A shameless person George Bush is! He has the
audacity to incriminate the people of India for
the scarcity of food the world over. His own govt
decided to produce fuel from food materials whereby
hundreds of thousands who would otherwise have
been fed are forced to starve to hunger and destitution.
The power hungry megalomaniac that he is , he
is after India , first for an ally to act in complicity
with his imperialist regime to escalate his nuclear
and atomic intimidations through out the world
while other countries are asked to castrate themselves
atomically. The ugly imperialism shows its dirty
face when millions of people in the third world
are suffering from hunger and malnutrition. Countries
like India eat and drink only the bare minimum
required, while the people of the developed countries
eat and drink enormously at the cost of the poor
countries. The fourth estate in India must also
be ashamed of the way they projected Bush statement
in this regard; they did not have any prick of
conscience to publicize the infamous assertion
of the anti-human President as if it were a great
utterance from the mouth of a prophet. Satan spits,
eels suck it as if it were nectar.
We express our grave protest against this inhuman
stance of the President of the United States and
appeal to the people of the country and the Govt.
of India to view this as an expression of US enmity
towards India.
Below we quote the apology tendered by the Prime
Minister of Australia on Wednesday 13Th February
2008 on the floor of the Australian parliament
to the people who are described as stolen generations
of Australia. We do not add any comment on the
apology because it speaks fro itself. But we may
caution the readers as we did in the last issue
that the imperialists have great documents to
their credit, but when it comes to truth and practice
they are unabashedly the same as they had always
bee. That is what exactly is happening in Iraq
and Afghanistan; that is what is going to happen
about Iran. They will not allow the world to live
and sleep peacefully. They would not allow even
a peaceful death to the peace-loving men and women
of the world. We have no serious affair in this
world more than a peaceful life. No individual
wanted to come to this world; every one is brought
to this world by the heart-to-heart and body-to-body
relation of one man and one woman. Prophets and
philosophers are no exception; warriors and commanders
are no exception; robbers and cutthroats are no
exception. President of the United States and
Prime Minister of Australia are no exception.
Life originated from pleasure; life must have
some pleasure, the most emphatic manifestation
of which is peace. Greed should not trespass the
peace and security of communities and tribes.
Doctrines should not be evolved to put societies
on the point of guns and swords; policing a society
in the name of culture is the savagest crime.
That was what happened wherever colonialism reigned.
It was the case in India, Africa and Australia.
The misfortune of Australia is that the Whites
continued it even recently at the cost of the
tribal entities. In India White Man “suffered”
a great burden of “civilizing” the
Indians, who are one of the oldest civilizations
of the world. Iraq the cradle of civilization
is ruined most “effectively”. The
Whiteman cannot tolerate civilization. Now it
is the turn of Iran. Elsewhere in this issue we
reproduce a write-up by Paul Craig Roberts on
a possible attack by the US on Iran.
So , now read the apology by Mr. Rudd Griffith,
the Australian Prime minister.
Editor.
Apology To Aborigines
Wednesday, 13 February 2008
The SPEAKER (Hon. Harry Jenkins) took the chair
at 9 am and read prayers.
APOLOGY TO AUSTRALIA’S INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
Mr RUDD (Griffith—Prime Minister) (9.00
am)—I move:
That today we honour the Indigenous peoples of
this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human
history.
We reflect on their past mistreatment.
We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of
those who were Stolen Generations—this blemished
chapter in our nation’s history.
The time has now come for the nation to turn a
new page in Australia’s history by righting
the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with
confidence to the future.
We apologize for the laws and policies of successive
Parliaments and governments that have inflicted
profound grief, suffering and loss on these our
fellow Australians.
We apologize especially for the removal of Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander children from their
families, their communities and their country.
For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen
Generations, their descendants and for their families
left behind, we say sorry.
To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and
the sisters, for the breaking up of families and
communities, we say sorry.
And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted
on a proud people and a proud culture, we say
sorry.
We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request
that this apology be received in the spirit in
which it is offered as part of the healing of
the nation.
For the future we take heart; resolving that this
new page in the history of our great continent
can now be written. We today take this first step
by acknowledging the past and laying claim to
a future that embraces all Australians. A future
where this Parliament resolves that the injustices
of the past must never, never happen again. A
future where we harness the determination of all
Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to
close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy,
educational achievement and economic opportunity.
A future where we embrace the possibility of new
solutions to enduring problems where old approaches
have failed. A future based on mutual respect,
mutual resolve and mutual responsibility.
A future where all Australians, whatever their
origins, are truly equal partners, with equal
opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping
the next chapter in the history of this great
country, Australia.
There comes a time in the history of nations when
their peoples must become fully reconciled to
their past if they are to go forward with confidence
to embrace their future. Our nation, Australia,
has reached such a time. That is why the parliament
is today here assembled: to deal with this unfinished
business of the nation, to remove a great stain
from the nation’s soul and, in a true spirit
of reconciliation, to open a new chapter in the
history of this great land, Australia.
Last year I made a commitment to the Australian
people that if we formed the next government of
the Commonwealth we would in parliament say sorry
to the stolen generations. Today I honour that
commitment. I said we would do so early in the
life of the new parliament. Again, today I honour
that commitment by doing so at the commencement
of this the 42nd parliament of the Commonwealth.
Because the time has come, well and truly come,
for all peoples of our great country, for all
citizens of our great Commonwealth, for all Australians—those
who are Indigenous and those who are not—to
come together to reconcile and together build
a new future for our nation.
Some have asked, ‘Why apologize?’
Let me begin to answer by telling the parliament
just a little of one person’s story—an
elegant, eloquent and wonderful woman in her 80s,
full of life, full of funny stories, despite what
has happened in her life’s journey, a woman
who has travelled a long way to be with us today,
a member of the stolen generation who shared some
of her story with me when I called around to see
her just a few days ago. Nanna Nungala Fejo, as
she prefers to be called, was born in the late
1920s. She remembers her earliest childhood days
living with her family and her community in a
bush camp just outside Tennant Creek. She remembers
the love and the warmth and the kinship of those
days long ago, including traditional dancing around
the camp fire at night. She loved the dancing.
She remembers once getting into strife when, as
a four-year-old girl, she insisted on dancing
with the male tribal elders rather than just sitting
and watching the men, as the girls were supposed
to do.
But then, sometime around 1932, when she was
about four, she remembers the coming of the welfare
men. Her family had feared that day and had dug
holes in the creek bank where the children could
run and hide. What they had not expected was that
the white welfare men did not come alone. They
brought a truck, two white men and an Aboriginal
stockman on horseback cracking his stockwhip.
The kids were found; they ran for their mothers,
screaming, but they could not get away. They were
herded and piled onto the back of the truck. Tears
flowing, her mum tried clinging to the sides of
the truck as her children were taken away to the
Bungalow in Alice, all in the name of protection.
A few years later, government policy changed.
Now the children would be handed over to the missions
to be cared for by the churches. But which church
would care for them? The kids were simply told
to line up in three lines. Nanna Feijo and her
sister stood in the middle line, her older brother
and cousin on her left. Those on the left were
told that they had become Catholics, those in
the middle Methodists and those on the right Church
of England. That is how the complex questions
of post-reformation theology were resolved in
the Australian outback in the 1930s. It was as
crude as that. She and her sister were sent to
a Methodist mission on Goulburn Island and then
Croker Island. Her Catholic brother was sent to
work at a cattle station and her cousin to a Catholic
mission.
Nanna Feijo’s family had been broken up
for a second time. She stayed at the mission until
after the war, when she was allowed to leave for
a prearranged job as a domestic in Darwin. She
was 16. Nanna Feijo never saw her mum again. After
she left the mission, her brother let her know
that her mum had died years before, a broken woman
fretting for the children that had literally been
ripped away from her.
I asked Nanna Feijo what she would have me say
today about her story. She thought for a few moments
then said that what I should say today was that
all mothers are important. And she added: ‘Families—keeping
them together is very important. It’s a
good thing that you are surrounded by love and
that love is passed down the generations. That’s
what gives you happiness.’ As I left, later
on, Nanna Feijo took one of my staff aside, wanting
to make sure that I was not too hard on the Aboriginal
stockman who had hunted those kids down all those
years ago. The stockman had found her again decades
later, this time himself to say, ‘Sorry.’
And remarkably, extraordinarily, she had forgiven
him.
Nanna Feijo’s is just one story. There are
thousands, tens of thousands of them: stories
of forced separation of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander children from their mums and dads
over the better part of a century. Some of these
stories are graphically told in Bringing them
home, the report commissioned in 1995 by Prime
Minister Keating and received in 1997 by Prime
Minister Howard. There is something terribly primal
about these firsthand accounts. The pain is searing;
it screams from the pages. The hurt, the humiliation,
the degradation and the sheer brutality of the
act of physically separating a mother from her
children is a deep assault on our senses and on
our most elemental humanity.
These stories cry out to be heard; they cry out
for an apology. Instead, from the nation’s
parliament there has been a stony, stubborn and
deafening silence for more than a decade; a view
that somehow we, the parliament, should suspend
our most basic instincts of what is right and
what is wrong; a view that, instead, we should
look for any pretext to push this great wrong
to one side, to leave it languishing with the
historians, the academics and the cultural warriors,
as if the stolen generations are little more than
an interesting sociological phenomenon. But the
stolen generations are not intellectual curiosities.
They are human beings, human beings who have been
damaged deeply by the decisions of parliaments
and governments. But, as of today, the time for
denial, the time for delay, has at last come to
an end.
The nation is demanding of its political leadership
to take us forward. Decency, human decency, universal
human decency, demands that the nation now step
forward to right an historical wrong. That is
what we are doing in this place today. But should
there still be doubts as to why we must now act,
let the parliament reflect for a moment on the
following facts: that, between 1910 and 1970,
between 10 and 30 per cent of Indigenous children
were forcibly taken from their mothers and fathers;
that, as a result, up to 50,000 children were
forcibly taken from their families; that this
was the product of the deliberate, calculated
policies of the state as reflected in the explicit
powers given to them under statute; that this
policy was taken to such extremes by some in administrative
authority that the forced extractions of children
of so-called ‘mixed lineage’ were
seen as part of a broader policy of dealing with
‘the problem of the Aboriginal population’.
One of the most notorious examples of this approach
was from the Northern Territory Protector of Natives,
who stated:
Generally by the fifth and invariably by the sixth
generation, all native characteristics of the
Australian aborigine are eradicated. The problem
of our half-castes—
to quote the protector—
will quickly be eliminated by the complete disappearance
of the black race, and the swift submergence of
their progeny in the white ...
The Western Australian Protector of Natives expressed
not dissimilar views, expounding them at length
in Canberra in 1937 at the first national conference
on Indigenous affairs that brought together the
Commonwealth and state protectors of natives.
These are uncomfortable things to be brought out
into the light. They are not pleasant. They are
profoundly disturbing. But we must acknowledge
these facts if we are to deal once and for all
with the argument that the policy of generic forced
separation was somehow well motivated, justified
by its historical context and, as a result, unworthy
of any apology today.
Then we come to the argument of intergenerational
responsibility, also used by some to argue against
giving an apology today. But let us remember the
fact that the forced removal of Aboriginal children
was happening as late as the early 1970s. The
1970s is not exactly a point in remote antiquity.
There are still serving members of this parliament
who were first elected to this place in the early
1970s. It is well within the adult memory span
of many of us. The uncomfortable truth for us
all is that the parliaments of the nation, individually
and collectively, enacted statutes and delegated
authority under those statutes that made the forced
removal of children on racial grounds fully lawful.
There is a further reason for an apology as well:
it is that reconciliation is in fact an expression
of a core value of our nation—and that value
is a fair go for all. There is a deep and abiding
belief in the Australian community that, for the
stolen generations, there was no fair go at all.
There is a pretty basic Aussie belief that says
that it is time to put right this most outrageous
of wrongs. It is for these reasons, quite apart
from concerns of fundamental human decency, that
the governments and parliaments of this nation
must make this apology—because, put simply,
the laws that our parliaments enacted made the
stolen generations possible. We, the parliaments
of the nation, are ultimately responsible, not
those who gave effect to our laws. And the problem
lay with the laws themselves. As has been said
of settler societies elsewhere, we are the bearers
of many blessings from our ancestors; therefore
we must also be the bearer of their burdens as
well. Therefore, for our nation, the course of
action is clear: that is, to deal now with what
has become one of the darkest chapters in Australia’s
history. In doing so, we are doing more than contending
with the facts, the evidence and the often rancorous
public debate. In doing so, we are also wrestling
with our own soul. This is not, as some would
argue, a black-armband view of history; it is
just the truth: the cold, confronting, uncomfortable
truth—facing it, dealing with it, moving
on from it. Until we fully confront that truth,
there will always be a shadow hanging over us
and our future as a fully united and fully reconciled
people. It is time to reconcile. It is time to
recognize the injustices of the past. It is time
to say sorry. It is time to move forward together.
To the stolen generations, I say the following:
as Prime Minister of Australia, I am sorry. On
behalf of the government of Australia, I am sorry.
On behalf of the parliament of Australia, I am
sorry. I offer you this apology without qualification.
We apologize for the hurt, the pain and suffering
that we, the parliament, have caused you by the
laws that previous parliaments have enacted. We
apologize for the indignity, the degradation and
the humiliation these laws embodied. We offer
this apology to the mothers, the fathers, the
brothers, the sisters, the families and the communities
whose lives were ripped apart by the actions of
successive governments under successive parliaments.
In making this apology, I would also like to speak
personally to the members of the stolen generations
and their families: to those here today, so many
of you; to those listening across the nation—from
Yuendumu, in the central west of the Northern
Territory, to Yabara, in North Queensland, and
to Pitjantjatjara in South Australia.
I know that, in offering this apology on behalf
of the government and the parliament, there is
nothing I can say today that can take away the
pain you have suffered personally. Whatever words
I speak today, I cannot undo that. Words alone
are not that powerful; grief is a very personal
thing. I ask those non-Indigenous Australians
listening today who may not fully understand why
what we are doing is so important to imagine for
a moment that this had happened to you. I say
to honourable members here present: imagine if
this had happened to us. Imagine the crippling
effect. Imagine how hard it would be to forgive.
My proposal is this: if the apology we extend
today is accepted in the spirit of reconciliation,
in which it is offered, we can today resolve together
that there be a new beginning for Australia. And
it is to such a new beginning that I believe the
nation is now calling us.
Australians are a passionate lot. We are also
a very practical lot. For us, symbolism is important
but, unless the great symbolism of reconciliation
is accompanied by an even greater substance, it
is little more than a clanging gong. It is not
sentiment that makes history; it is our actions
that make history. Today’s apology, however
inadequate, is aimed at righting past wrongs.
It is also aimed at building a bridge between
Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians—a
bridge based on a real respect rather than a thinly
veiled contempt. Our challenge for the future
is to cross that bridge and, in so doing, to embrace
a new partnership between Indigenous and non-Indigenous
Australians—to embrace, as part of that
partnership, expanded Link-up and other critical
services to help the stolen generations to trace
their families if at all possible and to provide
dignity to their lives. But the core of this partnership
for the future is to close the gap between Indigenous
and non-Indigenous Australians on life expectancy,
educational achievement and employment opportunities.
This new partnership on closing the gap will set
concrete targets for the future: within a decade
to halve the widening gap in literacy, numeracy
and employment outcomes and opportunities for
Indigenous Australians, within a decade to halve
the appalling gap in infant mortality rates between
Indigenous and non-Indigenous children and, within
a generation, to close the equally appalling 17-year
life gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous
in overall life expectancy.
The truth is: a business as usual approach towards
Indigenous Australians is not working. Most old
approaches are not working. We need a new beginning—a
new beginning which contains real measures of
policy success or policy failure; a new beginning,
a new partnership, on closing the gap with sufficient
flexibility not to insist on a one-size-fits-all
approach for each of the hundreds of remote and
regional Indigenous communities across the country
but instead allowing flexible, tailored, local
approaches to achieve commonly-agreed national
objectives that lie at the core of our proposed
new partnership; a new beginning that draws intelligently
on the experiences of new policy settings across
the nation. However, unless we as a parliament
set a destination for the nation, we have no clear
point to guide our policy, our programs or our
purpose; we have no centralized organizing principle.
Let us resolve today to begin with the little
children—a fitting place to start on this
day of apology for the stolen generations. Let
us resolve over the next five years to have every
Indigenous four-year-old in a remote Aboriginal
community enrolled in and attending a proper early
childhood education centre or opportunity and
engaged in proper preliteracy and prenumeracy
programs. Let us resolve to build new educational
opportunities for these little ones, year by year,
step by step, following the completion of their
crucial preschool year. Let us resolve to use
this systematic approach to build future educational
opportunities for Indigenous children to provide
proper primary and preventive health care for
the same children, to begin the task of rolling
back the obscenity that we find today in infant
mortality rates in remote Indigenous communities—up
to four times higher than in other communities.
None of this will be easy. Most of it will be
hard—very hard. But none of it is impossible,
and all of it is achievable with clear goals,
clear thinking, and by placing an absolute premium
on respect, cooperation and mutual responsibility
as the guiding principles of this new partnership
on closing the gap. The mood of the nation is
for reconciliation now, between Indigenous and
non-Indigenous Australians. The mood of the nation
on Indigenous policy and politics is now very
simple. The nation is calling on us, the politicians,
to move beyond our infantile bickering, our point-scoring
and our mindlessly partisan politics and to elevate
this one core area of national responsibility
to a rare position beyond the partisan divide.
Surely this is the unfulfilled spirit of the 1967
referendum. Surely, at least from this day forward,
we should give it a go.
Let me take this one step further and take what
some may see as a piece of political posturing
and make a practical proposal to the opposition
on this day, the first full sitting day of the
new parliament. I said before the election that
the nation needed a kind of war cabinet on parts
of Indigenous policy, because the challenges are
too great and the consequences are too great to
allow it all to become a political football, as
it has been so often in the past. I therefore
propose a joint policy commission, to be led by
the Leader of the Opposition and me, with a mandate
to develop and implement—to begin with—an
effective housing strategy for remote communities
over the next five years. It will be consistent
with the government’s policy framework,
a new partnership for closing the gap. If this
commission operates well, I then propose that
it work on the further task of constitutional
recognition of the first Australians, consistent
with the longstanding platform commitments of
my party and the pre-election position of the
opposition. This would probably be desirable in
any event because, unless such a proposition were
absolutely bipartisan, it would fail at a referendum.
As I have said before, the time has come for new
approaches to enduring problems. Working constructively
together on such defined projects would, I believe,
meet with the support of the nation. It is time
for fresh ideas to fashion the nation’s
future.
Mr Speaker, today the parliament has come together
to right a great wrong. We have come together
to deal with the past so that we might fully embrace
the future. We have had sufficient audacity of
faith to advance a pathway to that future, with
arms extended rather than with fists still clenched.
So let us seize the day. Let it not become a moment
of mere sentimental reflection. Let us take it
with both hands and allow this day, this day of
national reconciliation, to become one of those
rare moments in which we might just be able to
transform the way in which the nation thinks about
itself, whereby the injustice administered to
the stolen generations in the name of these, our
parliaments, causes all of us to reappraise, at
the deepest level of our beliefs, the real possibility
of reconciliation writ large: reconciliation across
all Indigenous Australia; reconciliation across
the entire history of the often bloody encounter
between those who emerged from the Dreamtime a
thousand generations ago and those who, like me,
came across the seas only yesterday; reconciliation
which opens up whole new possibilities for the
future.
It is for the nation to bring the first two centuries
of our settled history to a close, as we begin
a new chapter. We embrace with pride, admiration
and awe these great and ancient cultures we are
truly blessed to have among us—cultures
that provide a unique, uninterrupted human thread
linking our Australian continent to the most ancient
prehistory of our planet. Growing from this new
respect, we see our Indigenous brothers and sisters
with fresh eyes, with new eyes, and we have our
minds wide open as to how we might tackle, together,
the great practical challenges that Indigenous
Australia faces in the future.
Let us turn this page together: Indigenous and
non-Indigenous Australians, government and opposition,
Commonwealth and state, and write this new chapter
in our nation’s story together. First Australians,
First Fleeters, and those who first took the oath
of allegiance just a few weeks ago. Let’s
grasp this opportunity to craft a new future for
this great land: Australia. I commend the motion
to the House.
Honourable members applauding—
Australian prime minister asks Parliament to approve
apology to Aborigines
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