Freedom Socialist • Vol. 28, No. 4 • August-September 2007Stop Australia's brutal grab of Aboriginal land! Australia is reviving its bloody history of military takeover and genocide. Prime Minister John Howard's conservative government has begun an invasion, endorsed by the Labor Party, of all Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory. He has announced his intention to extend the invasion countrywide. The Northern Territory, a huge region in central north Australia, is its largest without statehood; the federal government can override all its laws. Its population is 29 percent Aboriginal, although Indigenous people are only 2.5 percent of Australia's total population. The territory also just happens to have the world's largest deposits of uranium, and is rich in manganese, iron and aluminum ore. In 2005, Howard announced his intention to locate a nuclear dump there, overturning territorial laws to do so. These are the real reasons for imposing martial law. But Howard's thinly veiled pretext is the "Little Children Are Sacred" report commissioned by the territory to look into child abuse in Indigenous communities. As is true in many colonized and impoverished communities, substance abuse, domestic violence and child abuse are serious problems for Aboriginal Australians. The report actually identifies authentic solutions for these problems, including adequate funding, under community control, to combat poverty. A racist military incursion is not one of their recommendations. Australia already has a high rate of incarceration of Aboriginal men, and the number of deaths in detention is a national scandal. The same week that Howard announced his invasion, an all-white jury in the state of Queensland acquitted a racist cop of the murder of an Aboriginal man, Mulrunji, while in police custody. The good news is the rallies occurring across Australia and New Zealand, and outside Australia House in London, expressing outrage and a determination to fight the occupation. Demonstrators understand that Howard's assault is both a terrible crime against Indigenous people and a threat to the democratic rights of all Australians. Now the protests need to spread far and wide! The Seattle police: corruption and impunity In the late 1960s and early '70s, scandal rocked the Seattle Police Department. Dirty cops were taking payoffs from organized crime with the acquiescence of their superiors. Seize the Time for Oppressed People, a coalition of Black, gay and radical activists including the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women, led a campaign to create a civilian police review board. This was the first of many attempts to win community control of the cops. But decades of protest over rampant police abuse, especially by African Americans, secured only window dressing, in the form of the Office of Professional Accountability. The OPA is a police internal investigations unit headed by a civilian whose boss is the police chief. Its director makes recommendations to the chief and is advised by a volunteer civilian review board. The Seattle City Council rejected requiring the chief to explain his reasons in writing when overruling the director's recommendations. NOW the NAACP and other civil rights organizations are calling for the resignation of Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske for tampering with OPA investigations and protecting cops who lie, assault, plant evidence, misuse their authority, and sexually harass in the workplace. Twenty-two such cases have come to light since the leaking of a review board report that the city administration refused to make public for over a year. Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels has formed a blue-ribbon commission to contain the crisis. Recommendations will follow, but Nichols has made it clear that he is the decider. Efforts to reform the Seattle Police Department prove one thing: the police can't police themselves. As long as the city establishment protects them from real civilian control, cop criminals will continue to have a free ride. The police are the servants of big business, not the people. In Seattle, they are on the side of developers hungry to take possession of the historically African American neighborhood close to downtown. Everywhere under capitalism, they are the enforcers of class rule and of the racism, sexism, homophobia, and hatred of poor people, the addicted, and the mentally ill that goes with it. While we must continue to fight for workingclass control over the cops, we must also fight to overthrow the system that turns them loose to perpetuate its evils. |
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