Racist attacks on international students in Australia

trotskyistplatf

The violent attacks on international students in Australia continues. On the weekend there was another series of chilling attcks on Indian students by a mob of racists.

International students from China have been attacked too. In the last couple of years a Chinese student from Hobart, one from Perth and possibly several Chinese students from Sydney were murdered by racists. Also a Chinese academic in Melbourne (leaving work from Victoria University of Technology) was murdered by a racist gang going on a "curry bashing" hunt to attack Asians.

Below is an article from an Australian group concerned about these incidents: http://web.aanet.com.au/tplatform/Indian%20Students.pdf

Stop Attacks on Indian & CHINESE Students

Indians, Lebanese, CHINESE, Trade Unionists & All Anti-Racists Unite

Build Grassroots, Anti-Racist Patrols!

June 11 - Indian students in Australia are desperate. Hundreds of them have been assaulted in recent times. In a small number of cases the attacks have been purely about robberies but mostly, the anti-Indian violence has been motivated by racism. The perpetrators have mainly been white supremacists. In a tiny percentage of cases, hoodlums from other ethnic minorities have also been responsible.

Bashings are becoming more widespread by the day. Four days ago, Indian student Kamal Jit was beaten unconscious by two racists as he walked to his home in an outer Melbourne suburb. Just two weeks earlier, the 23 year-old was pelted with eggs by masked men after getting off a train at St Albans. In late May, a racist gang assaulted four Indian students at a party in Melbourne and told them that they should go back to India. One of the four Indians, Shravan Kumar Theertala was in a coma fighting for his life after the racists stabbed him with a screwdriver. Meanwhile in Sydney’s Western suburbs, 25 year-old Hospitality graduate Rajesh Kumar received serious burns after a petrol bomb was hurled through the window of his Harris Park home.

What is infuriating Indian students the most is the indifference of the police to these racist assaults. Indian students note that because they are dark-skinned victims of violence, police show little interest in pursuing matters. Furthermore, the police and federal and state politicians from the Labor and Liberal parties are denying the racist character of these attacks. This is ridiculous! In many cases, Indians who have been assaulted have not even been robbed. And often the physical violence against them has been accompanied by racist verbal abuse. Yet police spokesman, Inspector Mahony, claimed that, “While Victoria Police acknowledges the Indian community are over-represented as victims, there is no evidence to support [the claim that] Indians are targeted or vilified because of their ethnicity.” In February, this lying policeman outraged Indian students even further when he suggested that they should not talk loudly in their native language in public or travel around with items such as mp3 players on display. So the victims of racist violence are to be blamed for their own victimisation! Worse still when Indian students and their anti-racist supporters have protested against the attacks, they have faced intimidation and sometimes sheer brutality from the police. On May 31 a spirited, thousands strong protest against racist violence in Melbourne was violently dispersed by police. The cops arrested 18 Indian students.


The stance taken by the police and mainstream politicians has not gone unnoticed by the Indian youth. Far from it! At a protest, one Indian student concisely expressed to a Trotskyist Platform representative the opinion that the youth have of the Australian police: “The police are shit heads.”

However, the response of police to the anti-Indian attacks is hardly a shock. Australia’s police are the upholders of a racist social order. It is worth here recalling the reaction of NSW Police to the terrifying rampage this “Australia Day” by hundreds of white youth at Manly Beach. It was then that youth of Anglo-Celtic appearance violently attacked and threatened anyone who was not white, especially targeting people of East Asian ethnicity. One 18 year-old Asian female had to be treated by Ambulance workers after the angry white mob attacked the car she was in.   ......................




For remainder of article go to http://web.aanet.com.au/tplatform/Indian%20Students.pdf

trotskyistplatf

1# trotskyistplatf

Here is some more of the article: http://web.aanet.com.au/tplatform/Indian%20Students.pdf

.... Among the others assaulted were a Sikh Indian taxi driver and an Asian shopkeeper. Yet police arrested just four of the rednecks and of these only one was charged - and not for violent racist attacks but for … assaulting police! Incredibly, Commander Dave Darcy from Manly Local Area Command claimed that the rampaging youth were no worse than a rowdy “old cricket crowd.” Darcy added: “I personally gave them a good looking over, just assessing them. There was an intensity there that no doubt would be confronting to some but at that stage they hadn’t crossed the threshold of criminality.” Yet police consider Indian students peacefully protesting against racist violence to have “crossed the threshold of criminality”! Just like with today’s anti-Indian attacks, police (and also Manly mayor Jean Hay) worked overtime to cover up the racist character of the Manly Beach riot. Commander Darcy insisted that, “To suggest that there were racial overtones there is, I think, way over the top.” Way over the top! The mob was marching with signs saying “F _ _ k-off we’re full” and chanting “lets go f_ _k with these Lebs” and “If you’re white and you know it clap your hands”!

Those least likely to get police protection from redneck violence in this country are Aboriginal people. Typical of what they face was illustrated by an incident that occurred one night in October 2006 in the NSW Far South Coast town of Bermagui. Three cars filled with armed white racists drove to the houses of two Aboriginal families and while shouting racist abuse attacked the houses. Aboriginal men in the homes fought back while a female elder called the police (The Age, 11 March 2008.) However, when police arrived they not only allowed the racist attackers to leave but later in the day charged the five Aboriginal people who had gone to the police station to relate the events of that night! With such encouragement from the establishment, it is little wonder that a couple of years later, white racists again attacked one of the same Aboriginal families – the Campbells - that had been earlier targeted.


Perhaps the starkest example of the inherently racist nature of the Australian “justice” system was seen in the events that surrounded the November 2004
death of Aboriginal man Mulrunji Doomadgee in a police cell in Palm Island, Queensland. Doomadgee was bashed to death by a racist white cop, Senior-Sergeant Chris Hurley soon after he had been arrested for simply swearing. But a coroner’s inquiry whitewashed this murder as an “accident.” In response to this terrible injustice and to decades of police violence, 400 Aboriginal people waged a powerful demonstration during which the symbols of racist brutality on Palm Island – the police station and courthouse – ended up being damaged. Even though this Aboriginal struggle caused no physical harm to any persons, several of the heroic Aboriginal protesters were arrested and given jail terms. The leading spokesman for the Aboriginal resistance, Lex Wotton, is still doing a 6 year sentence. Yet the murdering racist policeman ended up walking away free and was even granted over $100,000 compensation!



That is why, while it may be sometimes necessary for international students to call police in response to individual attacks on them, it is absolutely useless to have an overall strategy that looks to the Australian police and legal system to protect Indians from racist attacks. What is needed, instead, is for anti-racists of all colours to join together to form defence squads to patrol areas where attacks on Indians have been most prevalent. Courageously, Indian students in Melbourne have already organised patrols at train stations where racist assaults have been common. Four days ago, Indian youth at St Albans carried out a strong anti-racist act. In response to a bigot yelling to the Indians, “You are black, You don’t belong here. Go away from our country,”
the Indians took firm action. (The Times of India, June 9.) This resulted in the racist leaving the scene in a lesser physical condition than he was in prior to unleashing his vile tirade. A car belonging to a person who has committed racist assaults on Indians was also torched.

However, it is essential that the patrols become multiracial in composition. This will enable the self-defence efforts to win broader community support and will help to ensure that the squads remain focussed on a clear anti-racist perspective rather than becoming vigilantes or an ethnic-based force.
This has become especially vital because in Harris Park (unlike in Melbourne and other parts of Sydney) the anti-racist protests of Indians has in the last few days started to degenerate into hostility – encouraged by Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph newspaper – against another victimised ethnic group. That is why we insist that activists from other communities facing victimisation – Lebanese, Aboriginal, Chinese etc – and anti-racist whites be energetically recruited into the anti-racist squads. Let’s together stand against all racist violence and all harrassment by white supremacists!

A problem that the current patrols in Melbourne are facing is that they are being opposed by the establishment. The police have been dispersing the patrollers. Meanwhile, prime minister Kevin Rudd has hysterically denounced the self-defence efforts, almost equating them with the racist violence. In the face of such oppositon, the anti-racist patrols need a social force strong enough to make the state stand aside so that the squads can carry out their tasks. This social force is Australia’s trade union movement. Union activists must organise contingents of union members to join the patrols. The police are quite happy to bully Indian students on patrol but they are less likely to mess around with a contingent of trade unionists – as that could trigger strike action in response. Furthermore, because trade unions bring together workers of all different ethnicities, they will help to ensure that the defence squads solidify on an unambigiously anti-racist program.

Australia: A Very Racist Country

The wave of attacks has hit not only Indian students but other South Asians. A group of students from Sri Lanka had the windows of their house in Northern Canberra smashed by three men hurling racist insults. One of the students, Dijula Wijesuriya was threatened with a knife by an attacker demanding “get out of our streets” (The Hindu, 11 June.) In the meantime, Chinese people in the tertiary education sector continue to face violent racist attacks as well. In October 2007 in Western Australia, an Australian man fatally choked a 22 year-old Chinese student Jiao Dan and left her to die on a Perth roadside. Then in January 2008, a university researcher of Chinese origin, Zhongjun Cao, was bashed to death in Melbourne while walking home from Victorian University. Cao’s killer, who pleaded guilty to the crime, heads a racist gang. The murderer and his gang had gone out the night they killed Cao on a “curry bashing” expedition against Indian students and anyone of Asian appearance. They murdered Cao and also bashed a Mauritian man Binesh Mosaheb whom they mistook for an Indian.

Racist violence and degradation in this country targets not only international students but non-white residents living here. Many first and second-generation Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Tamils, Sinhalese and Fijian Indians have gone through a range of humiliating experiences. At the lowest level, this takes the form of a “mate” mimicking in a mocking manner the way that the “mate” thinks their accent should sound
… and then worse still slapping the victim of his “joke” on the back if the victim agrees to swallow their pride and “laugh” along with the racist perpetrator. Then there is the put down of being called not by one’s real name but by patronising nicknames like “Vindaloo” and “Chocolate Drop.” At the higher end of verbal abuse come the openly hostile taunts like “black shit.” And then there is the outright intimidation and violence.

Police have tried to whitewash the racist character of many of the recent attacks by “explaining” them away as a result of the “soft” character of South Asians. This is a complete lie proven by the fact that white racist violence not only targets South Asians. In December 2005, up to 10,000 howling white racists went on a rampage at Cronulla Beach that targeted, in particular, Middle Eastern people. The rednecks smashed several Lebanese youth over the head with beer bottles and also assaulted other non-white people including some Bangladeshi students and a mixed Aboriginal-Lebanese boy. Meanwhile, the first peoples of this land, the Aboriginal people, face a terrifyingly extreme level of racist oppression.

In Australia, for some racism has grown to the status of a national sport. Ocker, Aussie culture at its worst involves groups of men sitting in a pub boasting about how they have abused a non-white person …. and about how they have ill-treated their wives or girlfirends. To some in this country, to be racist is a badge of honour, a sign of masculinity. This “culture” is so overwhelming that even individuals from victimised ethnic groups express racist contempt for other victimised communities in order to seek “acceptance” in the mainstream.

So why is Australia so racist? Firstly, it is important to understand that racism exists in all capitalist countries. For in societies where a small number of capitalist exploiters make big profits out of the toil of workers, the rich elite must ensure that the masses do not unite against them and they do this by dividing the masses with racism. At the workplace level, cunning bosses manipulate racial divisions to prevent workers from joining together to stand up to exploitation. But racism is also fostered right from the top of capitalist governments. After the terrible September 2001 terror attacks in the U.S., the capitalist rulers throughout the Western countries seized a chance to channel the frustrations of poor white people away from them and on to Muslim and Arab people. They declared a racist “war on terror.” Although Middle Eastern people have been the main victims of this racist campaign, South Asian people have also been heavily targeted. To idiot redneck racists anyone from the Indian subcontinent is a “Muslim.”

Meanwhile, today, Labor’s Kevin Rudd is taking off from where the Liberals’ John Howard left off on the issue of refugees. In mid-April, Rudd went on a fanatical-sounding tirade on the issue: “People smugglers are engaged in the world’s most evil trade and they should all rot in jail because they represent the absolute scum of the earth” (Weekend Australian, 18-19 April.) This extreme language against people smugglers is code for xenophobic hostility to people “breaching” Australia’s borders. This was proven by the rest of Rudd’s rant: “... this Government is absolutely committed to dedicating all resources necessary to fight the fight against people smugglers, to maintain a hardline, tough and targeted strategy in maintaining this country’s border protection.” Needless to say, such rhetoric from the top is encouraging anti-immigrant sentiments amongst the population.


As economic woes deepen and unemployement grows, the ruling class has intensified its scapegoating of ethnic minorities. On March 16, the Rudd government fed into the myth that immigration causes unemployment by, with great fanfare, announcing that it was moving to “protect local jobs” by slashing the skilled migration intake. Immigration minister Chris Evans declared that, “We don’t want people coming in who are going to compete with Australians for limited jobs” (Radio Australia website, 16 March.) Such divisive politics is hardly confined to Australia. It is happening all over Europe too. The recent European Union elections showed that blaming non-white minorities for the effects of the economic crisis has been accompanied by a frightening resurgence of fascistic parties from Britain to Netherlands to Hungary to Austria.

Nevertheless, even amongst capitalist countries, Australia is particularly racist. This a product of both history and geography. First the history. Capitalist Australia was formed out of the brutal disposession and near genocide of the indigenous Aboriginal people. These crimes have stained the state institutions and indeed the whole “culture” of this country. And because these crimes have never been redressed and continue in different form today and because Aboriginal people have never been granted justice, the suffocating stench of racism continues to stink in almost every corner of Australian society.

Secondly, there is Australia’s geography. Australia is a white dominated country but unlike the European countries, it is not mostly neighboured by other white countries but instead by Asian countries with huge non-white populations. White racism in Australia thus takes on a particularly fearful and therefore vicious nature. Furthermore, the average standard of living in Australia is much higher than in its Asian and Pacific neighbours. On the one hand, this is because of this country’s enormous land and mineral resources and a result of the looting of poorer countries by Australian-owned “multinational” corporations (like Rio Tinto.) On the other hand the Southern Asian and Pacific neighbours have been handicapped by the legacy of European and Australian colonial domination and the continued neoconial oppression by rich capitalist powers. The wealth gap thus created between Australia and its Asia-Pacific neighbours produces a Mr Scrooge-like effect in this country. Those people here who are short-sighted think, quite mistakenly, that they can maintain a better standard of living if they jealously keep out poorer darker-skinned people in the region from gaining any access to the wealth of this country. Inevitably, such an outlook is accompanied by anti-Asian racism.


However, anti-Asian racism is a double-edged sword for the Australian ruling class. Asian countries are Australia’s biggest trading partners. It is bleedingly obvious that the only reason that Australia’s economy has thus far not deteriorated as quickly as its counterparts is that it is being held up by its exports to China, whose socialistic state-owned enterprises continue to power through the global financial crisis. White Australian chauvinism has always threatened to harm Australia’s economic relationships with Asian countries. Most immediately, the exposure of racist attacks on Indian students immediately endangers Australia’s international student market which has now become this country’s third biggest export market. Australian universities gain huge revenues by charging the 430,000 international students who study here each year exorbitant fees. There are over 90,000 students from India alone paying fees here.


Thus there is division within the ruling class about what to do about the attacks on Indian students. Some within the establishment have reproached the weak response of the Rudd Labor government to the attacks, worrying that it is damaging Australia-India relations. Australian ruling class strategists have long sought to bring capitalist India into the tripartite U.S./Australia/Japan military alliance against socialistic China and North Korea. Now they fear that these plans will be impeded by the mass outrage in India over Australia’s racist bashings. This is why even foreign affairs editor for The Australian, Greg Sheridan, a noted right-wing apologist for Aussie racism, has criticised the federal government’s response.

However, the Australian capitalist rulers are in a bind. Even though the attacks on Indian students is in some ways harmful to the ruling class’ economic and political interests, to acknowledge the depth of racism in Australian society would make it harder for Australian imperialism to use the pretext of “human rights” to throw its weight around the Asia-Pacific region. Furthermore, the capitalist class is reluctant to challenge racism because it actually needs racism in order to divert the anger of the masses that it exploits away from itself and on to racial minorities. Consequently, the bulk of the establishment, including the Rudd regime, has simply denied outright the racist character of the attacks on Indian students. Typical was the statement made by deputy prime minister Julia Gillard during an ABC Radio interview on June 11. Gillard stated that, “our advice from police is that these are not racially based crimes…. I take the advice of the police” (Ministers Media Centre.) Rudd for his part had the gall to claim that Australia is one of the safest countries in the world for international students and that the attacks on Indian students are “just a regrettable fact of urban life.” ......


For full article see: http://web.aanet.com.au/tplatform/Indian%20Students.pdf