Indigenous impasse
Wang Zhenyu

AUSTRALIAN Prime Minister John Howard recently promised to hold a referendum on indigenous reconciliation within 18 months of his return to office, if he is reelected in the federal election later this month. In a speech to the Sydney Institute on October 11, he said his goal is to have a “statement of reconciliation” incorporated into the preamble of the Australian constitution to formally recognize indigenous people as the first inhabitants of Australia. His remarks have created a big sensation across the country. Australians have been taken aback by Howard’s U-turn on indigenous policy. Their surprise is well founded, given the prime minister’s past actions on this issue during his 11 years in office.
A troubled history
First, Howard has a record of breaking his promises on this issue. Campaigning for a reelection in 1998, he pledged to hold a reconciliation referendum in 2001. However, he shelved the plan after he was reelected, calling for “practical reconciliation” instead of “symbolic reconciliation.” Second, Howard refuses to apologize to indigenous Australians. Before 1938, the Australian Government practiced a “protection” policy toward indigenous people. The government conducted “assimilation” from the 1930s to the early 1960s, when many indigenous children were forcefully taken away from their parents and adopted by white families. These children, who completely lost touch with their original families, became a “lost generation.”
Even with the “integration” and “indigenous self-determination” processes since the 1960s, there have been scandals such as the deaths of indigenous people held in custody. In 1997, after reviewing the injustices that indigenous Australians had suffered, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission suggested the government make a national apology to them. However, Howard has always refused to apologize. He said a collective national apology would not provide the necessary basis to move forward, but reinforce a “culture of victimhood” and take Australia backwards.
Third, Howard’s relations with the indigenous people have been strained. Howard drastically amended the government’s indigenous policy after he assumed office in 1996. Flaunting the banner of “equal opportunity” and “shared responsibilities,” he reformed the social welfare system by scrapping “passive welfare” and linking welfare to indigenous people’s performance. He put forward the Ten-Point Plan, restricting the indigenous people’s right to negotiate on the land issue. He also abolished the Aboriginal and Torres Islanders Commission and created the National Indigenous Council, which he staffed with handpicked members. As a result, indigenous people were deprived of their channel for holding a direct dialogue with the government.
In his speech to the Sydney Institute, Howard admitted that there had been low points when the dialogue between him and indigenous leaders dwindled almost to the point of nonexistence. He fully accepted his share of the blame for that, he added.
Fourth, the Howard government has failed to fundamentally improve the livelihoods of indigenous Australians. Official statistics show that the average life expectancy of indigenous Australians is 59 years, 17 years less than that of non-indigenous Australians. The death rate for indigenous Australians is four times higher than that of their non-indigenous counterparts. From 2002 to 2005, indigenous young people were under juvenile justice supervision at a rate of 44 to 45 per thousand, compared with 3 per thousand for non-indigenous young people. The indigenous adult imprisonment rate was 15 times the rate for non-indigenous adults in 2005. Only some 7 percent of indigenous Australians have a university education, while the average university admission rate in Australia stands at 23 percent. It should be mentioned that these figures have improved over the years. However, indigenous Australians are still left in a deplorable state, something that is not commensurate with Australia’s status as a developed country. Some critics place the blame squarely on Howard’s indifference to indigenous people.
Fifth, the Howard government has refused to sign the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The UN General Assembly passed the non-binding declaration on September 13 after 20 years of discussion, with only four votes against it cast by countries including Australia. For Howard, the objection is only natural, because he believes that indigenous people should be integrated into mainstream society and that customarily law should not be put above national law.
Self-evident intentions
Howard’s “Damascus Road conversion” before the federal election has been applauded by some but ridiculed by others. However, most people tend to view the shift with suspicion, believing that it was Howard’s “master card” for securing a fifth term as Australian prime minister. Judging from its timing, Howard’s announcement undoubtedly was made in light of the upcoming election. He did not announce the plan to hold a reconciliation referendum in May, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Australia’s first aboriginal referendum in 1967, but unveiled it three days before the day that this year’s election date was declared. Moreover, he said he would seek to enlist wide community support for a “yes” vote and aim to secure the sort of overwhelming vote achieved in the 1967 referendum.
Given these facts, Howard’s intentions are self-evident. In fact, Howard took another major step on the aboriginal issue earlier this year. In June, the government of Northern Territory released a report titled “Little Children Are Sacred.” The report, which lists a large number of cases of abuses against indigenous children, stirred the Australian Government and civil society. The Howard government announced a “national emergency” plan in Northern Territory on June 21. It also introduced a controversial intervention policy through legislation, under which troops, police forces and physicians would be sent to North Territory to protect the children. The media pointed out that social problems have long existed in Australia’s indigenous communities and said Howard’s high-profile move was merely an attempt to foster an image of a strong leader and win voters’ support.
Howard’s popularity ratings have been lower than those of his rival Kevin Rudd since Rudd became leader of the Australian Labor Party last December. However, Howard is said to be good at winning elections. He won a new term in 2001 when he regained public support with his handling of the Tampa Incident, in which the Australian Government refused the entry of Afghan refugees rescued by Norwegian cargo ship the MV Tampa from a distressed fishing vessel in international waters near Australia’s Christmas Island. Three years later, he reversed his unfavorable electoral situation using the antiterrorism issue.
To date, Howard’s recent moves have not borne much fruit. The indigenous people neither trust nor are grateful for these measures. The government’s intervention in Northern Territory seems to have disturbed the indigenous communities rather than being welcomed by them. Not long ago, more indigenous communities sued the government for its intervention. If they win the case, the intervention plan will have to be stopped. As for the proposed reconciliation referendum, indigenous Australians believe that reconciliation is necessary but the government should, most importantly, make a formal apology to them before real reconciliation is achieved.
Many people believe Howard should have held a reconciliation referendum during his premiership. Legal affairs experts have said that incorporating the statement of reconciliation into the preamble of the Constitution instead of its main body would not prompt the amendment of relevant laws, and is therefore only symbolic.
A chance or a risk?
The Labor Party, nevertheless, responded appropriately. It immediately showed support for Howard’s proposal for a reconciliation referendum. The Labor Party has clear-cut policies on the aboriginal issue. In its platform, the party vows to promote reconciliation and social justice and recognize the fact that the indigenous people first established nations in Australia. It also has pledged to sign the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and persist in carrying out the policy of indigenous self-determination.
As a matter of fact, the aboriginal issue is an area where the Labor Party has an advantage. Labor prime ministers Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating all performed well in this regard. The voters tend to give the Labor Party more credit, and Howard’s Liberal Party can hardly compete with its rival on this front. That’s why some critics have said Howard might be working for Rudd.
However, it should not be concluded that Howard is bound to fail in this area. Australia has been unable to resolve the aboriginal issue completely ever since Captain Arthur Phillip, who set up the first European colony on the Australian continent, landed at the Sydney Cove 220 years ago. The Australian Government has sought to tackle the long-term dilemma according to the principle of reconciliation. Despite all the criticism it has drawn, the Howard government has not abandoned this principle.
At present, reconciliation reflects mainstream public opinion, with all political parties supposedly dedicated to promoting reconciliation. Apology is quite another matter. Many non-indigenous Australians believe that they should not be responsible for the injustices their ancestors committed against indigenous people. It should also be noted that indigenous Australians, numbering about 500,000, account for only 2.5 percent of Australia’s total population, and therefore may not have much impact on the federal election. As a national concern, however, the aboriginal issue has drawn close attention from voters. That’s exactly the reason why Australian political forces all attach great importance to the issue. What matters to them is not how to resolve the issue, but how to gain the support of non-indigenous voters.
Howard’s shift was well maneuvered. He bravely admitted that he was wrong by saying that “symbolic reconciliation” is as important as “practical reconciliation.” In this way, he has satisfied the demands of the voters against his original policy. At the same time, he hopes his former supporters continue to back him, because his vision of “practical reconciliation” remains unchanged.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles Exchange Item)

What news misses
Ramzy Baroud

THE people of Somalia are enduring yet another round of suffering as Ethiopian forces wreck havoc in the capital, Mogadishu. Apparently in response to an attack on one of its units, and the dragging of a soldier’s mutilated body through the city’s streets, an Ethiopian mortar reportedly exploded in Mogadishu’s Bakara market on November 9, killing eight civilians. A number of Somalis were also found dead the following day, some believed to have been rounded up by Ethiopian forces the night before. Nearly 50 civilians have reportedly been killed and 100 wounded in the two-day fighting spree between fighters loyal to the Union of Islamic Courts and government forces and their Ethiopian allies. A report, issued by Human Rights Watch, chastised both Ethiopian troops and ‘insurgents’ for the bloodletting. Peter Takirambudde, the watchdog’s Africa director, was quoted as saying, “The international community should condemn these attacks and hold combatants accountable for violations of humanitarian law — including mutilating captured combatants and executing detainees.”
Of course, one cannot realistically expect the international community to take on a constructive involvement in the conflict. Various members of this ‘community’ have already played a most destructive role in Somalia’s 16-year-old civil war, which fragmented a nation that had long struggled to achieve a sense of sovereignty and national cohesion. To dismiss the war in Somalia as yet another protracted conflict between warlords and insurgents would indeed be unjust because the country’s history has consistently been marred by colonial greed and unwarranted foreign interventions. These gave rise to various proxy governments, militias and local middlemen, working in the interests of those obsessed with the geopolitical importance of the Horn of Africa.
Colonial powers came to appreciate the strategic location of Somalia after the Berlin Conference, which initiated the ‘Scramble for Africa’. The arrival of Britain, France and Italy into Somali lands began in the late 19th century and quickly the area disintegrated into British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland. Both countries sought expand their control, enlisting locals to fight the very wars aimed at their own subjugation. World War II brought immense devastation to the Somali people, who, out of desperation, coercion or promises of post-war independence, fought on behalf of the warring European powers. Somalia was mandated by the UN as an Italian protectorate in 1949 and achieved independence a decade later in 1960. However, the colonial powers never fully conceded their interests in the country and the Cold War actually invited new players to the scene, including the United States, the Soviet Union and Cuba.
One residue of the colonial legacy involved the Ogaden province of Somalia, which the British Empire had granted to the Ethiopian government. The region became the stage of two major wars between Ethiopia and Somalia between 1964 and 1977. Many Somalis still regard Ethiopia as an occupying power and view the policies of Addis Ababa as a continuation of the country’s history of foreign intervention. The civil war of 1991, largely a result of foreign intervention, clan and tribal loyalties, and lack of internal cohesion, further disfigured Somalia. As stranded civilians became deprived of aid, Somalia was hit by a devastating famine that yielded a humanitarian disaster. The famine served as a pretext for foreign intervention, this time as part of international ‘humanitarian’ missions, starting in December 1992, which also included US troops. The endeavour came to a tragic end in October 1993, when more than 1,000 Somalis and 18 US troops were killed in Mogadishu. Following a hurried US withdrawal, the mainstream media rationalised that the west could not help those who refuse to help themselves; another disfiguration of the fact that the interest of the Somali people was hardly ever a concern for these colonial philanthropists. Since then, the importance of Somalia was relegated in international news media into just another mindless conflict, with no rational context and no end in sight. The truth, however, is that colonial interest in the Horn of Africa has never waned.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 provided an impetus for US involvement in the strategic region; only one month after the attacks, Paul Wolfowitz met with various power players in Ethiopia and Somalia, alleging that Al Qaeda terrorists might be using Ras Kamboni and other Somali territories as escape routes. A year later, the US established the Combined Joint Task Force — Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) to ‘monitor’ developments and to train local militaries in ‘counterterrorism’. The US contingent was hardly neutral in the ongoing conflict. Reportedly, US troops were involved in aiding Ethiopian forces that entered Somalia in December 2006, citing efforts to track down Al Qaeda suspects. The Ethiopian occupation was justified as a response to a call by Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG), whose legitimacy is questioned. TGF, seen largely as a pro-Ethiopian entity, had been rapidly losing its control over parts of Somalia to the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) which came to prominence in January 2006, taking over the capital and eventually bringing long-sought stability to much of the country. Their attempts engage the US and other western powers in dialogue failed, however, as a US-backed Ethiopia moved into Somalia in December 2006.

—Khaleej Times


A time when oil becomes too scarce & expensive
Gwynne Dyer

DON’T Panic” is excellent advice in most times of crisis (though not if you’re an investor, in which case the trick is to panic 48 hours before everybody else does). If the peak oil crisis is upon us, then not panicking is definitely the right response. It can be a quite gentle crisis if it is properly handled, but it will be a nightmare if governments and markets panic. The current surge in the price of oil is certainly not driven by a conviction that oil supplies have peaked and can only decline from now on. The dealers in the London and New York exchanges who make the market react to the daily flow of news — a possible Turkish invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan, two North Sea rigs closed for a week because of bad weather — and don’t bother much about longer term issues like peak oil.
The market is a simple-minded beast: Supply is tight and disruptions are possible, so the price goes up. But the market is so tight because demand has been growing faster than supply for years, mainly due to the economic boom in Asia — and now the fear is that supplies may have stopped growing altogether. The German-based Energy Watch Group declared last month that global oil output peaked in 2006 at 81 million barrels per day. It will fall to 58 million b/d by 2020, they predict, and to only 39 million b/d by 2030.
That would give us just over twenty years to cut our use of oil by half — or rather by two-thirds, really, since world demand for oil is set to increase 37 percent by 2030, according to the annual report of the US Energy Department’s forecasting arm, the Energy Information Administration. In theory, two decades ought to be enough to come up with more efficient engines and other conservation measures for the half of all oil that is used in transport, and to switch to alternative fuels for much of the rest. But there are many who doubt that we will succeed.
Once the realization sinks in that the future is one of steadily diminishing oil supplies and steadily rising oil prices, they argue, there will be a vicious scramble for control of the remaining reserves, accompanied by wars that deplete those reserves even faster. The markets will panic, a deep and permanent global depression will impoverish everyone, and there will not be the will or the resources to build a new economy that is far less dependent on oil. The most pessimistic of these Cassandras, like American writer James Howard Kunstler, predict nothing less than the wholesale collapse of industrial civilization. You do not have to be a Cassandra, driving past the preposterously far-flung suburbs that have sprung up around North American cities in the past few decades, to see them as the neoslums of the post-peak-oil future, but their demise does not necessarily imply the collapse of an entire civilization.
There really is a finite amount of oil, and at some point production will peak and begin to decline. Is that time here? Perhaps. World oil production, which grew annually by an average of 1.2 million b/d over the past 20 years, has been almost flat for the past eighteen months despite the absence of any major disruptions. If peak oil is here, must we all now go into the dark together? Of course not. The predicted rate of decline in world oil production once we are past the peak is only two percent a year. If demand were still rising by about two percent a year, that would imply a four percent shortfall in supply next year, an eight percent shortage the year after, twelve percent the year after that..

—Arab News