AUSTRALIA: Claims of child abuse pretext for land grab, uranium mining This is a very horrible act of aggression by the Australian government, under a particularly egregious pretext. This is today ... now ... 2008 ... not 1908. Canada is no less guilty of continuing land grabs, under various guises. Mining and forestry alone consume billions and billions of acres of land worldwide, and total destruction and contamination is inherent in the business: Corporations have a way of sucking out the resources and then going 'bankrupt', thus unaccountable for human and environmental destruction in their wake. But I digress ... again ... This is a gem of a quote (from below), and it is EXACTLY true in Canada: OVER HALF of the budget of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada never leaves Ottawa. 'Canada' (INAC) uses it to pay the cost of defending itself from Aboriginal 'land claims'.

A pervasive white myth, that Aborigines leech off the state, serves to conceal the disgrace that money the federal government says it spends on indigenous affairs actually goes towards opposing native land rights. In 2006, some A$3bn was underspent "or the result of creative accounting", reported the Sydney Morning Herald. Like the children of apartheid, the Aboriginal children of Thamarrurr in the Northern Territory receive less than half the educational resources allotted to white children.

And that is also true in Canada. Do the math: Half the funding leads to half the graduating. nobrainer. Here's the full story from Australia ... http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/oppression-afrikans-generally/38400-australian-aboriginees-face-extinction-genocide.html Under cover of racist myth, a new land grab in Australia By John Pilger The Guardian, Friday October 24 2008 Claims of child abuse are proving a fertile pretext to menace the Aboriginal communities lying in the way of uranium mining Its banks secured in the warmth of the southern spring, Australia is not news. It ought to be. An epic scandal of racism, injustice and brutality is being covered up in the manner of apartheid South Africa. Many Australians conspire in this silence, wishing never to reflect upon the truth about their society's Untermenschen, the Aboriginal people. The facts are not in dispute: thousands of black Australians never reach the age of 40; an entirely preventable disease, trachoma, blinds black children as epidemics of rheumatic fever ravage their communities; suicide among the despairing young is common. No other developed country has such a record. A pervasive white myth, that Aborigines leech off the state, serves to conceal the disgrace that money the federal government says it spends on indigenous affairs actually goes towards opposing native land rights. In 2006, some A$3bn was underspent "or the result of creative accounting", reported the Sydney Morning Herald. Like the children of apartheid, the Aboriginal children of Thamarrurr in the Northern Territory receive less than half the educational resources allotted to white children. In 2005, the UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination described the racism of the Australian state, a distinction afforded no other developed country. This was in the decade-long rule of the conservative coalition of John Howard, whose coterie of white supremacist academics and journalists assaulted the truth of recorded genocide in Australia, especially the horrific separations of Aboriginal children from their families. They deployed arguments not dissimilar to those David Irving used to promote Holocaust denial. Smear by media as a precursor to the latest round of repression is long familiar to black Australians. In 2006, the flagship current affairs programme of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Lateline, broadcast lurid allegations of "sex slavery" among the Mutitjulu people in the Northern Territory. The programme's source, described as an "anonymous youth worker", was later exposed as a federal government official whose "evidence" was discredited by the Northern Territory chief minister and the police. The ABC has never retracted its allegations, claiming it has been "exonerated by an internal inquiry". Shortly before last year's election, Howard declared a "national emergency" and sent the army to the Northern Territory to "protect the children" who, said his minister for indigenous affairs, were being abused in "unthinkable numbers". Last February, with much sentimental fanfare, the new prime minister, Labor's Kevin Rudd, made a formal apology to the first Australians. Australia was said to be finally coming to terms with its rapacious past and present. Was it? "The Rudd government," noted a Sydney Morning Herald editorial, "has moved quickly to clear away this piece of political wreckage in a way that responds to some of its own supporters' emotional needs, yet it changes nothing. It is a shrewd manoeuvre." In May, barely reported government statistics revealed that of the 7,433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors as part of the "national emergency", 39 had been referred to the authorities for suspected abuse. Of those, a maximum of just four possible cases of abuse were identified. Such were the "unthinkable numbers". They were little different from those of child abuse in white Australia. What was different was that no soldiers invaded the beachside suburbs, no white parents were swept aside, no white welfare was "quarantined". Marion Scrymgour, an Aboriginal minister in the Northern Territory, said: "To see decent, caring [Aboriginal] fathers, uncles, brothers and grandfathers, who are undoubtedly innocent of the horrific charges being bandied about, reduced to helplessness and tears, speaks to me of widespread social damage." What the doctors found they already knew - children at risk from a spectrum of extreme poverty and the denial of resources in one of the world's richest countries. Having let a few crumbs fall, Rudd is picking up where Howard left off. His indigenous affairs minister, Jenny Macklin, has threatened to withdraw government support from remote communities that are "economically unviable". The Northern Territory is the only region where Aborigines have comprehensive land rights, granted almost by accident 30 years ago. Here lie some of the world's biggest uranium deposits. Canberra wants to mine and sell it. Foreign governments, especially the US, want the Northern Territory as a toxic dump. The Adelaide to Darwin railway that runs adjacent to Olympic Dam, the world's largest uranium mine, was built with the help of Kellogg, Brown & Root - a subsidiary of American giant Halliburton, the alma mater of Dick Cheney, Howard's "mate". "The land grab of Aboriginal tribal land has nothing to do with child sexual abuse," says the Australian scientist Helen Caldicott, "but all to do with open slather uranium mining and converting the Northern Territory to a global nuclear dump." What is unique about Australia is not its sun-baked, derivative society, clinging to the sea, but its first people, the oldest on earth, whose skill and courage in surviving invasion, of which the current onslaught is merely the latest, deserve humanity's support. John Pilger: Under cover of racist myth, a new land grab in Australia | Comment is free | The Guardian

Aboriginal tribes threatened by Peruvian logging "Putting it simply, the loggers are killing and expelling the isolated people.

October 17, 2008

REUTERS RIO DE JANEIRO–Evidence is mounting that unchecked logging in the Peruvian Amazon is pushing some of the world's last isolated tribes into Brazil and increasing land and food conflicts, according to a leading Brazilian tribe researcher and indigenous rights groups. From his observation outpost in a remote part of Brazil's Acre state near the Peruvian border, Jose Meirelles of the government's Indian affairs agency Funai told Reuters he was seeing regular evidence of uncontacted tribes fleeing the destruction of their traditional homeland. "Putting it simply, the loggers are killing and expelling the isolated people. It's clear that they (the Indians) are coming here," Meirelles told Reuters by e-mail. The 60-year-old Meirelles, who has lived in the area for 20 years researching and mapping uncontacted tribes, said he and a colleague had been attacked with last month near the outpost by a group of Aboriginals. The arrows were a different type than the ones used by Brazilian tribes he has studied, suggesting that the group had fled Peru. "Until two years ago, there were three peoples (in the area). A fourth moved to the area recently. The cut of their hair, their arrows and the place where they live is distinct from the others," Meirelles wrote. The reported attack took place in the same region where pigment-covered uncontacted Aboriginals were shown in photographs released in May that caused a worldwide media frenzy and drew calls for Peru to clamp down on logging in its Ucayali region. The head of Peru's agency that gives out petroleum licenses has occasionally questioned the existence of uncontacted tribes. An official at the Peruvian Indian Affairs department told Reuters it still aims to issue a full study on uncontacted tribes and logging that it promised several months ago. Initial findings were that logging is not causing groups to flee Peru, he said. "It is the policy of the state to recognize and protect uncontacted indigenous communities," said the official, who asked not to be identified. RESOURCE CONFLICTS Brazil has 26 confirmed native Indian tribes that live with little or no contact with the outside world, surviving by hunting and gathering as they have for centuries. Survival International, a group that campaigns for tribal people, says there are at least three groups on Peru's side of the border. "The (Peruvian) government has made it very clear that it wants to open up large parts of the Amazon – it's done that for oil and gas," said Survival's David Hill. "In this case there is a logging problem in all kinds of areas where it shouldn't be happening and it's failing to do anything about it." There is also logging on Brazil's side of the border. The Amazon Protection System that monitors the forest detected in May a deforested area of 2,000 hectares in the Kaxinawa Igarape reserve in Acre, 16 per cent of its total area. Funai has requested reconnaissance flights in 20 areas where isolated Indians are suspected to live. Meirelles says that newly built huts he photographed from the air this year about three miles inside the Brazilian border are further evidence of tribes moving from Peru. Planks of wood, empty fuel containers and other debris found floating down the Envira river past Meirelles' outpost point to logging activity upstream. Beatriz Huertas, an official with international indigenous rights group CIPIACI, spent three weeks in the border area in June. She said logging had caused conflicts between tribes over scarcer resources in Peru and pushed them into Brazil. Indigenous leaders in Rio Branco on Brazil's side told her they had been attacked by newcomer Peruvian tribes, she told Reuters. Former members of isolated tribes on the Peruvian side of the border told her in interviews that they had been attacked by loggers. "On one side they are persecuted and killed by loggers and when they flee they come into conflict with rival isolated tribes. So they have to keep looking for space where they can feed themselves," she said.