Actualité Internationales
Vendredi 3 décembre 2004
No - 15261

QUEENSLAND STATE
Tensions rise between black and white Australians

With relations between black and white Australia edging towards a flashpoint, Australian police were investigating yesterday claims that an aboriginal boy was dragged through the dirt with a noose around his neck. The incident during a farm break-in in tropical Queensland state followed a riot six days ago on a remote Queensland island sparked by the death of an aboriginal man in a police cell.

Queensland state premier Peter Beattie said charges would be laid after two men and two boys were alleged to have broken into a farmhouse near Goondiwindi, 280 km (175 miles) west of the state capital Brisbane, on Tuesday. Australian Broadcasting Corp. (ABC) radio said a 16-year-old Aborigine was caught as he tried to escape across a river. The boy had a rope tied around his neck and was dragged up and down a river bank before he was bashed and threatened with a shotgun, said a local aboriginal official. “They tied his hands together and put a rope around his neck and pulled him along the river bank,” Aborigine Burt Button told The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper.

The boy was in hospital with head and chest injuries and possible rope burns on his neck, the ABC said. The other boy escaped after a scuffle with the farm owner’s sons and raised the alarm at a nearby aboriginal community. “There’ll be charges involving the break and enter, but there’ll also be charges in relation to the assault,” Beattie told reporters. “Anyone who looks at this objectively would see that as being the law being enforced equally with both black and white.” Goondiwindi Mayor Tom Sullivan joined Beattie in calling for calm as tensions grew between indigenous Aborigines, Australia’s most disadvantaged group, and white Australians. Aboriginal leaders have called what they describe as a national day of action for Dec. 11 after 36-year-old Aborigine Cameron Doomadgee died in a police cell on Palm Island off the Queensland coast last month.

The release of an autopsy report, which showed Doomadgee died from a ruptured liver and that he also had four broken ribs, sparked a riot on the island last Friday during which the local police station and courthouse were burnt down. “We’ll be making representations to the United Nations because we have absolutely no confidence in the Australian so-called justice system,” local aboriginal activist Sam Watson told reporters on Wednesday.

The Queensland incident was the second major riot in the Aborigine community following one in Sydney’s Redfern ghetto in February after the death of an aboriginal boy. Redfern Aborigines mistakenly believed the boy was being chased by police when he fell from his bicycle and was impaled on a fence. Australia’s 450,000 Aborigines have a life expectancy 20 years less than white Australians. They make up 20 percent of the jail population despite being only 2 percent of the population. Figures released on Wednesday showed that indigenous Australians are murdered at a rate 11 times higher than the rest of the population.

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