Antinuclear

Australia has again declared war on its Indigenous people, reminiscent of the brutality that brought universal condemnation on apartheid South Africa. Aboriginal people are to be driven from homelands where their communities have lived for thousands of years. In Western Australia, where mining companies make billion dollar profits exploiting Aboriginal land, the state government says it can no longer afford to “support” the homelands.

Vulnerable populations, already denied the basic services most Australians take for granted, are on notice of dispossession without consultation, and eviction at gunpoint. Aboriginal leaders have warned of “a new generation of displaced people” and “cultural genocide”.

The prime minister, Tony Abbott, has revived this assault on a people who represent Australia’s singular uniqueness. Soon after coming to office, the federal government cut $534m in Indigenous social programs, including $160m from the Indigenous health budget and $13.4m from Indigenous legal aid. …….

In announcing that the Australian government would no longer honour the longstanding commitment to Aboriginal homelands, Abbott sneered, “It’s not the job of the taxpayers to subsidise lifestyle choices.” The weapon used by Abbott and his redneck state and territorial counterparts is dispossession by propaganda, coercion and blackmail. The minister for Indigenous affairs, Nigel Scullion, has been accused of threatening to stop providing basic services unless Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory sign 99-year leases. According to Scullion, “this is about what communities want”. In fact, there has been no real consultation – only the time-honoured co-option of a few.

Both Coalition and Labor governments have already withdrawn the national jobs program and the community development employment projects from the homelands, ending opportunities for employment, and prohibited investment in infrastructure: housing, generators, sanitation. The saving is peanuts.

The homelands are seen as a threat to white power.

The reason is an extreme doctrine that evokes the punitive campaigns of the early 20th century “chief protector of Aborigines”, such as the fanatic AO Neville who decreed that the first Australians “assimilate” to extinction. Influenced by the same eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis, Queensland’s “protection acts” were a model for South African apartheid. Today, the same dogma and racism are threaded through anthropology, politics, the bureaucracy and the media. “We are civilised, they are not,” wrote the acclaimed Australian historian Russel Ward two generations ago. The spirit is unchanged………

The current political attack was launched in the richest state, Western Australia. Last October, the state premier, Colin Barnett, announced that his state could not afford $90m for basic municipal services to 282 homelands: water, power, sanitation, schools, road maintenance, rubbish collection. It was the equivalent of informing the white suburbs of Perth that their lawn sprinklers would no longer sprinkle and their toilets no longer flush; and they had to move; and if they refused, the police would evict them.

Where would the dispossessed go? Where would they live? In six years, Barnett’s government has built few houses for Indigenous people in remote areas. In the Kimberley region, Indigenous homelessness – aside from natural disaster and civil strife – is one of the highest in the world, in a state renowned for its conspicuous wealth, golf courses and prisons overflowing with impoverished black people. ………

In Barnett’s vast rich Western Australia, barely a fraction of mining, oil and gas revenue has benefited communities for which his government has a duty of care. In the town of Roeburne, in the midst of the booming minerals-rich Pilbara, 80% of the Indigenous children suffer from an ear infection called otitis media that causes deafness.

In 2011, Barnett’s government displayed a brutality in the community of Oombulgurri which the other homelands can expect. “First, the government closed the services,” wrote Tammy Solonec of Amnesty International:

It closed the shop, so people could not buy food and essentials. It closed the clinic, so the sick and the elderly had to move, and the school, so families with children had to leave, or face having their children taken away from them. The police station was the last service to close, then eventually the electricity and water were turned off. Finally, the 10 residents who resolutely stayed to the end were forcibly evicted [leaving behind] personal possessions. [Then] the bulldozers rolled into Oombulgurri. The WA government has literally dug a hole and in it buried the rubble of people’s homes and personal belongings.

In South Australia, the state and federal governments launched a similar attack on the 60 remote Indigenous communities. …….

Australian politicians are nervous of the United Nations, and Abbott’s abuse of the UN is a cover for this. The closure of Indigenous homelands breaches Article 5 of the International Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (Icerd). Australia is committed to “provide effective mechanisms for prevention of, and redress for … any action which has the aim of dispossessing [Indigenous people] of their lands, territories or resources”. The Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is blunt. “Forced evictions” are against the law.

An international momentum is building. In 2013, Pope Francis spoke out for “Indigenous peoples … who are increasingly isolated and abandoned”.

It was South Africa’s defiance of such a basic principle of human rights that ignited the international opprobrium and campaign that brought down apartheid. Australia beware.

www.johnpilger.com    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/22/by-evicting-the-homelands-australia-has-again-declared-war-on-indigenous-people?CMP=soc_568