Making
the World a More Dangerous Place: The Eager Role of Julia
Gillard
By John Pilger
October 24, 2012 "Information
Clearing House"
- The Australian parliament building reeks of floor polish.
The wooden floors shine so virtuously they reflect the
cartoon-like portraits of prime ministers, bewigged judges and
viceroys. Along the gleaming white, hushed corridors, the walls
are hung with Aboriginal art: one painting after another as in a
monolithic gallery, divorced from their origins, the irony
brutal. The poorest, sickest, most incarcerated people on earth
provide a façade for those who oversee the theft of their land
and its plunder.
Australia has 40% of the world’s uranium, all of it on
indigenous land. Prime Minister Julia Gillard has just been to
India to sell uranium to a government that refuses to sign the
Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and whose enemy,
Pakistan, is also a non-signatory. The threat of nuclear war
between them is constant. Uranium is an essential ingredient of
nuclear weapons. Gillard's deal in Delhi formally ends the
Australian Labor Party's long-standing policy of denying uranium
to countries that reject the NPT's obligation "to pursue
negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to
cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to
nuclear disarmament".
Like the people of Japan, Australian Aborigines have experienced
the horror of nuclear weapons. During the 1950s, the British
government tested atomic bombs at Maralinga in South Australia.
The Aboriginal population was not consulted and received scant
or no warning, and still suffer the effects. Yami Lester was a
boy when he saw the nuclear flash and subsequently went blind.
The enduring struggle of Aboriginal people for recognition as
human beings has been a fight not only for their land but for
what lies beneath it. Since they were granted a status higher
than that of sheep -- up to 1971, unlike the sheep, they were
not counted – many of their modest land rights have been
subverted or diminished by governments in Canberra.
In 2007, prime minister John Howard used the army to launch an
"emergency intervention" in Aboriginal communities in the
resource-rich Northern Territory. Lurid and fraudulent stories
of paedophile rings were the cover; indigenous people were told
they would not receive basic services if they did not surrender
the leasehold of their land. Gillard’s minister of indigenous
affairs has since given this the Orwellian title of "Stronger
Futures".
The tactics include driving people into “hub towns” and denying
decent housing to those forced to live up to a dozen in one
room. The removal of Aboriginal children has reached the level
of the infamous "Stolen Generation" of the last century. Many
may never see their families again.
Once the “intervention” had got under way, hundreds of licences
were granted to companies exploring for minerals, including
uranium. Contemporary politics in Australia is often defined by
the power of the mining companies. When the previous Labor prime
minister, Kevin Rudd, proposed a tax on record mining profits,
he was deposed by a backroom party cabal, including Gillard, who
reduced the tax. Diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks reveal
that two of the plotters against Rudd were informants of the US
embassy, which Rudd had angered by not following to the letter
US plans to encircle China and to release uranium for sale to US
clients such as India.
Gillard has since returned Australia to its historic
relationship with Washington, similar to that of an east
European satellite of the Soviet Union. The day before Barack
Obama arrived in Canberra last year to declare China the new
enemy of the “free world”, Gillard announced the end of her
party’s ban on uranium sales.
Washington's other post-cold war obsessions demand the services
of Australia. These include the intimidation of Iran and
destruction of that country’s independence, the undermining of
the NPT and prevention of nuclear-free zones that threaten the
nuclear-armed dominance of the US and Israel. Unlike Iran, a
founding signatory of the NPT and supporter of a nuclear-free
zone Middle East, the US and Israel ban independent inspections.
And both are currently threatening to attack Iran which, as the
combined agencies of US intelligence confirmed, has no nuclear
weapons.
The necessary inversion of reality and double standard require a
“carefully orchestrated process”, the US embassy is assured by
an Australian official quoted by WikiLeaks. According to the US
cables, there are enthusiastic "Australian ideas" for "dredging
up" information to help discredit Mohamad El Baradei who, as
director of the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1997 to
2009, repeatedly refuted US claims that Iran was building a
nuclear weapon. The Director of the Australian Arms Control
office is portrayed as a US watchdog, warning against "a
slippery slope" of governments "exercising independent judgment"
on nuclear matters. A senior Australian official, one Patrick
Suckling, is reporting as telling the US that “Australia wants
the most robust, intrusive and debilitating sanctions possible”
against Iran. Suckling’s victims are today mostly ordinary men,
women and children.
On 5 October, the Australian Nuclear Free Alliance, which
includes Aboriginal groups from across the country, gathered in
Alice Springs. They called for a moratorium on all uranium
mining and sales. Indigenous women made a special plea to
Gillard, recently ordained by the white media as a feminist
hero. No response was expected.
On 17 October, all the testaments of obedience and servility to
the mighty patron finally paid off when Australia was rewarded
with a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council, known in
Canberra as “the top table”. The timing is striking. An attack
by Nato on Syria or Iran, or both, has never been closer. A
world war beckons as 50 years are marked since "the world stood
still", wrote the historian Sheldon Stern. This was the 1962
Cuba missile crisis when the US and the Soviet Union came within
an ace of nuclear war. Declassified files disclose that
President John F. Kennedy authorised "NATO aircraft with Turkish
pilots ... to take off for Moscow and drop a bomb."
The echo today could not be clearer
www.johnpilger.com
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