamic radicals.

Still, Mr. Howard's view that this is not a racist country was shared by beachgoers here.

"I don't really see there's an underlying issue of racism in the riots," said Sandra Georges, a 27-year-old physical education teacher. She said the mob last Sunday was fueled by too much alcohol.

She was particularly disgusted by what one man had painted on his chest: "Ethnic Cleansing Day."

"We're not racist," she said. If anyone might know the sting of racism, she might: her father is Sudanese, her mother Spanish and she is married to a Lebanese.

But Mr. Mejia, lying nearby and reading a book about Warren Buffett, disagreed. "If I had been here last week, they would have jumped me," he said, because of his dark complexion. His mother is Colombian.

The riots' powder keg, he and others said, was an incident the previous Sunday in which Lebanese youths beat up two lifeguards. It has been described in the press as a "bashing." But Mr. Mejia, who said he had witnessed it, said it lasted only 30 seconds and only a few punches were thrown.

A lifeguard on duty agreed Thursday that it had been a minor incident. Only one of the lifeguards was hurt, and that was just a small cut under one eye, he said.

The incident was the organizing cry for groups of local residents who had long wanted to "reclaim their beach," said Mick Darcy, 61, just after coming out of the surf.

Even by the standards of a largely white Australia, the beach, 20 miles south of the Sydney center, has been markedly white. This is a quintessentially middle-class suburb, of middle-rise apartments with glassed-in balconies and a seemingly endless number of restaurants.

But it is also on the rail line from the western suburbs, where most of the city's Middle Easterners live. In recent years, more and more Lebanese have been coming to the beach and, many locals said, harassing women.

"My wife won't come here any more," Mr. Darcy said.

Ms. Georges said that she, too, had been harassed by young Lebanese men, who she said sometimes make suggestive and derogatory comments.

But Australian men are not immune from charges of treating women like sex objects.

"When Australian men do it to Australian women, it's O.K.," said Mr. Mejia. "When we do it, it's sleazy."

Mr. Mejia said he would come to the beach on Sunday. "I'm not going to let these people run my life," he said of the white Australians who would like to keep the beach, and country, for whites only.

Mr. Darcy said he, too, would be here Sunday. "I'm not going to let them tell me what to do," he said of the Lebanese gangs.

[Bozur]

Op-Ed Contributor
Australia's Dangerous Fantasy

By EVA SALLIS
Published: December 17, 2005
Adelaide, Australia

LAST Sunday on Cronulla Beach, a suburb of Sydney, thousands of drunken white youths attacked anyone they believed was of Arab descent. Inspired by reports that Lebanese-Australians had assaulted two white lifeguards, text messages calling for a Lebanese "bashing day" appeared on thousands of cellphones. Some of Sunday's assailants wore T-shirts that proclaimed, "We grew here; you flew here," or, "Ethnic cleansing unit."

For many, the Cronulla Beach incident did not come as a surprise. Rather, it was the bubbling up of an undercurrent that is increasingly evident in Australian life.

Newcomers, especially those who form linguistic or ethnically distinct groups, always have a hard time in Australia at first. But Australia is a country that has been created by many streams of immigrants and has come out the better for it. Greeks and Italians are among the largest non-Anglo groups and are fully integrated. Melbourne has the world's third largest Greek community. Vietnamese immigrants experienced racism and hostility when they first arrived in the late 70's and early 80's, but time, and the entry of increasing numbers of Vietnamese-Australians into public life, have eroded that prejudice.

While this country is less diverse than the United States, its minority communities are a core part of its national identity. The notion of an all-white Australia is a fantasy and an anachronism. No dark-haired, dark-eyed Australian would have been safe on Cronulla Beach last Sunday, yet Australia is - has always been - substantially dark-haired and dark-eyed. And the expressed hostility toward "Lebs" as recent intruders belies the history of Australia, where people of Lebanese ancestry have lived for more than a century.

Several recent events have made this latest eruption of racism and xenophobia different from those of the past. While denying even that racism exists, our leaders have given tacit approval and support for it through policy, whether this is policy on refugees, security or Indigenous affairs. The policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers was strongly linked with border protection from 2001, and, as most asylum seekers of recent years have been from the Middle East and Muslim South Asia, "border protection" has become protection from Muslim refugees in the popular imagination.

Like the United States, Australia has new anti-terrorism legislation, first passed in 2002 and significantly strengthened just recently. Such laws have helped to validate broader community mistrust of Arab and Muslim Australians.

Our government has done little to substantively allay fear of Muslim and Middle Eastern Australians generally or to increase public understanding and appreciation of their culture and contribution to Australian life. Arabic is the fourth most commonly used language after English in Australia, and the most commonly used language after English in New South Wales, Sydney's home state, yet it is taught in only a handful of schools and universities.

In the last five years there has also been evidence of an increase in violence toward people of Arab appearance. An Iraqi writer I know begged his wife and daughter to stop wearing the hijab because of the potential of violence on the street. An Afghan refugee taxi driver in Adelaide said to my partner last night that he thought he would have to quit because his younger passengers were so nasty. In recent years high-profile cases in which Arab-Australian youths were charged with violent crimes generated a storm in the news media, as well as unchecked vilification on talk radio.

Prejudice creates what it fears by curtailing young people's prospects. Young Arab-Australians are increasingly ghettoized in Sydney's poor suburbs, where they struggle for education and jobs. Their families are often prejudiced against non-Arab Australians; the racism of the minority and that of the broader society reinforce each other.

I have Muslim friends who used to feel that they were Australians, but now cannot identify themselves in the negative space created for them in our community. I have non-Muslim friends who are furious at being mistaken for Muslims because of their Middle Eastern background; they are doing all they can to differentiate themselves from people they too are starting to openly dismiss. It has become fashionable, perhaps, to be racist, although none of us, not even our prime minister, is willing to call it what it is.

What happened on Cronulla Beach warns us that our self-inflicted wounds are festering. A volatile part of our community is deeply alienated, unable to belong, and another volatile part has retreated to an irretrievable past and a mythical notion of racial purity. If contemporary Australians are to live at ease with ourselves, we need more education, less fear mongering and, not least, greater honesty about the culture of racism that is so damaging us.

Eva Sallis is the author of six books, including "Mahjar," a collection of short stories.