January 11 - It was August 10, 2007 and a military vehicle belonging to the occupation forces lay smouldering in ruins. A convoy of the hated colonial troops had just been pelted with rocks by 600 demonstrators. An exchange of gunfire followed, then the police vehicles were burnt. Occupied Iraq? No, not in this case. This was instead a scene from occupied East Timor. An East Timor where 800 Australian troops and a contingent of Federal Police (AFP) enforce a social order that has been constructed to extract profits for rich Australian corporate owners and to serve the overall interests of Australia’s capitalist ruling class. The Timorese masses are meanwhile crushed into terrible poverty. The Australian military/police are the main power in the “International Stabilisation Force” that supports the United Nations intervention in East Timor. New Zealand troops and cops also play a role.

“Australian forces drove two tanks into [the camp] by hitting IDPS door barricade which [was] still unlocked and fueled the situation. The children, old man and women be suffered of tear-gas and resulted two seriously injured and two others were lightly injured and one got shot dead right away under IDPS tent by the Australian troops. The troops wanted to hide the dead bodies assuming he was shot outside of the camp so they then pulled out of barbed wire and his hair stickled [got stuck] at the barbed wire. Then the Australian soldiers cover up the dead–body with black plastics and thrown into maize field. However, many of IDPS were seeing and shouted at them, and then they taken back the dead–body put into Australian military vehicle.”

The refugees killed by the Australian troops were Jacinto Soares who was shot dead on the spot (as described above) and Antonio Dasi who was shot in his chest and the left side of his stomach and died later in hospital. Among those shot and injured were Geraldo Guteres, Cris Lopes and Julio da Silva. The IDP statement went on to demand the “Immediate withdrawal of Australian troops out of Timor Leste” [East Timor]. That’s a demand that the left in this country ought to seriously support!

At the same camp as the February 23 massacre, Australian troops again opened fire on refugees less than six months later. East Timorese youths had earlier smashed the windows of an Australian military vehicle. The cycle of resistance and brutal colonial repression in East Timor is starting to resemble the situation in the Israeli occupied Palestinian lands. In August, Timorese people denouncing president Ramos Horta as an Australian puppet defied Australian and New Zealand forces by setting up barricades of burning tyres. The youths threw rocks at the hated occupying police and troops and at the Australian embassy. Then on October 4, an explosive device detonated outside the Australian Defence Co-operation House, adjacent to the Australian Embassy. CONTINUE

Violent Cops Target African Communities
February 5, 2008: Thirteen months ago Victorian police publicly open up a new front in the daily war they wage against the masses on behalf of their masters in the ruling class. Not content with their war of attrition against indigenous people and workers who stand up for their rights in the workplace, they escalate the targetting of Melbourne’s burgeoning African community. Then Police Association secretary, Paul Mullett, declares that the Sudanese “come from a lawless background” and “really have to be properly educated about Australian society’s standards.” (The Australian website, Jan 5 2007)That is, an education at the end of a barrel of a gun, hard lessons taught with a face pressed against the pavement of the street where you live, “choke-slammed” to the ground by a cop, “punched and kneed”, punched while handcuffed, slapped and choked, a lesson in humiliation as you are forced to strip naked below the waist in public. In fact, a litany of violent degradations that form the (at least) 19 official complaints against police victimization in Victoria between March 2006 and December 2007 and that, one must conclude, are just the scrapings at the surface of the violence directed against people of African origin now living in Australia.