The Invasion of Australia

The City of Sydney council has voted to replace the words "European arrival" in the official record with "invasion". The deputy lord mayor, Marcelle Hoff, says it is intellectually dishonest to use any other word to describe how Aboriginal Australia was dispossessed by the British. "We were invaded," said Paul Morris, an Aboriginal adviser to the council. "It is the truth and shouldn't be watered down. We wouldn't expect Jewish people to accept a watered-down version of the Holocaust, so why should we?"

In 2008, the then prime minister Kevin Rudd formally apologised to Aborigines wrenched from their families as children under a policy inspired by the crypto-fascist theories of eugenics. White Australia was said to be coming to terms with its rapacious past, and present. Was it? The Rudd government, noted a Sydney Morning Herald editorial at the time, "has moved quickly to clear away this piece of political wreckage in a way that responds to some of its supporters' emotional needs, yet it changes nothing. It is a shrewd manoeuvre."

The City of Sydney ruling is a very different gesture – different, and admirable; for it reflects not a liberal and limited "sorry campaign", seeking feel-good "reconciliation" rather than justice, but counters a cowardly movement of historical revision in which a collection of far-right politicians, journalists and minor academics claimed there was no invasion, no genocide, no stolen generations, no racism.

The platform for these holocaust deniers is the Murdoch press, which has long run its own insidious campaign against the indigenous population, presenting them as victims of each other or as noble savages requiring firm direction: the eugenicists' view. Favoured black "leaders" who tell the white elite what it wants to hear while blaming their own people for their poverty provide a PC cover for a racism that often shocks foreign visitors. Today the first Australians have one of the shortest life expectancies in the world and are incarcerated at five times the rate of black people in apartheid South Africa. Go to the outback and see the children blinded by trachoma, a biblical disease, entirely preventable. The Aboriginal people are both Australia's secret and this otherwise derivative society's most amazing distinction.

In its landmark rejection of historical propaganda, Sydney recognises black Australia's "cultural endurance" and, without saying so directly, a growing resistance to an outrage known as "the intervention". In 2007, John Howard sent the army into Aboriginal Australia to "protect the children" who, said his minister, were being abused in "unthinkable numbers". It is striking how Australia's incestuous political and media elite so often rounds on the tiny black minority with all the fervour of the guilty, unaware perhaps that the national mythology remains culpably damaged while a nationhood, once stolen, is not returned to the original inhabitants.

Journalists accepted the Howard government's reason for "intervening" and went hunting for the lurid. One national TV programme used an "anonymous youth worker" to allege "sex slavery" rings among the Mutitjulu people. He was later exposed as a federal government official. Of 7,433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors, just four were identified as possible cases of abuse. There were no "unthinkable numbers". The rate was around that of white child abuse. The difference was that no soldiers invaded the beachside suburbs; no white parents were swept aside, their wages diminished and welfare "quarantined". It was all a mighty charade, but with serious purpose.

The Labor governments that followed Howard have reinforced the new controlling powers over black homelands, the strict Julia Gillard especially – she who lectures her compatriots on the virtues of colonial wars that "make us who we are today" and imprisons refugees from those wars indefinitely, including children, on an offshore island not deemed to be Australia, which it is.

In the Northern Territory, the Gillard government is in effect driving Aboriginal communities into apartheid areas where they will be "economically viable". The unspoken reason is that the Northern Territory is the only part of Australia where Aborigines have comprehensive land rights; and here lie some of the world's biggest deposits of uranium, and other minerals.

The most powerful political force in Australia is the multibillion-dollar mining industry. Canberra wants to mine and sell, and those bloody blackfellas are in the way again. But this time they are organised, articulate, militant. They know it is a second invasion. Having finally uttered the forbidden word, white Australians should stand with them.

by John Pilger

Remember Rwanda

In a park in London, two men greet each other as old friends. One is grey-haired and American, the other a tall Rwandan in a smart suit. They embrace. The American wipes tears from his eyes. The last time the two men met was in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, in 1994: the year of the genocide in which 800,000 people were killed in 100 days.

The two men, Jean-Francois Gisimba and Carl Wilkens, met a handful of times in that year but in the most extreme of circumstances. Together with Jean-Francois' brother, Damas, they saved more than 400 children and hundreds of adults from the Interahamwe, the Hutu militia intent on eradicating Tutsi "inyenzi" or "cockroaches".

Seventeen years later, the Aegis Trust, which campaigns against genocide, has brought Jean-Francois and Carl back together in the UK. At last, Jean-Francois has the chance to say: "You saved my life but I don't understand why."

Back in 1994, Jean-Francois, then 24, and Damas were running the orphanage their late parents had founded in Kigali in the 1980s. Of mixed Hutu and Tutsi parentage, they were caring for around 60 children of different ethnicities. "We were brought up not to see a difference," Jean-Francois says. Damas ran the orphanage full-time, while Jean-Francois also worked for Radio Rwanda.

On 6 April, a private jet carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down near Kigali airport, triggering the genocide. Government-controlled news organisations began reporting that the Hutu president had been assassinated by Tutsi rebels. Within hours, Kigali was surrounded by roadblocks and the systematic murder of Tutsi families by militia groups began.

Jean-Francois rushed home from the radio station to find hundreds of people gathered at the orphanage, seeking shelter. "They came not because they thought we could save them, but because they didn't want to die alone," he says.

People were hiding in the attic, in the basement and in locked rooms, sick with dysentery and starvation. The brothers kept them alive for months with the help of Red Cross parcels. Because of their father, they had Hutu identity cards, and Damas began to negotiate for the orphanage's survival.

"My brother would go for a beer with the killers," Jean-Francois remembers. "He would say: don't come, don't panic the kids, but he was also protecting the adults inside. He was pretending to be with them."

As the killings continued, the militia members became restless. Armed men began turning up drunk at the orphanage. On one visit they tortured and killed eight people they found hiding on the roof. Then the brothers heard from friends that they planned to kill everyone at the orphanage.

"The day you came was the day the massacre was going to happen," Jean-Francois tells Carl. "There was a knock at the door and I thought: this is it. A boy said, there is a muzungu – a white man – at the door looking for you."

Jean-Francois looks at the man sitting next to him. "It was you in your white Toyota Corolla."

Carl was then the 36-year-old head of Adrai, an Adventist relief organisation working in Rwanda. On 10 April, the UN had evacuated all foreigners from the country, including Carl's wife, parents and three young children.

Carl was the only American who stayed through the genocide. By negotiating with key militia figures including Colonel Tharsisse Renzaho, the prefect of Kigali, he managed to get supplies of water and food through to people in dire need. Renzaho had told him there was an orphanage that needed help.

"I came out and you started telling me: 'I'm bringing water,'" Jean-Francois says. "I wanted you to stop talking. I had the feeling that you did not know what was going on. You just wanted to deliver water and go to the next place. I dragged you to Damas's office.

"I said to you: they are coming in five or 10 minutes to kill all of us. I just wanted you to stay there and witness – so that later you could tell people what had happened."

Carl wanted to leave immediately to fetch help. "I remember standing in the parking lot by my Corolla. You kept on telling me: don't go."

Jean-Francois shakes his head. "We went together slowly up to the car. You were trying to start it. You looked in the mirror and I remember you putting your hands through your hair. You got out again and got on your radio."

As the men stood by the car, dozens of Interahamwe militia began surrounding the orphanage. "The leader said: 'I am coming to take all the Tutsis who are here.'"

"Carl was still on his radio. Then I heard them say: 'We were going to carry out our mission, but the American is there.' The boss said in Kinyarwanda: 'Leave the place, don't do it in front of that man.'"

With Jean-Francois still begging him to stay, Carl left to raise the alarm. When he reached Renzaho's office he found that the prime minister, Jean Kambanda – who would later plead guilty to genocide – was visiting.

"He was one of three people orchestrating the genocide," Carl says. "But what choice did I have? I said: 'There's a massacre about to happen at Gisimba.'

"He talked to his men and said: 'We're aware of this.' He promised me that the orphans would be OK. He shook hands with me."

At the orphanage, Jean-Francois waited. "For three days nothing happened," he says. "Then an army major arrived. Many Interahamwe came behind him. One of the biggest killers – who had killed thousands – was there. 'Inyenzi' he called us – cockroaches."

The major took Jean-Francois aside. "He said to me, 'I am not a killer, I am with you, but you need to tell me the truth.' I decided to trust him. I said, well, the truth is we are hiding many people – more than 400 children, and a big number of adults, widows. I don't even know the number myself.

"He said: 'Be ready to be evacuated.'"

By the next day, more militia had surrounded the orphanage. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the Tutsi rebel army fighting their way back into Rwanda, were now close to the capital. "Bombs were landing like rain from the hills," Jean-Francois says. "I thought: now we are going to die.

"The major returned with 12 bodyguards. He said to his men, 'Whoever tries to shoot, you shoot all of them.' If only more soldiers had been like him.

"I thought these were my last moments. There was shooting. They took us to the road. He packed all of us into buses. He had a revolver in his hand and a Kalashnikov on his shoulder. They took us all up to St Michel Cathedral. Two to three days later the RPF took the area and we were safe."

More than 17 years later, Carl and Jean-Francois have met again because the Gisimba orphanage (still run by Jean-Francois and Damas) needs money. Next week is the 25th anniversary of the orphanage's foundation. "We want it to have a future," Jean-Francois says.

In London, the American turns to the Rwandan and says: "I never knew if it was the right decision to leave you at the orphanage."

"It was the right decision," Jean-Francois replies. "But what about my question – why did you help us?"

Carl talks about not abandoning his Rwandan staff and friends, but Jean-Francois is shaking his head. "You were on the other side of the city so why cross through all those roadblocks, bombs and bullets to get to the orphanage?"

Carl looks at him as if he should know. Jean-Francois, after all, is a man who let hundreds shelter in the orphanage knowing it meant almost certain death. "Why did you help those people?" he asks.

Jean-Francois looks at him with incredulity. "How would we turn people away? We were taught by our parents that we should respect other people's lives. If you tell people to get away you are an animal not a human being."

And so somehow he himself answers the question he has been waiting 17 years to ask.

Sri Lanka v Tamil People

The footage screened by Channel 4 last night ranks among the most horrific yet shown on British television. Naked prisoners shot in the head; the dead bodies of women who had been raped, dumped on a truck; the immediate aftermath of a shell landing on a hospital – images caught on mobile phones of the atrocities committed by government soldiers in the final months of Sri Lanka's brutal civil war. The story of what happened two years ago when government forces corralled hundreds of thousands of Tamils in horrific conditions into an ever-shrinking space, as they closed in the defeated Tigers, is well known. A UN panel last month found credible allegations of war crimes committed both by the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE. But the pictures of the shootings are new and Channel 4 has done what human rights organisations should have been doing in compiling and sifting through it.

The footage, shot either by escapers, or as trophy videos by soldiers committing the atrocities, is almost unwatchable. But on this occasion there are two reasons why it was right to dispense with the responsibility broadcasters have to avoid causing distress. First, the Sri Lankan government engineered a war without witness, which was why, in echoes of Srebrenica, they forced UN observers to leave first. This film atones, in small part, for the failure of the international community to make Sri Lanka accountable for these deaths. Second, the parallel with Srebrenica is only too real. As the UN panel reveals, the shelling of hospitals in the so-called no-fire zones was so systematic – there were 65 such attacks – that it is impossible to believe it was random. One shelling took place after a Red Cross official supplied the GPS co-ordinates to the Sri Lankan authorities, a procedure meant to avoid such shellings.

The targeting of civilians is a war crime. If proved, these charges go right up the chain of command of Sri Lanka's military and government. If Iran stands condemned for killing hundreds in the wake of the June 2009 election, if Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic now face justice in The Hague, if Bashar al-Assad faces UN sanctions for an assault that has killed 1,300 Syrians, how it is that President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother, the defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, escape all censure, after over 40,000 civilians were killed?

That the LTTE assassinated presidents and invented the suicide belt, that the Tigers used civilians as human shields, is no defence from the charge that Sri Lankan soldiers summarily executed prisoners in their custody. Sri Lanka is trying to pretend these events are history, as the economy and tourism pick up. They are not. This evidence has to be faced.

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The Tamil People

This is not a war on terror. It is a racist war on all Tamils

A colossal humanitarian tragedy is under way in Sri Lanka, and the silence from India is shameful. The world must step in

by Arundhati Roy

The horror that is unfolding in Sri Lanka becomes possible because of the silence that surrounds it. There is almost no reporting in the mainstream Indian media - or indeed in the international press - about what is happening there. Why this should be so is a matter of serious concern.

From the little information that is filtering through, it looks as though the Sri Lankan government is using the propaganda of "the war on terror" as a fig leaf to dismantle any semblance of democracy in the country, and commit unspeakable crimes against the Tamil people. Working on the principle that every Tamil is a terrorist unless he or she can prove otherwise, civilian areas, hospitals and shelters are being bombed and turned into a war zone. Reliable estimates put the number of civilians trapped at over 200,000. The Sri Lankan army is advancing, armed with tanks and aircraft.

Meanwhile, there are official reports that several "welfare villages" have been established to house displaced Tamils in Vavuniya and Mannar districts. According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, these villages "will be compulsory holding centres for all civilians fleeing the fighting". Is this a euphemism for concentration camps? Mangala Samaraveera, the former foreign minister, told the Telegraph: "A few months ago the government started registering all Tamils in Colombo on the grounds that they could be a security threat, but this could be exploited for other purposes, like the Nazis in the 1930s. They're basically going to label the whole civilian Tamil population as potential terrorists."

Given its stated objective of "wiping out" the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, this malevolent collapse of civilians and "terrorists" does seem to signal that the government of Sri Lanka is on the verge of committing what could end up being genocide. According to a UN estimate, several thousand people have already been killed. Thousands more are critically wounded. The few eyewitness reports that have come out are descriptions of a nightmare from hell.

What we are witnessing, or should we say what is happening, in Sri Lanka - and what is being so effectively hidden from public scrutiny - is a brazen, openly racist war. The impunity with which the Sri Lankan government is being able to commit these crimes actually unveils the deeply ingrained racist prejudice that is precisely what led to the marginalisation and alienation of the Tamils of Sri Lanka in the first place. That racism has a long history - of social ostracism, economic blockades, pogroms and torture. The brutal nature of the decades-long civil war, which started as a peaceful protest, has its roots in this.

Why the silence? In another interview Samaraveera says that "a free media is virtually non-existent in Sri Lanka today". He talks about death squads and "white van abductions", which have made society "freeze with fear". Voices of dissent, including several journalists, have been abducted and assassinated. The International Federation of Journalists accuses the Sri Lanka government of using a combination of anti-terrorism laws, disappearances and assassinations to silence journalists.

There are disturbing but unconfirmed reports that India is lending material and logistical support to the Sri Lankan government in these crimes against humanity. If the reports are true, it is outrageous. What of the governments of other countries? Pakistan? China? What are they doing to help or to harm the situation?

In the Indian state of Tamil Nadu the war in Sri Lanka has fuelled passions that have led to more than 10 people immolating themselves. The public anger and anguish, much of it genuine, some of it cynical political manipulation, has become an election issue.

It is extraordinary that this concern has not travelled to the rest of India. Why is there silence here? There are no "white van abductions" - at least not on this issue. Given the scale of what is happening in Sri Lanka, the silence is inexcusable. More so because of the Indian government's long history of irresponsible dabbling in the conflict, first taking one side and then the other. Several of us - including myself - who should have spoken out much earlier have not done so, simply because of a lack of information about the war.

So while the killing continues, while tens of thousands of people are being barricaded into concentration camps, while more than 200,000 face starvation, and a genocide waits to happen, there is dead silence from this great country.

It's a colossal humanitarian tragedy. The world must step in. Now. Before it's too late.

• Arundhati Roy is a writer and activist who won the Booker Prize for her novel, The God of Small Things

The Massacre, As per Today

As per Sun 11 Jan 09, and according to international press, Israel has killed 854 and wounded more than 3,500 Palestinians. Palestinians have killed, in the other hand, 13 Israelis (10 of them, military personnel). You can reach your own conclusions.