History > 2008 > USA > Australia (I)

Police to End Restrictions

on ex-Gitmo Detainee

November 20, 2008
Filed at 2:45 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) -- Australian police said Thursday they will stop restricting the movements and communications of a former Guantanamo Bay detainee after he broke his long media silence to ask them to let him ''get on with'' his life.

If the restrictions are lifted, Hicks will be a completely free man for the first time since he was captured by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in late 2001 and handed to U.S. troops invading to unseat the Taliban regime.

Hicks, a 33-year-old former Outback cowboy and kangaroo skinner turned Taliban foot soldier, has been subject to a control order since his release from prison in his home state of South Australia last December.

Under the order, Hicks must report to police three days a week, observe a curfew and is banned from using any telephone or Internet account not approved by police. It is due to expire next month.

Hicks released a 54-second video message to the public Thursday through a political lobby group opposed to Australia's toughened anti-terrorism laws, saying he feared police will ask for the control order to be extended for another year.

''I don't know what the future holds for me,'' Hicks says in the video, posted on the GetUp! group's Web site. ''The only thing I do know is that until the control order is lifted, I will not be able to get on with my life.''

Australian Federal Police initially said it would be inappropriate to comment on whether they were seeking an extension of the control order.

Hours later, it released a second statement. ''Following extensive consultation with a number of agencies, the AFP has decided it will not be seeking a further control order in respect of Mr. Hicks.'' it said.

It was unclear if the government would allow Hicks to apply for a new passport or travel overseas.

Attorney General Robert McClelland was not immediately available for comment.

The Muslim convert spent 5 1/2 years in captivity without trial at the U.S. military prison in Cuba before pleading guilty to supporting terrorism at a U.S. military tribunal in exchange for serving a nine-month sentence in Australia.

Under the plea bargain, Hicks admitted providing material support to al-Qaida. The deal prevented him from speaking to the media until March 2008.

But even after that date he has refused all media offers to tell his story. He said Thursday he must first recover from his years in captivity.

''Because I'm still recovering from that ordeal, I'm not yet ready to fully explain what happened or why,'' he says. ''One day, I will tell Australia that story, but I am not at that point yet.''

Since Hicks' guilty plea, only two Guantanamo Bay detainees have been convicted on terrorism charges.

Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden's media specialist Ali Hamza al-Bahlulto was sentenced this month to life in prison. Bin Laden driver Salim Hamdan was convicted in August and sentenced to 5 1/2 years in prison.

------

On the Net:

www.getup.org.au 

Police to End Restrictions on ex-Gitmo Detainee, NYT, 20.11.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-AS-Australia-Terror-Supporter.html

Pope Meets Australian Abuse Victims

July 22, 2008
The New York Times
By TIM JOHNSTON

SYDNEY, Australia — Pope Benedict XVI, on the last morning of his visit to Australia, celebrated Mass on Monday before a small group of victims of sexual abuse by priests.

The Vatican said that two men and two women — “a representative group of victims” — were invited to attend the Mass with a delegation of senior clergy before the pope left the country.

“He listened to their stories and offered them consolation,” the Vatican said in a statement. “Assuring them of his spiritual closeness, he promised to continue to pray for them, their families and all victims. Through this paternal gesture, the Holy Father wished to demonstrate again his deep concern for all those who have suffered sexual abuse.”

The pope made a similar gesture in a service with abuse victims in the United States when he visited there in April.

The head of the Catholic Church in Australia, Cardinal George Pell, who attended the Mass on Monday, said the four victims had requested anonymity and no details were released.

During his six-day visit to Australia for World Youth Day, the pope addressed the subject of sexual abuse, a controversy that has dogged the church for years, and alleged attempts by the Catholic hierarchy to cover it up.

Speaking to a congregation of priests, seminarians and others contemplating religious life on Saturday, the pope departed from his prepared remarks to apologize to the victims.

“I am deeply sorry for the pain and suffering the victims have endured and I assure them that, as their pastor, I, too, share in their suffering,” he said.

But victims’ groups criticized him for not meeting the victims face to face.

Cardinal Pell, speaking to the media after the left, said that Monday’s Mass was not a response to the criticism.

“This had been organized over a number of weeks,” he said, adding that the group had been chosen by the Professional Standards Office, which was set up to coordinate the Australian Catholic Church’s Towards Healing program, which is addressing the issue of sexual abuse.

Chris MacIsaac, the president of Broken Rites, a support group for victims of sexual abuse said the victims were still not satisfied.

“I rejoice with these victims to got to go to Mass with the pope, but I feel heartfelt sorrow for all those others who still feel they are outside the church,” she said in a telephone interview.

She said she was suspicious that the group that attended Mass with the pope had been selected because they had not spoken out publicly and added that she believed the church was unwilling to engage with those who went public with their complaints.

“The main reason they have been ostracized is that they have chosen to speak out,” she said.

    Pope Meets Australian Abuse Victims, NYT, 22.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/world/asia/22pope.html

Pope Calls for a ‘New Age’

in Final Australia Mass

July 20, 2008
The New York Times
By TIM JOHNSTON

SYDNEY, Australia — In his final address to hundreds of thousands of young Catholics gathered in Australia on Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI attacked the violence and materialism of the modern age, and called on his audience to build a “new age.”

“A new generation of Christians is being called to help build a world in which God’s gift of life is welcomed, respected and cherished — not rejected, feared as a threat and destroyed,” he told a congregation of about 400,000 gathered at a Sydney race track and neighboring park.

He sought “a new age in which hope liberates us from the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption which deaden our souls and poison our relationships,” he told his rapt audience, which included 26 cardinals and more than 400 bishops.

Sunday’s Mass was the culmination of six days of public and private events of World Youth Day, which the Roman Catholic Church says is the largest gathering of young people on the planet. The pope has used the event as a forum to call for religion to be returned to the center of the moral universe; for Catholicism to return to its evangelistic roots; and for a united front, both among Christians and among the world’s religions, in the face of a world becoming ever more materialistic.

“In so many of our societies, side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading: an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair,” he warned.

He also used an address Saturday to apologize for the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests and brothers in Australia. Going further than the apology he made to American Catholics during a visit to the United States in April, the pontiff personally identified himself with the pain of the victims.

“I am deeply sorry for the pain and suffering the victims have endured and I assure them that, as their pastor, I, too, share in their suffering,” he said in a departure from his prepared script.

He said that those guilty of sexual abuse, “a grave betrayal of trust” as he called it, should be brought to justice.

Broken Rites, a pressure group which assists the victims of sexual abuse by figures of religious authority, called the apology hollow, saying that he had not apologized to the victims in person.

But in other aspects, World Youth Day has been a triumph. Despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of young visitors, 125,000 of them from overseas, there has been almost no trouble. The police have reported only one arrest, of a young Australian Catholic who punched a demonstrator who was throwing condoms into a crowd of pilgrims in protest at the church’s stance on birth control and opposition to condoms as a barrier to the spread of H.I.V.

The event, which happens every three or four years, is scheduled to be held next in Madrid in 2011.

    Pope Calls for a ‘New Age’ in Final Australia Mass, NYT, 20.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/world/asia/20pope.html

Pope apologizes

for clergy sex abuse in Australia

18 July 2008
USA Today
By Rohan Sullivan, Associated Press Writer

SYDNEY, Australia — Pope Benedict XVI said he was "deeply sorry' for the sexual abuse of children by Australia's Catholic clergy, delivering a strongly-worded apology Saturday that described their acts as evil and a grave betrayal of trust.

"I would like to pause to acknowledge the shame which we have all felt as a result of the sexual abuse of minors by some clergy and religious in this country," Benedict said during an address at a Mass in Sydney.

"I am deeply sorry for the pain and suffering the victims have endured. I assure them as their pastor that I too share in their suffering," he said.

"Those responsible for these evils must be brought to justice."

Benedict has expressed regret before about the clergy abuse scandal that has rocked the church in recent years -- notably during a visit to the United States in April when he also met privately with a small number of victims. But the language of Saturday's apology was stronger than the pope's comments in the United States.

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said the pope added the words that he was deeply sorry to the original text given to reporters because he wanted to "personally underline" that he felt close to the victims.

There was no immediate word whether Benedict would meet with victims of clergy abuse during his Australia trip, which ends Monday.

Anthony Foster, the father of two Australian girls who were allegedly raped by a Catholic priest as children, has been publicly seeking a meeting with Benedict during his visit. He said he was disappointed the pope's remarks repeated the church's expressions of regret but offered no practical assistance for victims.

"What we haven't had is an unequivocal, unlimited practical response that provides for all the victims for their lifetime," he said. "The practical response needs to include both financial help ... and psychological help."

Support groups for victims of church abuse in Australia, whose numbers are not known but who activists say are in the thousands, accuse the church of covering up of the scale of the problem and fighting compensation claims lodged in civil courts.

"Sorry is not enough. Victims want action, not just words," the Broken Rites group said in a statement posted Saturday on its Web site.

The pontiff is in Australia to lead hundreds of thousands of pilgrims in the church's World Youth Day, a global celebration meant to inspire a new generation of Catholics.

During his appearances in Australia, Benedict has spoken about the need to strengthen traditional Christian values including charity and chastity, and decried the selfishness and greed of today's "cult of material possessions."

In his remarks Saturday, the pope said the sexual abuse scandal had badly damaged the church.

"These misdeeds, which constitute so grave a betrayal of trust, deserve unequivocal condemnation," he said. "They have caused great pain, they have damaged the church's witness."

About 500 people protested Saturday for what they called the pope's antiquated and discriminatory views, holding a contest for the T-shirt that would most annoy Roman Catholics and chanting: "The pope is wrong, put a condom on!"

The boisterous protest at a square in the city's center included inflated condoms floating above the crowd and some participants dressed as nuns and priests. They listened to speeches by activists supporting sex education and safe sex practices at Taylor Square.

"It's good that people protest against the pope's homophobia and misogyny," Alex Bainbridge of the Socialist Alliance told the crowd. "We don't want a war against sex, we want a war against sexually transmitted infections. We're here for the people who could be saved if they had adequate sex education and access to condoms."

Police on horseback and on foot patrolled the site at Taylor Square, but there were no signs of trouble.

Papal apologies have been few in the long history of the church, mostly confined to correcting historical errors such as condemning Galileo for maintaining that the Earth is not the center of the universe or asking forgiveness for the sins of Christians over the centuries.

But Benedict also said he was "deeply sorry" regarding remarks on Islam he made in Germany in 2006 that linked the religion to violence and set off a fury across the Muslim world.

Pope John Paul II's plan for a sweeping apology timed for the new millennium in 2000 drew resistance from some cardinals. But John Paul went ahead, asking forgiveness for the sins of Catholics through the ages, including wrongs inflicted on Jews, women and minorities.

Among other apologies, John Paul, during a 1992 visit to Senegal asked forgiveness for Christians involved in the slave trade and during a 1995 visit to the Czech Republic for violence by Catholics against Protestants during the 16th century.

Benedict will join tens of thousands of young Catholics for a couple of hours later Saturday at an open-air vigil held at a horse race track in Sydney. He will lead a Mass on Sunday before a crowd estimated at more than 200,000 that will mark the culmination of the World Youth Day festival.

    Pope apologizes for clergy sex abuse in Australia, UT, 18.7.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/topstories/2008-07-18-2212646786_x.htm

The Food Chain

A Drought in Australia,

a Global Shortage of Rice

April 17, 2008
The New York Times
By KEITH BRADSHER

DENILIQUIN, Australia — Lindsay Renwick, the mayor of this dusty southern Australian town, remembers the constant whir of the rice mill. “It was our little heartbeat out there, tickety-tick-tickety,” he said, imitating the giant fans that dried the rice, “and now it has stopped.”

The Deniliquin mill, the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere, once processed enough grain to meet the needs of 20 million people around the world. But six long years of drought have taken a toll, reducing Australia’s rice crop by 98 percent and leading to the mothballing of the mill last December.

Ten thousand miles separate the mill’s hushed rows of oversized silos and sheds — beige, gray and now empty — from the riotous streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, but a widening global crisis unites them.

The collapse of Australia’s rice production is one of several factors contributing to a doubling of rice prices in the last three months — increases that have led the world’s largest exporters to restrict exports severely, spurred panicked hoarding in Hong Kong and the Philippines, and set off violent protests in countries including Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Italy, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, the Philippines, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

Drought affects every agricultural industry based here, not just rice — from sheepherding, the other mainstay in this dusty land, to the cultivation of wine grapes, the fastest-growing crop here, with that expansion often coming at the expense of rice.

The drought’s effect on rice has produced the greatest impact on the rest of the world, so far. It is one factor contributing to skyrocketing prices, and many scientists believe it is among the earliest signs that a warming planet is starting to affect food production.

It is difficult to definitely link short-term changes in weather to long-term climate change, but the unusually severe drought is consistent with what climatologists predict will be a problem of increasing frequency.

Indeed, the chief executive of the National Farmers’ Federation in Australia, Ben Fargher, says, “Climate change is potentially the biggest risk to Australian agriculture.”

Drought has already spurred significant changes in Australia’s agricultural heartland. Some farmers are abandoning rice, which requires large amounts of water, to plant less water-intensive crops like wheat or, especially here in southeastern Australia, wine grapes. Other rice farmers have sold fields or water rights, usually to grape growers.

Scientists and economists worry that the reallocation of scarce water resources — away from rice and other grains and toward more lucrative crops and livestock — threatens poor countries that import rice as a dietary staple.

The global agricultural crisis is threatening to become political, pitting the United States and other developed countries against the developing world over the need for affordable food versus the need for renewable energy. Many poorer nations worry that subsidies from rich countries to support biofuels, which turn food, like corn, into fuel, are pushing up the price of staples. The World Bank and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization called on major agricultural nations to overhaul policies to avoid a social explosion from rising food prices.

With rice, which is not used to make biofuel, the problem is availability. Even in normal times, little of the world’s rice is actually exported — more than 90 percent is consumed in the countries where it is grown. In the last quarter-century, rice consumption has outpaced production, with global reserves plunging by half just since 2000. A plant disease is hurting harvests in Vietnam, reducing supply. And economic uncertainty has led producers to hoard rice and speculators and investors to see it as a lucrative or at least safe bet.

All these factors have made countries that buy rice on the global market vulnerable to extreme price swings.

Senegal and Haiti each import four-fifths of their rice, and both have faced mounting unrest as prices have increased. Police suppressed violent demonstrations in Dakar on March 30, and unrest has spread to other rice-dependent nations in West Africa, notably Ivory Coast. The Haitian president, René Préval, after a week of riots, announced subsidies for rice buyers on Saturday.

Scientists expect the problem to worsen. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, set up by the United Nations, predicted last year that even slight warming would lower agricultural output in the tropics and subtropics.

Moderate warming could benefit crop and pasture yields in countries far from the Equator, like Canada and Russia. In fact, the net effect of moderate warming is likely to be higher total global food production in the next several decades.

But the scientists said the effect would be uneven, and enormous quantities of food would need to be shipped from areas farther from the Equator to feed the populations of often less-affluent countries closer to the Equator.

The panel predicted that even greater warming, which might happen by late in this century if few or no limits are placed on greenhouse gas emissions, would hurt total food output and cripple crops in many countries.

Survival Techniques

Paul Lamine N’Dong, an elder in Joal, Senegal, worries that hot weather and failing rains have already crippled his village’s crop of millet, a coarse grain eaten locally and traded for rice.

Sitting on a concrete dais reserved for elders, Mr. N’Dong said on a recent morning, “The price rises very quickly, which means we really have to go and look for money.”

“It is live or die,” he said.

For farmers in a richer nation like Australia, the effects of the current drought are already significant.

The rice farmers who do not give up and sell their land or water rights are experimenting with varieties or techniques that require less water.

Still, Australia’s total rice capacity has declined by about a third because many farmers have permanently sold water rights, mostly for grape production. And production last year was far lower because of a severe shortage of water; rice farmers received one-eighth of the water they are usually promised by the government.

The accidental beneficiaries of these conditions have been the farmers who grow wine grapes in the river basin where the Deniliquin mill stands silent.

Even with the recent doubling of rice prices, to around $1,000 a metric ton for the high grades produced by Australia, it is even more profitable to grow wine grapes. All told, wine grapes produce a pretax profit of close to $2,000 an acre while rice produces a pretax profit around $240 an acre.

Also selling water rights to grape growers are ranchers like Peter Milliken, who raises sheep on 37,500 acres near Hay, Australia. Some ranchers have water to sell because they are reducing the water they use. Mr. Milliken is installing a buried nine-mile pipe to replace an irrigation canal that lost up to 90 percent of its water to evaporation — and is planning for the day when he does not irrigate at all.

Sheep farmers have already worked out cooperative arrangements to send flocks to whatever fields have recently received rain, sometimes herding or trucking them long distances. Keeping an eye on a flock, Frank Cox, a drover, said recently, “We had to move the sheep because they were dying of starvation, and truck them down here.”

The drought is making rice harder to find. For instance, SunRice, the Australian rice trading and marketing giant owned by the country’s rice growers, began preparing to mothball the Deniliquin mill five months ago, when it noticed that Australian farmers were planting almost no rice. To make sure that it could continue supplying the domestic market, as well as export markets in Papua New Guinea, South Pacific island nations, Taiwan and the Middle East, SunRice stepped up rice purchases from other countries, said the chief executive, Gary Helou.

The SunRice purchases became one among the many factors that are making it harder for longtime rice importers elsewhere to find supplies.

Researchers are looking for solutions to global rice shortages — for example, rice that blooms earlier in the day, when it is cooler, to counter global warming. Rice plants that happen to bloom on hot days are less likely to produce grains of rice, a difficulty that is already starting to emerge in inland areas of China and other Asian countries as temperatures begin to climb.

“There will be problems very soon unless we have new varieties of rice in place,” said Reiner Wassmann, climate change coordinator at the International Rice Research Institute near Manila, a leader in developing higher-yielding strains of rice for nearly half a century.

The recent reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change carried an important caveat that could make the news even worse: the panel said that existing models for the effects of climate change on agriculture did not yet include newer findings that global warming could reduce rainfall and make it more variable.

Seeking Hardier Rice

Many agronomists contend that changes in the timing and amount of rain are more important for crops than temperature changes. Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the panel, said long-range climate forecasts for precipitation would require another 5 to 20 years of research.

In addition to drought, climate change could also produce more extreme weather, more pest and weed outbreaks, and changes in sea level as polar ice melts. Most of the world’s increase in rice production over the last quarter-century has occurred close to sea level, in the deltas of rivers like the Mekong in Vietnam, Chao Phraya in Thailand and Ganges-Brahmaputra in Bangladesh.

Yet the effects of climate change are not uniformly bad for rice. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, can actually help rice and other crops — although the effect dwindles or disappears if the plants face excessive heat, inadequate water, severe pollution or other stresses.

Still, the flexibility of farmers and ranchers here has persuaded some climate experts that, particularly in developed countries, the effects of climate change may be mitigated, if not completely avoided.

“I’m not as pessimistic as most people,” said Will Steffen, the director of the Fenner School of Environment and Society at Australian National University. “Farmers are learning how to do things differently.”

Meanwhile, changes like the use of water to grow wine grapes instead of rice carry their own costs, as the developing world is discovering.

“Rice is a staple food,” said Graeme J. Haley, the general manager of the town of Deniliquin. “Chardonnay is not.”


Keith Bradsher reported from Australia last month and later added updated information. Rose Skelton in Fadiouth, Senegal, contributed reporting.

    A Drought in Australia, a Global Shortage of Rice, NYT, 17.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/business/worldbusiness/17warm.html

Australia, U.S. affirm alliance

Sat Feb 23, 2008
6:11pm EST
Reuters
By Kristin Roberts

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Australia and the United States reaffirmed their strong alliance on Saturday, saying their security and defense partnership would not change with the election of Canberra's new government and plans for a partial withdrawal from Iraq.

The foreign and defense ministers of both countries sought to play down differences over Iraq, while on Afghanistan both sides struck the same chord, calling on Europe to dedicate more resources to the fight.

Australia also appeared ready to act as a bridge between Beijing and Washington, as Canberra's foreign minister urged both sides to have a more open dialogue and called on China for more transparency in its activities.

"The alliance between Australia and the United States is fundamental to Australia's defense, security and strategic arrangements," Foreign Minister Stephen Smith told reporters after the annual Australia-United States ministerial consultations.

"The alliance relationship transcends a Labor or Liberal government here, or a Democrat or Republican administration in the United States," he said.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte are the highest ranking Bush administration officials to visit since Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's centre-left Labor Party won power. U.S. officials had looked for Australia to renew its commitment to their alliance during Saturday's session.

They also sought to press Australia for an assessment of China's growing strategic and economic role in the region. Some officials have said they hoped Rudd, a former diplomat with China expertise, would act as a bridge between China and the West.

But other officials and some security experts questioned what impact China's growing economic links to Australia might have on Canberra's commitment to partnership with Washington. China is on the verge of replacing Japan as Australia's top trading partner, due to China's demand for Australia's mineral resources.

Smith, however, said the United States and Japan remained Australia's key strategic allies.

"We can have a very good economic relationship with China which doesn't impact on the United States," he said.

COMBAT ROLES

The Rudd government has already broken with the Bush administration on Iraq, promising to pull 550 of its 1,500 troops out. The remaining force will begin to transition to non-combat roles to help build Iraqi capabilities, Smith said.

He said Australia would also look to increase its non-military support to Afghanistan to help build schools and roads and improve Afghanistan's police and judiciary.

But Australia had no plans to increase its force of about 1,000 troops in Afghanistan, including engineers and special forces commandos who are fighting in one of the more restive areas of that war zone.

"We are currently giving consideration to the capacity building and development assistance in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan," he said.

The ministers also discussed missile defense and the possibility of joint defense system with the United States, something considered by the previous John Howard government. defense Minister Joel Fitzgibbon would not offer details of those discussions.

But he said Australia had noted America's successful shoot-down of a defunct U.S. spy satellite last week, a mission seen by the Pentagon as proving the capability of its limited missile defense system.

"I can say to our American friends and in particular to Secretary Gates that we watched their activity in terms of bringing down the satellite with great interest," Fitzgibbon said.

"Bob, nice shot," he told to Gates.

(Additional reporting by James Grubel; Editing by Alex Richardson)

    Australia, U.S. affirm alliance, R, 23.2.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSSYD20367120080223

Leading article:

The courage to right

a historic wrong

Wednesday, 13 February 2008
The Independent

In the few weeks since he led the Labor Party into office on a landslide, Mr Rudd has brought a liberating breath of fresh air into Australian politics. Before the end of his first day in office, he had reversed Australia's policy on climate change by ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. He has also announced the permanent closure of the notorious detention centre on Nauru Island, which is scheduled to take place next month. Both moves illustrate the world of difference between his policies and those of the defeated Prime Minister, John Howard.

But it is Mr Rudd's determination to institute a serious process of reconciliation with Australia's Aboriginal population that could well become the hallmark of his prime ministership. The opening of Parliament yesterday showed that he was starting as he intended to go on. In place of the stiffly formal ceremonies inherited from the old world, Australian MPs watched an Aboriginal elder hand a symbolic message stick to the new Prime Minister. Music was provided by didgeridoo.

This new-style, all-Australian opening of Parliament was followed this morning by a solemn ceremony without precedent in Australia. Mr Rudd delivered an official apology to Aborigines, in the name of the Australian government and Parliament, for the cruel assimilation policy over more than a century, and other wrongs.

The apology acknowledged the "profound grief, suffering and loss" inflicted on the Aboriginal population by policies that included removing young children from their parents so that they were brought up outside their own milieu. And it did not shy away, as so many so-called apologies tend to do, from using the hardest word. The parliamentary motion concluded: "For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry."

It was not the first attempt by an Australian government to broach national reconciliation. The last Labor administration opened an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children but Mr Howard failed to act on its harrowing findings. Mr Rudd is righting that additional wrong and trying to make up for lost time.

If he succeeds – and the crowds flocking to Canberra to be a part of the occasion suggested he had caught the national mood – he will have helped to make Australia a more harmonious, more contented and generally better place.

Leading article: The courage to right a historic wrong, I, 13.2.2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-the-courage-to-right-a-historic-wrong-781500.html

Australia's stolen generation:

'To the mothers and the fathers

the brothers and the sisters,

we say sorry'

Today marks a historic apology
by the Australian government
to its Aboriginal community
for years of estrangement, lies and abuse.
But while the official admission of guilt is welcomed,
the question of compensation still remains.

Wednesday, 13 February 2008
The Independent
By Andy McSmith and Christopher Finn

For years, Australians have agonised over the fate of about 100,000 Aborigine children who were taken from their families because the government believed that their race had no future and they would be better off being brought up in white society.

Yesterday, as Australia's Parliament returned from its summer break, its formal opening was turned into a ceremony designed to draw a line under one of the nastiest episodes in Australian history and usher in a new era of "mutual respect".

If nothing else, it made for one of the most colourful starts to any parliamentary session, as thousands of Aborigines poured into the capital, Canberra. Kirstie Parker, the managing editor of the Aboriginal newspaper the Koori Mail, said she found the apology "very moving".

Though they have now had the satisfaction of an official admission that they were wronged, it is still a vexed question as to whether the victims are to be compensated. Only one has been so far. Bruce Trevorrow was 13 months old when, on Christmas Day 1957, his father, Joseph, asked neighbours to take him to hospital in Adelaide for treatment for stomach pains. When he arrived, it was recorded that he had no parents and he was handed on to be fostered by a white couple. This information was deliberately withheld from his parents, and he never saw his father again. He was reunited with his mother at the age of 10. Trevorrow won a court judgment that his alcoholism, depression and inability to hold down a job were attributable to his having been "stolen" as a child, and he was awarded A$525,000, about £240,000. His case was unusual because the lies told to his parents had been set down on paper and were retrieved from the files.

Tasmania has set up a £2.2m fund to compensate 106 former victims, but none of the other Australian states has declared a willingness to pay. Mr Rudd has rejected calls for a A$1bn fund to be set up at national level. "Aboriginal people ... feel that compensation is an absolute possibility, notwithstanding the Prime Minister's vehement statement about not considering it," Parker said. The Australian Greens are also backing the case for restitution. Their leader, Senator Bob Brown, told journalists: "With the statement of sorry, there have to be reparations."

Arguments about the "stolen generation" have dominated Australia's media for weeks. The former prime minister John Howard consistently refused to apologise, fearing that if he did he would open the floodgates to litigation. He argued that the present generation should not be held responsible for past wrongs, and refused to support what he called the "black armband" view of Australian history. He was conspicuously absent from yesterday's ceremony.

Dr Brendan Nelson, who succeeded Mr Howard as leader of the defeated Liberal Party, warned: "These calls for compensation will seriously undermine the goodwill of good-hearted Australians who are prepared to go along with this apology, if not enthusiastically support it."

About 100,000 Aboriginal and mixed-race children were forcibly removed from their parents between 1910 and the 1970s, under federal and state laws designed to integrate the children into the mainstream and eventually "breed out" their colour. They grew up in orphanages, church missions or white foster homes, where many were physically and sexually abused or used as unpaid labour. Often they never saw their families again.

Ten years ago a task force funded by the Australian government wrote a report entitled Bringing Them Home, which found that many victims suffered long-term psychological effects as a result of their treatment. It recommended a formal apology and compensation.

Leonie Pope, now 36, was one of the lucky ones. She was fostered and then adopted by Neil and Gloria Pope, who lived in Brisbane before moving to Cwmbran, Wales, in 1972. The Popes proved to be loving parents, although they told Leonie that she had been abandoned at birth. In fact, her mother was tricked into signing an agreement stating that Leonie should be fostered, thinking that she was giving consent for an inoculation. She was later told that Leonie was dead.

Leonie learnt the truth about her origins in 2005. Having failed to find any record of her birth, she remembered being told by a nurse's aide that she was cared for in Mater Mother's Hospital, Queensland, before being fostered. She wrote to the hospital and they confirmed that a girl had been born there on 23 January 1972, which is her birthday, and gave her mother's name as Gladys Anderson.

Through an international registry, Pope then made contact with her sister, Rosemary Connors, who had spent 15 years trying to find her. Her sister sent her a black-and-white photograph of her parents, the first memento of them that Leonie had ever owned. Leonie first met her sister and four of her five siblings when she visited in Australia in January last year. She also saw her mother's grave and met her uncle, Jeffrey Dynevor, who had been the first Aborigine to win a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games, in 1963. All of her siblings were taken away from their mother.

Later in the year, Leonie moved to Brisbane with her husband, Michael, and children Joshua, Matthew and Ffion. She told BBC News Online yesterday: "I still feel as dumbfounded as I did on the first day that I found out [about the stolen generation], as to why they felt that it would work. I'm not sure [the apology] will bring me complete closure. It does create acceptance and healing, but I think the fight for the stolen generation still has a long way to go. From a historical point of view, it ... [is] a remarkable day in history."

Parliament reassembled yesterday with the unprecedented traditional welcoming ceremony staged by the Ngambri-Ngunnawal tribe. Their tribal elder, Matilda House-Williams, dressed in a cloak made from possum skins, sat alongside the Prime Minister. The ceremony, designed to welcome newcomers, was the government's way of admitting for the first time that the land on which Australia's capital was built was once owned by the Ngunnawal and was taken away, without compensation.

House-Williams described how a solitary Aboriginal man was forced to leave the old parliament building in Canberra 80 years ago. "I stand here before you in this same great institution of ceremonial dress, barefoot, honoured and welcome," she said.

Mr Rudd compared the event to the first opening of the Canberra parliament in 1927, when no indigenous people were invited. "Today we begin with one small step to set right the wrongs of the past ... It is a significant and symbolic step," he said. His 344-word statement was agreed by the Parliament after long consultation with Aboriginal elders and with the backing of both main political parties. It was Mr Rudd's first formal statement to Parliament since he was sworn in as Prime Minister in December, and fulfils a promise made by the Labor Party during its election campaign.

"We reflect on [the Aborigines'] past mistreatment," the statement said. "We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were stolen generations, this blemished chapter in our nation's history. For the pain, suffering and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry. To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry."

The statement promised "a future where we harness the determination of all Australians, indigenous and non-indigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity – a future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility".

Closing the gap could prove easier said than done given the appalling poverty, unemployment and ill-health of many of the 450,000 Aborigines, whose average life expectancy is 17 years shorter than the national average. Crime, drug addiction, alcoholism and infant mortality rates are also significantly higher among Aborigines, who make up a little over 2 per cent of Australia's population of 21 million.

Jenny Macklin, the minister for Indigenous Affairs, has said that investment to close the gap should take priority over compensation. "If we're going to improve the chances of an Aboriginal child born today, they need to have the same level of health services as any other Australian."

Michael Mansell, an outspoken leader of the National Aboriginal Alliance, said he was pleased with the wording of Mr Rudd's statement. "I think the stolen generation will be very relieved that that word [sorry] is finally being used, because, as we know, the previous prime minister refused," he said. "The fact that these words were used does indicate that the door is open for negotiations and we think there is a real possibility that compensation could come, during the passage of this year."

But Tom Calma, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, said: "It is not about black armbands and guilt. It is about inclusion and learning from the past. And, ultimately, it is about providing space in the telling of our national story for the stolen generation."

    Australia's stolen generation: 'To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, we say sorry', I, 13.2.2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/australias-stolen-generation-to-the-mothers-and-the-fathers-the-brothers-and-the-sisters-we-say-sorry-781543.html

Australia to Apologize to Aborigines

February 12, 2008
Filed at 1:04 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) -- Aborigines organized breakfast barbecues in Outback communities, giant TV screens went up in state capitals, and schools planned assemblies so students can watch the telecast of Australia's government apologizing for policies that degraded its indigenous people.

The formal apology motion that new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd scheduled for a Parliament vote Wednesday was welcomed as a powerful gesture of reconciliation between the descendants of Australia's original inhabitants and those of the white settlers who now rule.

Aborigines remain the country's poorest and most disadvantaged group, and Rudd has made improving their lives one of his government's top priorities.

As part of that campaign, Aborigines were invited for the first time to give a traditional welcome Tuesday at the official opening of the Parliament session -- symbolic recognition that the land on which the capital was built was taken from Aborigines without compensation.

The apology is directed at tens of thousands of Aborigines who were forcibly taken from their families as children under now abandoned assimilation policies.

''We apologize for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians,'' the apology motion says.

''To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.

''And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.''

The apology, which was certain to be passed since both Rudd's governing Labor Party and the main opposition parties support it, ends years of divisive debate and a decade of refusals by the previous conservative government that lost November's elections.

It places Australia among a handful of nations that have offered official apologies to oppressed minorities, including Canada's 1998 apology to its native peoples, South Africa's 1992 expression of regret for apartheid and the U.S. Congress' 1988 law apologizing to Japanese-Americans for their internment during World War II.

The reading of Australia's apology and the parliamentary vote was being broadcast nationally, and people across the country made plans for communal watching, from the Outback breakfasts to the school assemblies.

Giant television screens were erected outside Parliament House in Canberra for hundreds of people who could not fit inside. Screens were also set up in parks and other public places in Sydney and other state capitals.

Rudd's motion offered ''a new page in the history of our great continent'' and ''a future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again.''

Aborigines lived mostly as hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years before British colonial settlers landed at what is now Sydney in 1788.

Today, there are about 450,000 Aborigines in Australia's population of 21 million. They are the country's poorest group, with the highest rates of jailing, unemployment and illiteracy. Their life expectancy is 17 years shorter than other Australians.

The debate about an apology was spurred by a government inquiry into policies that from 1910 until the 1970s resulted in 100,000 mostly mixed-blood Aboriginal children being taken from their parents under state and federal laws based on a premise that Aborigines were dying out.

Most were deeply traumatized by the loss of their families and culture, the inquiry concluded, naming them the ''Stolen Generations.'' Its 1997 report recommended a formal apology and reparations for the victims.

Rudd ruled out compensation -- a stance that helped secure support for the apology among the many Australians who believe they should not be held responsible for past policies, no matter how flawed.

He pledges instead to lift the living standards of all Aborigines, and on Tuesday outlined bold targets for cutting infant mortality, illiteracy and early death rates among indigenous people within a decade.

Aboriginal leaders generally welcomed Rudd's apology, though some said it was empty rhetoric without addressing the issue of compensation.

Noel Pearson, a respected Aborigine leader from Queensland state, wrote in The Australian newspaper on Tuesday that offering an apology without compensation meant: ''Blackfellas will get the words, the whitefellas keep the money.''

Marcia Langton, an Aborigine academic at the University of Melbourne, also said the question of compensation must be addressed, but celebrated the apology as a huge step forward.

''I think that it's impossible to feel any kind of cynicism at all, if you can understand how much it means to people who have lived through these events and been removed from their families,'' she told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Michael Mansell, spokesman for the rights group the National Aboriginal Alliance, said the word ''sorry'' was one that ''Stolen Generation members will be very relieved is finally being used.''

Mansell, who has urged the government to establish an $880 million compensation fund, said he still hoped Rudd would be open to the idea.

Bob Brown, leader of the minority Greens party, said he would try to have Rudd's motion amended in the Senate to include a commitment to paying compensation. But the amendment was likely to be rejected by majority parties, and Brown said he would not pursue it further.

Tony Abbott, the indigenous affairs spokesman for the main opposition coalition, said his bloc had reversed its previous objection to the apology in part because Rudd promised there would be no compensation.

''As far as the opposition is concerned, this apology creates no new rights or entitlements. We are guaranteed that by the prime minister,'' Abbott said.

    Australia to Apologize to Aborigines, NYT, 12.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Australia-Aborigines.html

Australia to Apologize to Aborigines

January 31, 2008
The New York Times
By TIM JOHNSTON

SYDNEY, Australia — The new Australian government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will apologize for past mistreatment of the country’s Aboriginal minority when Parliament convenes next month, addressing an issue that has blighted race relations in Australia for years.

In a measure of the importance Mr. Rudd attaches to the issue, the apology will be the first item of business for the new government when Parliament first convenes on Feb. 13, Jenny Macklin, the federal minister for indigenous affairs, said Wednesday.

Ms. Macklin said she had consulted widely with Aboriginal leaders, but it was still not clear what form the apology would take. However, she said the government would not bow to longstanding demands for a fund to compensate those damaged by the policies of past governments.

The history of relations between Australia’s Aboriginal population and the broader population is one of brutality and neglect. Tens of thousands of Aboriginals died from disease, warfare and dispossession in the years after European settlement, and it was not until 1962 that they were able to vote in national elections.

But the most lasting damage was done by the policy of removing Aboriginal children and placing them either with white families or in state institutions as part of a drive to assimilate them with the white population.

A comprehensive 1997 report estimates that between one in three and one in 10 Aboriginal children, the so-called stolen generations, were taken from their homes and families in the century until the policy was formally abandoned in 1969.

“A national apology to the stolen generations and their families is a first, necessary step to move forward from the past,” Ms. Macklin said.

“The apology will be made on behalf of the Australian government and does not attribute guilt to the current generation of Australian people,” she said.

Marcia Langton, professor of Australian indigenous studies at the University of Melbourne, said the apology was a good first step, but she added that it was hard to see where the government’s program would go from there.

“There can’t be any next step without a compensation fund,” Ms. Langton, who is also one of Australia’s most prominent Aboriginal advocates, said Wednesday.

She said she suspected that the apology was aimed more at pleasing the core voter base of Mr. Rudd’s Labor Party than Aboriginal people themselves.

“It’s difficult not to be cynical,” said Ms. Langton.

The previous government of Prime Minister John Howard, which was convincingly beaten in elections last November, had refused to apologize to the Aboriginal community for past wrongs.

“There are millions of Australians who will never entertain an apology because they don’t believe that there is anything to apologize for,” Mr. Howard told a local radio station last year.

“They are sorry for past mistreatment but that is different from assuming responsibility for it,” he said.

Many of Mr. Howard’s critics believed that he was unwilling to apologize because it would open the flood gates to potentially massive claims for compensation.

Ms. Langton estimated that some 13,000 members of the stolen generations still survive.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders make up some 2.5 percent of the overall population, but many eke out an existence on the margins of society.

Life expectancy for Aboriginal people is 17 years lower than the rest of the country; they are 13 times more likely to be incarcerated; three times more likely to be unemployed; and twice as likely to be victims of violence or threatened violence.

Successive governments have been wary of intervening in Aboriginal affairs, and many blame policies implemented in the 1970s as part of a drive to empower indigenous Australians for further marginalizing them.

The permit system, which bars outsiders from visiting Aboriginal communities without the permission of community leaders, has come in for particular criticism. It was designed to preserve indigenous culture, but critics say it has created ghettos and is partially responsible for an environment in many communities where alcoholism, violence and child abuse have become endemic.

A report issued by the government of the Northern Territory last year uncovered widespread evidence of child neglect and sexual abuse. The report triggered a wide-ranging and controversial intervention by the Howard government in the territory, which included removing the permit system from the Northern Territory and mandating that half of welfare payments could only be spent on food.

The Rudd government has committed itself to reviewing the intervention, but it has yet to come up with a comprehensive plan. Many indigenous Australians are distrustful of government interference in their lives, and although the plan for an apology has been broadly welcomed as an important symbolic step, designing acceptable practical measures will be more difficult.

Australia to Apologize to Aborigines, NYT, 31.1.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/world/asia/31australia.html