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John Pilger: Mandela’s gone, but apartheid lives in Australia

Thursday, December 26, 2013

By John Pilger

In the late 1960s, I was given an usual assignment by the London Daily Mirror‘s editor in chief, Hugh Cudlipp. I was to return to my homeland, Australia, and “discover what lies behind the sunny face”.

The Mirror had been an indefatigable campaigner against apartheid in South Africa, where I had reported from behind the “sunny face”. As an Australian, I had been welcomed into this bastion of white supremacy. “We admire you Aussies,” people would say. “You know how to deal with your blacks.”

I was offended, of course, but I also knew that only the Indian Ocean separated the racial attitudes of the two colonial nations. What I was not aware of was how the similarity caused such suffering among the original people of my own country.

Growing up, my school books had made clear, to quote one historian: “We are civilised, and they are not.” I remember how a few talented Aboriginal Rugby League players were allowed their glory as long as they never mentioned their people.

Eddie Gilbert, the great Aboriginal cricketer, the man who bowled Don Bradman for a duck, was to be prevented from playing again. That was not untypical.

In 1969, I flew to Alice Springs in the red heart of Australia and met Charlie Perkins. At a time when Aboriginal people were not even counted in the census — unlike the sheep — Charlie was only the second Aborigine to get a university degree.

He had made good use of this distinction by leading “freedom rides” into racially segregated towns in the outback of New South Wales. He got the idea from the freedom riders who went into the Deep South of the United States.

We hired an old Ford, picked up Charlie’s mother Hetti, an elder of the Aranda people, and headed for what Charlie described as “hell”. This was Jay Creek, a “native reserve”, where hundreds of Aboriginal people were corralled in conditions I had seen in Africa and India.

One outside tap trickled brown; there was no sanitation; the food, or “rations”, was starch and sugar. The children had stick-thin legs and the distended bellies of malnutrition.

What struck me was the number of grieving mothers and grandmothers — bereft at the theft of children by the police and “welfare” authorities who, for years, had taken away those infants with lighter skin. The policy was “assimilation”. Today, this has changed only in name and rationale.

The boys would end up working on white-run farms, the girls as servants in middle-class homes. This was undeclared slave labour. They were known as the Stolen Generation.

Hetti Perkins told me that when Charlie was an infant she had kept him tied to her back, and would hide whenever she heard the hoofs of the police horses. “They didn’t get him,” she said, with pride.

In 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised for this crime against humanity. Older Aboriginal people were grateful; they believed that Australia’s first people — the most enduring human presence on earth — might finally receive the justice and recognition they had been denied for 220 years.

What few of them heard was the postscript to Rudd’s apology. “I want to be blunt about this,” he said. “There will be no compensation.”

That 100,000 people deeply wronged and scarred by vicious racism — the product of a form of the eugenics movement with its links to fascism — would be given no opportunity to materially restore their lives was shocking, though not surprising. Most governments in Canberra, conservative or Labor, have insinuated that the First Australians are to blame for their suffering and poverty.

When the Labor government in the 1980s promised “full restitution” and land rights, the powerful mining lobby went on the attack, spending millions campaigning on the theme that “the blacks” would “take over your beaches and barbies”. The government capitulated, even though the lie was farcical; Aboriginal people comprise barely 3% of the Australian population.

Today, Aboriginal children are again being stolen from their families. The bureaucratic words are “removed” for “child protection”. By July 2012, there were 13,299 Aboriginal children in institutions or handed over to white families. Today, the theft of these children is now higher than at any time during the last century.

I have interviewed numerous specialists in child care who regard this as a second stolen generation. “Many of the kids never see their mothers and communities again,” Olga Havnen, the author of a report for the Northern Territory government, told me. “In the Northern Territory, $80 million was spent on surveillance and removing kids, and less than $500,000 on supporting these impoverished families.

“Families are often given no warning and have no idea where their children are being taken. The reason given is neglect — which means poverty. This is destroying Aboriginal culture and is racist. If apartheid South Africa had done this, there would have been an uproar.”

In the town of Wilcannia, New South Wales, the life expectancy of Aborigines is 37 — lower than the Central African Republic, perhaps the poorest country on earth, currently racked by civil war.

Wilcannia’s other distinction is that the Cuban government runs a literacy programme there, teaching young Aboriginal children to read and write. This is what the Cubans are famous for — in the world’s poorest countries. Australia is one of the world’s richest countries.

I filmed similar conditions 28 years ago when I made my first film about indigenous Australia, The Secret Country. Vince Forrester, an Aboriginal elder I interviewed then, appears in my new film, Utopia. He guided me through a house in Mutitjulu where 32 people lived, mostly children, many of them suffering from otitis media, an infectious, entirely preventable disease that impairs hearing and speech.

“Seventy per cent of the children in this house are partially deaf,” he said. Turning straight to my camera, he said, “Australians, this is what we call an abuse of human rights.”

The majority of Australians are rarely confronted with their nation’s dirtiest secret. In 2009, the respected United Nations Special Rapporteur, Professor James Anaya, witnessed similar conditions and described government “intervention” policies as racist.

The then-minister for Indigenous health, Tony Abbott, told him to “get a life” and stop listening to “the victim brigade”. Abbott is now prime minister.

In Western Australia, minerals are being dug up from Aboriginal land and shipped to China for a profit of a billion dollars a week. In this, the richest, “booming” state, the prisons bulge with stricken Aboriginal people, including juveniles whose mothers stand at the prison gates, pleading for their release. The incarceration of black Australians here is eight times that of black South Africans during the last decade of apartheid.

When Nelson Mandela was buried this week, his struggle against apartheid was duly celebrated in Australia, though the irony was missing.

Apartheid was defeated largely by a global campaign from which the South African regime never recovered. Similar opprobrium has seldom found its mark in Australia, principally because the Aboriginal population is so small and Australian governments have been successful in dividing and co-opting a disparate leadership with gestures and vacuous promises.

That may well be changing. A resistance is growing, yet again, in the Aboriginal heartland, especially among the young.

Unlike the US, Canada and New Zealand, which have made treaties with their first people, Australia has offered gestures often wrapped in the law. However, in the 21st century the outside world is starting to pay attention. The specter of Mandela’s South Africa is a warning.

[Reprinted from www.johpilger.com. John Pigler’s new documentary on Aboriginal Australia, Utopia, will be released in January.

On Friday 17 January, there will be free open-air screening at the Block in Redfern, Sydney, starting at 7pm on the corner of Eveleigh & Caroline streets.

Utopia will be launched in Australia at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, with screenings from 21-23 January and on Australia Day, 26 January. For information visit mca.com.au

On 25 January, Utopia will be screened in Alice Springs at the Aaraluen Arts Centre. Contact Marlene Hodder on mhodder@rocketmail.com

 

Never-Seen-Before ‘Massive Lake’ Trapped Under Greenland Ice!

A massive reservoir of melt water is trapped underneath the frozen landscape of the Greenland ice sheet, where temperatures often hover below zero degrees Fahrenheit, according to new analysis.

Researchers from the University of Utah discovered the huge aquifer while drilling for core samples in 2011.

The gigantic reservoir was found to be roughly 27,000 square miles, an area about the size of Ireland, the researchers using ice-penetrating radar.

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The find could have major implications for understanding sea level rise.

During two drills, when researchers pulled up the equipment, it was pouring liquid water, despite air temperatures in the area were around minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit. The water was found at a depth of 33 feet in the first drill and 82 feet in the second, according to the study published Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

“This discovery was a surprise,” Rick Forster, lead author and professor of geography at the University of Utah, said in a statement. “Instead of the water being stored in the air space between subsurface rock particles, the water is stored in the air space between the ice particles, like the juice in a snow cone.”

Generally, the researchers found layers of dry snow in a drilling expedition. Moreover, it was early spring, so there was no possibility for surface melt to seep in through the cracks. Therefore, researchers concluded that the water remained trapped underneath the surface year-round.

“Of the current sea level rise, the Greenland Ice Sheet is the largest contributor – and it is melting at record levels,” Forster said. “So understanding the aquifer’s capacity to store water from year to year is important because it fills a major gap in the overall equation of meltwater runoff and sea levels.”

National Geographic reported earlier that the global sea levels have risen drastically over the last few decades. In fact, in the 1990s alone, Earth’s oceans have risen by .14 inches, which is twice faster that the level rise rates of the 1980s.

Rising sea levels are the consequences of three major factors.

The first is thermal expansion, which occurs as water heats up; the second is melting ice caps and glaciers; and the third is ice loss from Greenland and West Antarctica.

Greenland ice sheet lost 34 billion tons of ice per year between 1992 and 2001, BBC noted. That amount increased to 215 billion tons between 2002 and 2011. The new discovery could mean that a good amount of this melted ice is being stored under the ice sheets.

The new research suggests that a significant amount of the melt is still being stored within the Greenland ice sheet. If the melt water is allowed to escape, it could contribute greatly to global sea level rise.

“Most models assume water runs off or refreezes,” Forster told Discovery News. “Is this water buffering sea-level rise? Or is it already connected and passing through and there’s just a delay? Right now we don’t know. It may be something in between.”

“We don’t know the answer to this right now. It’s massive, it’s a new system we haven’t seen before – we need to understand it more completely if we are to predict sea level rise,” he added in a statement.

Lung cancer: A cloud on China’s polluted horizon

China’s doctors are beginning to speak of a link between air pollution and lung cancer. Children as young as 8 have been treated.

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A man flies a kite in Shanghai. This month, the city had an air pollution reading of 500 for the first time, prompting authorities to order children and the elderly to remain indoors. Beijing and other parts of northern China have pollution that is even higher. (ChinaFotoPress / Getty Images / December 5, 2013)

• ‘Airpocalypse’: Severe pollution cripples northeastern China
• China pollution cuts life spans by 5.5 years
• As Olympics near, Beijing still can’t beat pollution

By Barbara DemickDecember 24, 2013, 4:00 a.m.

BEIJING — The youngest known lung cancer patient in eastern China is an 8-year-old girl whose home is next to a dust-choked road in heavily industrialized Jiangsu province.

Another patient was a 14-year-old girl from Shanghai, the daughter of two nonsmokers with no family history of lung cancer.

Back in the 1970s, when Bai Chunxue was in medical school, the textbook lung cancer patient was a chain-smoking male in his 60s. Nowadays, Bai, one of the physicians who treated the teen, sees so many who are still in their 20s that the cases blend together.

“When I see patients who are not smokers with no other risk factors, we have to assume that the most probable cause is pollution,” said Bai, who works at Shanghai’s Zhongshan Hospital and is chairman of the Shanghai Respiratory Research Institute.

Increasingly, other Chinese physicians are reaching the same conclusion. At a time when cigarette smoking is on the decline in China, the nation is facing an explosion of lung cancer cases.

From 2002 to 2011, the incidence of lung cancer in Beijing rose to 63 cases per 100,000, from 39.6, according to municipal health authorities. Nationwide in the last three decades, an era in which China opened up its economy and industrialized, deaths from lung cancer have risen 465%.

In a country that manufactures 1.7 trillion cigarettes a year, smoking is still cited as the leading cause of lung cancer. But these days, only about half of Chinese men smoke, down from 63% in 1996.

The additional culprit, doctors believe, is the fine particulate matter known as PM 2.5, the microscopic particles from exhaust, coal smoke and vehicle fumes that can burrow their way into lungs.

Readings in Beijing and elsewhere in northern China frequently climb straight off the chart devised by the World Health Organization, which classifies particulate levels between 300 and 500 micrograms per cubic meter as hazardous.

The northeastern city of Harbin practically closed down for two days in October when readings approached 1,000, creating air so murky that residents said they couldn’t see their dogs at the end of the leash.

The episode was reminiscent of the famous London smog of December 1952, when deadly pollution caused in large part by the burning of coal lasted for five days, leading to an estimated 12,000 premature deaths, according to a 2002 study by British health officials.

As with London, the Harbin “airpocalypse,” as it was dubbed, was caused mostly by coal, which remains the major heating source in China. In January, Beijing experienced levels of pollution nearly as high; this month, far-less-polluted Shanghai hit the 500 level for the first time, prompting authorities to order children and the elderly to remain indoors.

Although China’s Communist Party is more candid about pollution than it used to be, the topic remains a sensitive one. Many Chinese doctors and researchers turn down requests for interviews, saying it’s too risky to speak to foreign journalists.

Wei Zhang, a Chinese-born cancer researcher at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said he was stunned that so few speakers mentioned pollution at a major conference on cancer last month in Tianjin.

“In the plenary session, I think I was the only person who brought up the term ‘air pollution,’” Zhang said.

“Ten years ago, it was sensitive to talk about smoking because the tobacco industry was so important to the Chinese economy. Now it feels safe to talk about smoking. But for pollution, people are not prepared to talk about it,” he said.

Though the Chinese news media are replete with stories about pollution, connecting the dots between dirty air and the rising cancer rate is risky. The doctor who first disclosed the case of the 8-year-old girl with lung cancer last month to a reporter from the state-run China News Service appears to have been publicly silenced.

“There was a misunderstanding. I can’t do an interview,” said Feng Dongjie of the Jiangsu Province Tumor Hospital in Nanjing.

Researchers at Fudan University School of Public Health in Shanghai were chastised last month for reporting on an experiment in which water contaminated with fine particulate matter was injected into the lungs of laboratory rats.

Photos of the blackened lungs went viral on Chinese social media sites before China’s state media jumped in, running large editorials attacking the researchers for injecting the solution rather than letting the mice breathe polluted air.

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George Monbiot news@monbiot.com via google.com	6:10 PM (58 minutes ago)
to me

Unearthed

Posted: 23 Dec 2013 09:03 AM PST

A winter’s tale of guns, gold and greed.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 24th December 2013.

Perhaps I should have been more careful. Last year I decided that every Christmas I would tell a winter’s tale or two(1). Through a long history of doing stupid things, I’ve accumulated a stock of ripping yarns. But I failed to explain myself. Some people interpreted the tale I told last Christmas as making a political point about Travellers I had no intention of suggesting; a point that is in fact the opposite of what I believe(2). So please read what follows as a story and no more: true to the best of my knowledge and memory but without a polemical purpose.

I was told this tale by a gold prospector in the garimpos of Roraima: the illegal mines exacavated among the river gravels in the forests of northern Brazil. He and his friends swore it was true. Though parts of the story must have been filled in later, in the light of what I had seen I found it easy to believe.

To say that the mines were lawless is not quite correct. They stood outside the laws of the state, but had established their own codes, which were informed by power and honour and greed and lust. Every week, thieves were taken into the forest to be shot. Duels were fought on the airstrips, in which men took ten paces, turned and fired: the miners circulated Wild West comics and acted out scenes that might once have been mythical, but there became horribly real.

To illustrate the point, before we get to the tale itself: one evening João, a remarkable man from the north-east of Brazil, who, after leaving home at 14 then spending ten years crossing and recrossing the Amazon on foot, had found work as a minder for two prostitutes, took me and his charges to a bar at the end of the airstrip village in which I was staying. The bar and the strip of dirt were owned by Zé, a man who spent some of his vast earnings on causing trouble: roaming around with his band of pistoleiros, starting fights and roughing people up. Zé, in whose house I was staying (by his choice, not mine) was said to have killed five men, starting with his business partner: by this means he had acquired control of the airstrip, and the extortionate fees for landing and leaving.

The bar was a flimsy shack in which a ghetto blaster was turned up so high that you could scarcely hear the music. Ragged men swayed and lurched and sprawled across the more sober prostitutes. On every table there was a bottle or two of white rum and a revolver. The men who had stayed in their seats drummed their fingers nervously on the tabletops, halfway between their drinks and their guns. The door was shoved open, and Zé and his thugs walked in.

His was at all times an arresting presence: charming, mercurial and terrifying. A machete scar ran from one cheek, over his nose and across the other cheek. He wore a sawn-off denim jacket and two revolvers on his belt. He opened his arms and announced, in a voice loud enough to carry above the music, that he would buy drinks for everyone. Zé moved through the bar, slapping backs and shaking hands, flashing his gold teeth. João’s eyes darted around, watching people’s hands. Bottles of cachaça were passed down from the bar.

Suddenly João shoved me so hard that I almost fell off my chair. He grabbed my arm, managing at the same time to seize the two prostitutes, and propelled us towards the door. As we hurtled out of the bar it erupted in gunfire. Amazingly, only one man was killed: he was dragged onto the airstrip with a hole the size of an apple in his chest. He was one of an estimated 1,700 people murdered, in a community of 40,000, in just six months.

So here’s the story. Two men established a small stake in the mines, in a remote valley some distance from the nearest airstrip. They cut down the trees and began to excavate. They found the digging and hosing and sifting of the gravel exceedingly hard and, though they had discovered very little, they decided to hire two other men to do it for them. They agreed to split any findings equally with the workers. The two hired men dug for four months without success: with high pressure hoses they scoured great pits into which the trees collapsed; they turned the clear waters of the forest stream they excavated red with clay and tailings; they winnowed the gravel through meshed boxes; they dissolved the residues in mercury and burnt it off; but they produced almost nothing. Then they hit one of the richest deposits ever discovered in Roraima: in one day they extracted four kilos.

If you find a lot of gold in the garimpos you keep quiet – very quiet. A single shout of triumph can amount to suicide. You gather it up, hide it in your bag and explain to anyone who asks on your way out that months of work have brought you nothing but disease and misery. But first it must be divided.

The two men who owned the stake began to comprehend, for the first time, the implications of the deal they had done. “We risked our lives to establish this stake. We spent every cent we had – and plenty we didn’t – travelling here, buying the equipment and the diesel, hacking out a clearing in the forest, hiring these men. And now we have to split the gold equally with people who are no more than manual labourers, who would normally be paid a few dollars a day.” They told the two workers that they wanted a special meal that night, and sent them to the nearest airstrip to buy the ingredients.

As the two workers walked they began to ruminate. “We’ve nearly killed ourselves in that pit. We’ve been up before dawn every day and have worked until dusk. We’ve had malaria, foot rot, screw worm, sunstroke, while those two bastards have done nothing but lie in their hammocks shouting instructions. Now we’re expected to give them an equal share of the gold that we and we alone found.” When they reached the store, they bought cachaça, rice, beans, a packet of seasoning and a box of rat poison. They mixed the poison into the seasoning and set off back to the camp. Before they reached it, they were ambushed by the two owners and shot. The owners then picked up the bags and went back to the camp to celebrate over the first hot dinner they had had in weeks.

Some time later a party of men moving through the forest to look for new stakes walked into the camp. They found two skeletons over which vines were already beginning to creep. And four kilos of gold.

www.monbiot. com

References:

1. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/26/my-inner-anarchist-lost-out-bourgeois