The Rape of East Timor: "Sounds Like Fun"

by John Pilger

Secret documents found in the Australian National Archives provide a glimpse of how one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century was executed and covered up. They also help us understand how and for whom the world is run.

The documents refer to East Timor, now known as Timor-Leste, and were written by diplomats in the Australian embassy in Jakarta. The date was November 1976, less than a year after the Indonesian dictator General Suharto seized the then Portuguese colony on the island of Timor.

The terror that followed has few parallels; not even Pol Pot succeeded in killing, proportionally, as many Cambodians as Suharto and his fellow generals killed in East Timor. Out of a population of almost a million, up to a third were extinguished.

This was the second holocaust for which Suharto was responsible. A decade earlier, in 1965, Suharto wrested power in Indonesia in a bloodbath that took more than a million lives. The CIA reported: "In terms of numbers killed, the massacres rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century."

This was greeted in the Western press as "a gleam of light in Asia" (Time). The BBC's correspondent in South East Asia, Roland Challis, later described the cover-up of the massacres as a triumph of media complicity and silence; the "official line" was that Suharto had "saved" Indonesia from a communist takeover.

"Of course my British sources knew what the American plan was," he told me. "There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops, so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was only much later that we learned that the American embassy was supplying [Suharto with] names and ticking them off as they were killed. There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the [US-dominated] International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were part of it. That was the deal."

I have interviewed many of the survivors of 1965, including the acclaimed Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who bore witness to an epic of suffering "forgotten" in the West because Suharto was "our man". A second holocaust in resource-rich East Timor, an undefended colony, was almost inevitable.

In 1994, I filmed clandestinely in occupied East Timor; I found a land of crosses and unforgettable grief. In my film, Death of a Nation, there is a sequence shot on board an Australian aircraft flying over the Timor Sea. A party is in progress. Two men in suits are toasting each other in champagne. "This is a uniquely historical moment," babbles one of them, "that is truly, uniquely historical."

This is Australia's foreign minister, Gareth Evans. The other man is Ali Alatas, the principal mouthpiece of Suharto. It is 1989 and they are making a symbolic flight to celebrate a piratical deal they called a "treaty". This allowed Australia, the Suharto dictatorship and the international oil companies to divide the spoils of East Timor's oil and gas resources.

Thanks to Evans, Australia's then prime minister, Paul Keating -- who regarded Suharto as a father figure -- and a gang that ran Australia's foreign policy establishment, Australia distinguished itself as the only western country formally to recognise Suharto's genocidal conquest. The prize, said Evans, was "zillions" of dollars.

Members of this gang reappeared the other day in documents found in the National Archives by two researchers from Monash University in Melbourne, Sara Niner and Kim McGrath. In their own handwriting, senior officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs mock reports of the rape, torture and execution of East Timorese by Indonesian troops. In scribbled annotations on a memorandum that refers to atrocities in a concentration camp, one diplomat wrote: "sounds like fun". Another wrote: "sounds like the population are in raptures."

Referring to a report by the Indonesian resistance, Fretilin, that describes Indonesia as an "impotent" invader, another diplomat sneered: "If 'the enemy was impotent', as stated, how come they are daily raping the captured population? Or is the former a result of the latter?"

The documents, says Sarah Niner, are "vivid evidence of the lack of empathy and concern for human rights abuses in East Timor" in the Department of Foreign Affairs. "The archives reveal that this culture of cover-up is closely tied to the DFA's need to recognise Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor so as to commence negotiations over the petroleum in the East Timor Sea."

This was a conspiracy to steal East Timor's oil and gas. In leaked diplomatic cables in August 1975, the Australian Ambassador to Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, wrote to Canberra: "It would seem to me that the Department [of Minerals and Energy] might well have an interest in closing the present gap in the agreed sea border and this could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia ... than with Portugal or independent Portuguese Timor." Woolcott revealed that he had been briefed on Indonesia's secret plans for an invasion. He cabled Canberra that the government should "assist public understanding in Australia" to counter "criticism of Indonesia".

In 1993, I interviewed C. Philip Liechty, a former senior CIA operations officer in the Jakarta embassy during the invasion of East Timor. He told me: "Suharto was given the green light [by the US] to do what he did. We supplied them with everything they needed [from] M16 rifles [to] US military logistical support ... maybe 200,000 people, almost all of them non-combatants died. When the atrocities began to appear in the CIA reporting, the way they dealt with these was to cover them up as long as possible; and when they couldn't be covered up any longer, they were reported in a watered-down, very generalised way, so that even our own sourcing was sabotaged."

I asked Liechty what would have happened had someone spoken out. "Your career would end," he replied. He said his interview with me was one way of making amends for "how badly I feel".

The gang in the Australian embassy in Jakarta appear to suffer no such anguish. One of the scribblers on the documents, Cavan Hogue, told the Sydney Morning Herald: "It does look like my handwriting. If I made a comment like that, being the cynical bugger that I am, it would certainly have been in the spirit of irony and sarcasm. It's about the [Fretilin] press release, not the Timorese." Hogue said there were "atrocities on all sides".

As one who reported and filmed the evidence of genocide, I find this last remark especially profane. The Fretilin "propaganda" he derides was accurate. The subsequent report of the United Nations on East Timor describes thousands of cases of summary execution and violence against women by Suharto's Kopassus special forces, many of whom were trained in Australia. "Rape, sexual slavery and sexual violence were tools used as part of the campaign designed to inflict a deep experience of terror, powerlessness and hopelessness upon pro-independence supporters," says the UN.

Cavan Hogue, the joker and "cynical bugger", was promoted to senior ambassador and eventually retired on a generous pension. Richard Woolcott was made head of the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra and, in retirement, has lectured widely as a "respected diplomatic intellectual".

Journalists watered at the Australian embassy in Jakarta, notably those employed by Rupert Murdoch, who controls almost 70 per cent of Australia's capital city press. Murdoch's correspondent in Indonesia was Patrick Walters, who reported that Jakarta's "economic achievements" in East Timor were "impressive", as was Jakarta's "generous" development of the blood-soaked territory. As for the East Timorese resistance, it was "leaderless" and beaten. In any case, "no one was now arrested without proper legal procedures".

In December 1993, one of Murdoch's veteran retainers, Paul Kelly, then editor-in-chief of The Australian, was appointed by Foreign Minister Evans to the Australia-Indonesia Institute, a body funded by the Australian government to promote the "common interests" of Canberra and the Suharto dictatorship. Kelly led a group of Australian newspaper editors to Jakarta for an audience with the mass murderer. There is a photograph of one of them bowing.

East Timor won its independence in 1999 with the blood and courage of its ordinary people. The tiny, fragile democracy was immediately subjected to a relentless campaign of bullying by the Australian government which sought to manoeuvre it out of its legal ownership of the sea bed's oil and gas revenue. To get its way, Australia refused to recognise the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the Law of the Sea and unilaterally changed the maritime boundary in its own favour.

In 2006, a deal was finally signed, Mafia-style, largely on Australia's terms. Soon afterwards, Prime Minister Mari Alkitiri, a nationalist who had stood up to Canberra, was effectively deposed in what he called an "attempted coup" by "outsiders". The Australian military, which had "peace-keeping" troops in East Timor, had trained his opponents.

In the 17 years since East Timor won its independence, the Australian government has taken nearly $5 billion in oil and gas revenue - money that belongs to its impoverished neighbour.

Australia has been called America's "deputy sheriff" in the South Pacific. One man with the badge is Gareth Evans, the foreign minister filmed lifting his champagne glass to toast the theft of East Timor's natural resources. Today, Evans is a lectern-trotting zealot promoting a brand of war-mongering known as "RTP", or "Responsibility to Protect". As co-chair of a New York-based "Global Centre", he runs a US-backed lobby group that urges the "international community" to attack countries where "the Security Council rejects a proposal or fails to deal with it in a reasonable time". The man for the job, as the East Timorese might say.

Ms Dhu’s Preventable Death: A Postscript

by Alister McKeich
newmatilda.com

Last week I wrote about the tragic death in custody in Western Australia of 22-year-old Aboriginal woman Ms Dhu. The negligence and racism surrounding her death in this day and age, are both shameful and infuriating.

This is no less so given the knowledge we have of how to prevent Aboriginal deaths in custody from reports such as the Royal Commission. Many of these sources I cited in my previous article, from a legal perspective as someone who studies law and works at the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service.

However, as a postscript, I want to write from a more personal point of view. I was prompted to write about the case of Ms Dhu for a number of reasons -- as a current example of the ongoing genocide of Aboriginal peoples in our prisons; as a legal rebuff to demonstrate that we have the knowledge to prevent custodial deaths, but lack the compassioned impetus; that Australia’s racist foundations -- as rightly pointed out by SBS presenter Stan Grant -- continues to impede justice and equality for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

I was also prompted when I saw the name of Ms Dhu’s partner -- Dion Ruffin -- who gave evidence as part of the inquest into her death while incarcerated in Greenough prison.

The name rang a bell, and sure enough, after confirming with my father, it transpires that the Ruffin’s are old family friends of ours from when I was a kid growing up in Geraldton.

I remember those family visits well -- a lot of laughter, a few tears, and of course, a good feed. As a non-Aboriginal kid growing up in a fairly segregated town, it was an eye-opener into what seemed another world.

Sadly, it still feels like another world. Mr Ruffin is 41-years-old, only four years older than me. Our families may have shared lunch when we were kids, but that’s all we’ve shared. I’ve had many opportunities over the years, and now work at the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, while Mr Ruffin is now embroiled in an inquest regarding the preventable custodial death of his partner.

They were both arrested on the same day, although reportedly for unrelated charges. Mr Ruffin was forced to sit in an adjacent cell to Ms Dhu, and listened to her ‘choking on her vomit and struggling to breathe’.

Via video link from Greenough prison, Mr Ruffin informed the inquest that he heard a loud bang, and Ms Dhu’s cries for help end abruptly. He then watched as an officer dragged her ‘lifeless body’ along the floor by her hands.

As part of both my job and my involvement in music, I hear many jail stories from Aboriginal people. Not just in Victoria, but as far-flung as the Western Desert, Arnhem Land and the Tiwi Islands.

Over time I’ve come to realise that for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, jail is simply the norm. Just as going to school and getting a job is for me -- a non-Aboriginal person -- a part of life, so is going to prison for Indigenous peoples.

I’ve heard more than once that doing jail would be preferable to paying fines -- as in the case of Ms Dhu -- as the jail time is ‘easy’, and the alternative, unreasonable payment plans, simply keeps people in poverty.

I’ve also been told over the years that going to jail is a good thing as it keeps you off the streets, you get three meals a day and a roof over your head, all your cousins are there -- no big deal.

This state of affairs should be a big deal. It should be a big deal when it is more likely a young Aboriginal person will end up in jail than finish high school.

It should be a big deal when the overwhelming number of incarcerated people are Indigenous.

It should be a big deal when an Aboriginal man is forced to watch his partner dragged dying across the prison floor.

It should be a big deal when racism begets poverty, and poverty is punished with incarceration.

It should be a big deal when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples continue to be oppressed by a system that shows no recognition of sovereignty.

It should be a big deal when two young kids, of around the same age, sitting around a kitchen table back in the 1980’s, one black, and one white, grow up to have vastly different lives.

Me -- working with inmates on the free side of the prison bars, and Mr Dion Ruffin, watching his partner die in custody at the hands of a nation of indifference.

Another Preventable Death: Ms Dhu Vs WA Police And Australia-At-Large

The ongoing inquest into the death of Ms Dhu is welcome. But a broader inquiry into national behaviour is long overdue, writes Alister McKeich.

by Alister McKeich
newmatilda.com

In 2014, 22-year-old Ms Dhu died in police custody in South Hedland, Western Australia. The autopsy found Ms Dhu passed away from pneumonia, septicaemia and complications from a previous rib fracture.

A recent coronial inquest found that the police officers charged with her care thought she was faking the illnesses, told her to ‘shut up’, and laughed at her as she choked on her own vomit.

Ms Dhu was carried ‘like a dead kangaroo’ into a paddy wagon, and taken to the health clinic for the third time, where she passed away from cardiac arrest.

Ms Dhu was in police custody for unpaid fines of $3,622.

At this point, it’s almost needless to state that Ms Dhu was an Aboriginal woman. When reporting deaths in custody, sadly, Aboriginality is almost a given. Despite an extensive (and expensive ? around $40m) Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1990, Aboriginal Australians still die in custody on a regular basis.

The Royal Commission included 339 recommendations in its conclusion; however, the issue boiled down to one very simple fact: ‘the conclusions are clear… Aboriginal people in custody are more likely to die than others in custody because the Aboriginal population is grossly over-represented in custody.’

The short (and seemingly obvious) answer is, then: if there were less Aboriginal people in jail, there would be less deaths in custody. However, since the Royal Commission released its report in 1990, we have failed Aboriginal people even at this first juncture.

In 2014, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) found that Aboriginal inmates made up 86 per cent of the total prison population in the Northern Territory.

Nationally, in 2012, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were 15 times more likely to be incarcerated than non-Aboriginal people.

Most recently, a Productivity Commission report cited a 57 per cent rise overall in Aboriginal incarceration in the previous 15 years. This is consistent with current evidence that also demonstrates Aboriginal deaths in custody growing steadily in the last 20 years alongside the soaring rates of Aboriginal incarceration.

That Ms Dhu was jailed for to court-ordered unpaid fines, and died as a result, is simply unacceptable under the recommendations of the Royal Commission, which aim to keep Aboriginal Australians out of jail.

Yet in Western Australia, people with unpaid fines can opt to spend a day in jail for every $250 worth of fines ? a law which clearly targets the poor, has resulted in increased numbers of Aboriginal people in custody, and sadly, entrenches jail time as a social norm within Aboriginal communities.

Upon her incarceration, numerous internal factors led to Ms Dhu’s death: police mistreatment, medical staff indifference, institutional racism, poor systems management and lack of familial consultation ? Ms Dhu’s grandmother Carol Roe reportedly phoned the station twice but police refused to let her speak with her granddaughter.

The Deaths in Custody Watch Committee has called for national action, which includes regular and culturally competent communication from police to families, no imprisonment for non-payment of fines, and an independent inquiry into systemic racism in the justice system.

The Committee have also reiterated recommendations from the Royal Commission, including 24-hour legal advice and custody notification line, 24-hour medical coverage and on-call medical assistance at watch houses and lock-ups.

Currently, 24-hour custody notification services are only operational in Victoria, ACT and New South Wales. The New South Wales Aboriginal Legal Service states that, ‘significantly, there have been no Aboriginal deaths in police cell custody since the CNS [Custody Notification Services] began’ in 2000.

At the cost of detaining two juvenile offenders per year, the NSW ALS states that its Custody Notification Service assists over 15,000 Aboriginal people per year.

It is clear that had culturally appropriate legal and medical services been notified of Ms Dhu’s incarceration and condition, her death could have been prevented. Similarly, culturally competent family consultation should have also been conducted ? instead, her family were refused contact.

The key here is cultural competency: Ms Dhu’s treatment at the hands of police and medical staff could not be described as anything but indifferent, racist and cruel. It is clear that a national movement to highlight police treatment of Aboriginal people is required.

Yet there are also systemic societal failures that lead to Aboriginal incarceration in the first instance. The Royal Commission acknowledged this, stating, “it is important that we understand the legacy of Australia’s history, as it helps to explain the deep sense of injustice felt by Aboriginal people [and]their disadvantaged status today.”

The Royal Commission report also concluded that “Aboriginal people remember this history and it is burned into their consciousness”, reflecting the deep trauma colonisation has had on Aboriginal communities.

Inter-generational trauma is the inherited collective trauma experienced by a group over a period of time, reflected in a range of physical, psychological and social indicators. It is evident that in both historic and current contexts, Aboriginal communities have been subject to both collective and individual traumas, resulting in the ‘cascading’ effects of inter-generational trauma.

Essentially, just as wealth, education and power are inherited amongst the privileged, equally so is poverty, poor health, fractured families and substance abuse among the disenfranchised.

It is clear that such historical trauma played a part in Ms Dhu’s initial incarceration: poverty, poor health, substance abuse and a physically abusive relationship were all factors that were reported and must all be taken into consideration.

This is the legacy of colonisation, a manifestation of an indifferent, racist society.

If the recent conduct of the Australian public towards Adam Goodes is anything to go by, or that a Pitjantjatjara woman was told to ‘speak English’ on Invasion Day, Australia as a nation must address its attitudes towards Aboriginal people in order to rectify the traumas that have been wrought upon Aboriginal communities.

While calls for a national movement against police mistreatment against Aboriginal people are both vital and necessary, calls for a national movement against systemic societal mistreatment of Aboriginal people must be voiced as well.

An approach that centres on incarceration prevention as well as custody care on this issue is vital to preventing further Aboriginal deaths in custody.

While the inquest will continue with police inquiries in March 2016, perhaps this should also be the year where Australia holds an inquest into its ongoing colonisation.

John Pilger on the Indigenous struggle: 'There is no alternative now'

by John Pilger

Why are we here? Why are we doing this every 26th January - year after year? Of course, we know why - Indigenous people are saying to Australia: 'Look, we are still here. We have survived the massacres and the cynicism. We have survived.'

But is that enough, I wonder? Is survival without action ever enough?

The sources of power in Australia - especially political and media power -- draw both comfort and delusion from the very idea of Survival Day.

Yes, yes, they say, we understand. We have a place for you on the great Australian facade, next to Qantas and Anzac and Fair Go. Their delusion is that as long as Indigenous people have a token role in the theatre of Australia Day, then all is well. As long as there's a bit of dancing and a smoking ceremony down by the Harbour Bridge, then all is well.

Societies like Australia - with dark secrets and dishonest politics - feed off image and tokenism. They admire their own image of gormless, unthinking patriotism, while secretly admiring their capacity to silence and divert dissent and to control and co-opt people and never to change. It's a clever system of divisiveness. How does it work?

Take the idea of 'reconciliation'. It sounds good, but what does it mean? What is there to reconcile between oppression and suffering, poverty and privilege? Does it include 'justice'? Of course not. Reconciliation is to make the majority feel good with symbolic gestures and symbolic speeches. Nothing more.

Is this acceptable to us, here today?

Is this acceptable to those of us who know that Australia is a version of apartheid South Africa? Ask a black South African who has looked behind the facades.

Is the idea of Survival Day enough for the young Indigenous men who die before they reach the age of 40?

Is it enough for those who succumb to terrible sadness and violence in prison and police custody?

Is it enough for a 22-year-old Indigenous woman from Western Australia - her name was Ms. Dhu - who died in custody and who was laughed at by police officers as she lay in her own vomit?

Is it enough for the children who go deaf and blind from diseases of poverty?

Is it enough for the hundreds of families who are raided in the early morning and their children stolen from them?

The Australia Day banners out there in George Street, Sydney, tell us to: Chill. Enjoy. Reflect. I would add another banner, blood-red in colour, on which is printed the following: 'No country since apartheid South Africa has been more condemned by the UN for its racism than Australia.' It's time to tear down the facades. The image is a lie. No other settler nation has done so little to come to terms with its indigenous people. No other settler nation has done so little to discharge the colonial mentality that imprisons all of us in the past.

What I find especially tragic is the unspoken fear instilled into the tiny Indigenous educated class. This fear says that that, unless they wave the flag, however defensively, they'll be dropped off the bus of white privilege. For until a moral and legal treaty is signed with the first nations of this country, there'll be only pockets of privilege, and no justice whatsoever.

By treaty, I mean an historic series of laws that return to Indigenous people power over their own lives and communities, and a rightful share of the vast wealth of Australia... a treaty that carries the legal obligation of education and housing and health care.

And this will happen only if every day is not just survival day, but a day of action. Direct action. The kind of direct action that horrifies the media that guards a system of divide and rule.

Above all, you must not be afraid. Direct action is the only reason we have certain freedoms in Australia. Read the high court judgement of Lionel Murphy, the great reformer and jurist, who in 1982 said that Aboriginal people had every right to fight back. Murphy quoted Oscar Wilde that without what he called "agitation" - direct action - "there would be no advance towards civilisation." It's up to you how you take action. But you must do it. There is no alternative now.

One thing is absolutely certain: no matter how many flags are waved today, until Indigenous Australia can take back its nationhood, the rest of us can never claim our own.

Australia's Day for Secrets, Flags and Cowards

by John Pilger

On 26 January, one of the saddest days in human history will be celebrated in Australia. It will be "a day for families", say the newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch. Flags will be dispensed at street corners and displayed on funny hats. People will say incessantly how proud they are.

For many, there is relief and gratitude. In my lifetime, non-indigenous Australia has changed from an Anglo-Irish society to one of the most ethnically diverse on earth. Those we used to call "New Australians" often choose 26 January, "Australia Day", to be sworn in as citizens. The ceremonies can be touching. Watch the faces from the Middle East and understand why they clench their new flag.

It was sunrise on 26 January so many years ago when I stood with Indigenous and non Indigenous Australians and threw wreaths into Sydney Harbour. We had climbed down to one of the perfect sandy coves where others had stood as silhouettes, watching as the ships of Britain's "First Fleet" dropped anchor on 26 January, 1788. This was the moment the only island continent on earth was taken from its inhabitants; the euphemism was "settled". It was, wrote Henry Reynolds, one of few honest Australian historians, one of the greatest land grabs in world history. He described the slaughter that followed as "a whispering in our hearts".

The original Australians are the oldest human presence. To the European invaders, they did not exist because their continent had been declared terra nullius: empty land. To justify this fiction, mass murder was ordained. In 1838, the Sydney Monitor reported: "It was resolved to exterminate the whole race of blacks in that quarter." This referred to the Darug people who lived along the great Hawkesbury River not far from Sydney. With remarkable ingenuity and without guns, they fought an epic resistance that remains almost a national secret. In a land littered with cenotaphs honouring Australia's settler dead in mostly imperial wars, not one stands for those warriors who fought and fell defending Australia.

This truth has no place in the Australian consciousness. Among settler nations with indigenous populations, apart from a facile "apology" in 2008, only Australia has refused to come to terms with the shame of its colonial past. A Hollywood film, Soldier Blue, in 1970 famously inverted racial stereotypes and gave Americans a glimpse of the genocide in their own mythical "settlement". Almost half a century later, it is fair to say an equivalent film would never be made in Australia.

In 2014, when my own film, Utopia, which told the story of the Australian genocide, sought a local distributor, I was advised by a luminary in the business: "No way I could distribute this. The audiences wouldn't accept it."

He was wrong - up to a point. When Utopia opened in Sydney a few days before 26 January, under the stars on vacant land in an Indigenous inner-city area known as The Block, more than 4,000 people came, the majority non-Indigenous. Many had travelled from right across the continent. Indigenous leaders who had appeared in the film stood in front of the screen and spoke in "language": their own. Nothing like it had happened before. Yet, there was no press. For the wider community, it did not happen. Australia is a murdochracy, dominated by the ethos of a man who swapped his nationality for the Fox Network in the US.

The star Indigenous AFL footballer Adam Goodes wrote movingly to the Sydney Morning Herald demanding that "the silence is broken". "Imagine," he wrote, "watching a film that tells the truth about the terrible injustices committed against your people, a film that reveals how Europeans, and the governments that have run our country, have raped, killed and stolen from your people for their own benefit.

"Now imagine how it feels when the people who benefited most from those rapes, those killings and that theft - the people in whose name the oppression was done - turn away in disgust when someone seeks to expose it."

Goodes himself had already broken a silence when he stood against racist abuse thrown at him and other Indigenous sportspeople. This courageous, talented man retired from football last year as if under a cloud - with, wrote one commentator, "the sporting nation divided about him". In Australia, it is respectable to be "divided" on opposing racism.

On Australia Day 2016 - Indigenous people prefer Invasion Day or Survival Day - there will be no acknowledgement that Australia's uniqueness is its first people, along with an ingrained colonial mentality that ought to be an abiding embarrassment in an independent nation. This mentality is expressed in a variety of ways, from unrelenting political grovelling at the knee of a rapacious United States to an almost casual contempt for Indigenous Australians, an echo of "kaffir" - abusing South Africans.

Apartheid runs through Australian society. Within a short flight from Sydney, Indigenous people live the shortest of lives. Men are often dead before they reach 45. They die from Dickensian diseases, such as rheumatic heart disease. Children go blind from trachoma, and deaf from otitis media, diseases of poverty. A doctor told me, "I wanted to give a patient an anti-inflammatory for an infection that would have been preventable if living conditions were better, but I couldn't treat her because she didn't have enough food to eat and couldn't ingest the tablets. I feel sometimes as if I'm dealing with similar conditions as the English working class of the beginning of the industrial revolution."

The racism that allows this in one of the most privileged societies on earth runs deep. In the 1920s, a "Protector of Aborigines" oversaw the theft of mixed race children with the justification of "breeding out the colour". Today, record numbers of Indigenous children are removed from their homes and many never see their families again. On 11 February, an inspiring group called Grandmothers Against Removals will lead a march on Federal Parliament in Canberra, demanding the return of the stolen children.

Australia is the envy of European governments now fencing in their once-open borders while beckoning fascism, as in Hungary. Refugees who dare set sail for Australia in overcrowded boats have long been treated as criminals, along with the "smugglers" whose hyped notoriety is used by the Australian media to distract from the immorality and criminality of their own government. The refugees are confined behind barbed wire on average for well over a year, some indefinitely, in barbaric conditions that have led to self-harm, murder, suicide and mental illness. Children have not been spared. An Australian Gulag run by sinister private security firms includes concentration camps on the remote Pacific islands of Manus and Nauru. People often have no idea when they might be freed, if at all.

The Australian military - whose derring-do is the subject of uncritical tomes that fill the shelves of airport bookstalls - has played an important part in "turning back the boats" of refugees fleeing wars, such as in Iraq, launched and prolonged by the Americans and their Australian mercenaries. No irony, let alone responsibility, is acknowledged in this cowardly role.

On this Australia Day, the "pride of the services" will be on display. This pride extends to the Australian Immigration Department, which commits people to its Gulag for "offshore processing", often arbitrarily, leaving them to grieve and despair and rot. Last week it was announced that Immigration officials had spent $400,000 on medals which they will award their heroic selves. Put out more flags.

Follow John Pilger on Twitter @johnpilger & on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pilgerwebsite


- On January 26, Indigenous Australians and their supporters will march from The Block in Redfern, Sydney, to the Sydney Town Hall. The march will begin at 10am.

- On Thursday February 11, Grandmothers Against Removals will address a rally in Canberra. This will start at 12 noon at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, then march to Parliament House.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Purvi Patel Could Be Just the Beginning

by Emily Bazelon
The New York Times Magazine

The prosecution of Purvi Patel began in sorrow and ended in more sadness this week. Patel, a 33-year-old woman who lives in Indiana, was accused of feticide ? specifically, illegally inducing her own abortion ? and accused of having a baby whom she allowed to die. The facts supporting each count are murky, but a jury convicted Patel in February, and on Monday she was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

It’s tempting to simply look away from Patel’s case on the grounds that it is an outlier, however tragic. But it demonstrates how unsparing the criminal-justice system can be to women whose pregnancies end in (or otherwise involve) suspicious circumstances. If one lesson of the case is about the legal risk of inducing your own late-term abortion, another is about the peril of trying to get medical help when you are bleeding and in pain.

Last July, Patel went to an emergency room in South Bend, Ind., where she told the doctors she had a miscarriage. Asked what she had done with the fetal remains, she said the baby was stillborn and, not knowing what else to do, she put the body in a bag and left it in a Dumpster. The police were able to recover the body. Later, they also found text messages in which Patel told a friend about ordering pills to induce an abortion from a pharmacy in Hong Kong and about taking the medication. Three days later, she texted the same friend, “Just lost the baby.”

Patel was charged with felony child neglect and feticide, based on the supposed self-abortion. Asked by Slate’s Leon Neyfakh about the apparent contradiction between the charges, the St. Joseph County prosecutor, Ken Cotter, said that a person can be guilty of feticide under Indiana law for deliberately trying to end a pregnancy, even if the fetus survives. As Neyfakh points out, the Indiana feticide statute exempts legal abortions ? but while the pills Patel took are available in the United States with a prescription, it’s against the law to order them online, as she apparently did. And so she was prosecuted for taking the medication as well as for letting her baby die after the self-abortion failed.

If this case were only about a woman who clearly gave birth to a live baby and then killed her child, it would be clear cut. There is a line between pregnancy and birth, and once it is crossed, the state has just as much at stake in protecting the life of a newborn as it does in protecting the life of anyone else. But the evidence that Patel’s baby was born alive is sharply contested. The pathologist who testified for the defense, Shaku Teas, said the baby was stillborn. Teas told the court the fetus was at 23 or 24 weeks gestation and that its lungs weren’t developed enough to breathe. (Here’s more support for this position.)

But the pathologist for the prosecution, Joseph Prahlow, testified that the fetus was further along than that ? at 25 to 30 weeks gestation, which is past the point of viability ? and was born alive. News reports from the trial emphasized Prahlow’s use of a “lung float test” in making his determination. The idea behind the test ? which dates from the 17th century ? is that if the lungs float in water, the baby took at least one breath. If they sink, then the fetus died before leaving the womb.

If that sounds like the old test for witchcraft ? if an accused witch floated, she was judged guilty; if she sank, she was innocent ? it’s also about as old and nearly as discredited. “The lung float test was disproven over 100 years ago as an indicator for live birth,” Gregory J. Davis, assistant state medical examiner for Kentucky and a professor of pathology and lab medicine at the University of Kentucky, told me. “It’s just not valid.”

When I called Prahlow, who is a professor of pathology and lab medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine, South Bend, and a former president of the National Association of Medical Examiners, he conceded that “the lung float test, in and of itself, is unreliable.” Still, Prahlow argued, the lung test could “provide corroborating evidence, in light of additional findings.”

Prahlow enumerated those findings to me as he had to the Patel jury: The weight of the lungs and the other organs, the inflation of the lungs and the air sacs, the presence of blood in the lung vessels and the “relative maturity” of the lungs. Put these findings together, along with a lack of blood in the baby’s body, and “I can’t come up with any other explanation other than that this baby was born alive,” Prahlow said.

But Davis was unconvinced. He said that while he knows and respects Prahlow, his conclusion was “dead wrong.” Prahlow’s list of findings are still “totally nonspecific” as to whether Patel’s baby died in utero or after being born, Davis said. “Or even if we agree hypothetically that the baby took a breath, that doesn’t mean Ms. Patel did anything wrong. What if she was scared and bleeding herself, and she didn’t clamp the cord in time, because she didn’t know how, and the baby died?”

To Davis, the forensics in this case can’t determine whether Patel was culpable any more than looking at a body that fell from a high building can determine whether the fall was a suicide, an accident or a homicide. “Sometimes the only answer you can give as a scientist is ‘I don’t know,’” he said.

Whatever happened to Patel and her baby at the point of delivery, it’s hard to imagine that either the prosecution or the judge at sentencing would have come down as hard on her if they weren’t sure she’d tried to induce her own illegal abortion. And this is where Patel’s case moves from a fight over birth to a fight over pregnancy.

This is the first case I can find in which a state-level feticide law has been successfully used to punish a woman for trying to have an abortion. Women have been charged with other crimes after taking abortion pills without a prescription, but the feticide charge appears to be Indiana’s idea. It could spread, though: About 38 states have fetal homicide laws in place.

The common justification for these measures is that they protect pregnant women against unscrupulous abortion providers or abusive partners. Indiana’s feticide law was intended to apply to the knowing or intentional termination of another’s pregnancy, its history shows. Abortion opponents, who support feticide laws, have given repeated assurances that their aim is not to put pregnant women in prison. “We do not think women should be criminalized,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List told NPR in 2012 after a woman in Idaho was prosecuted for a self-induced abortion, also with pills she ordered online. “Criminal sanctions or any kind of sanctions are appropriate for abortionists and not for women.”

Nevertheless, prosecutions like these are growing more frequent. In Indiana, before Purvi Patel, there was Bei Bei Shuai, a Chinese immigrant who tried to commit suicide while pregnant and was also charged with feticide. The charges against Shuai were dropped in 2013 after she pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and spent a year in custody. In Iowa, Christine Taylor faced charges for attempted fetal homicide after falling down the stairs, going to the hospital and being reported for trying to end her pregnancy.

The charges in Taylor’s case were dropped, too. But in an Op-Ed in The Times last year, Lynn M. Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, and Jeanne Flavin, a sociology professor at Fordham University, detailed similar cases. A study they conducted, surveying cases since 1973, turned up hundreds of arrests of women for actions taken during their own pregnancies that the authorities deemed harmful to their fetuses.

Many of the cases involved women who took drugs like cocaine and methamphetamines during pregnancy. But they also included women who refused cesarean sections their doctors recommended ? and, lately, women who took abortion pills they ordered online. Last September, I wrote about a mother in Pennsylvania, Jennifer Whalen, who went to prison for helping her 16-year-old daughter do that, even though it was a first-trimester abortion and the girl came to no harm. (Whalen has since been released.)

Patel’s case stands out, for the draconian length of the sentence she received, and for the disturbing image of a baby left in a Dumpster. But it is also part of a pattern. “This case shows how easy it is to sweep up women who’ve had miscarriages and stillbirths into a criminal justice framework,” Paltrow told me. For her, the key question is how to ensure that fewer women become as desperate as Patel must have been about her pregnancy. “Do you think these cases will be less rare if you terrify people and make them criminals?” she said.