Australian Aborigines and refugee groups on Thursday announced plans to protest outside Rugby World Cup grounds, comparing themselves with anti-apartheid demonstrators who dogged tours by South Africa’s Springboks in the 1970s.
Refugee advocates plan to line the streets leading up to Sydney’s Olympic stadium on Friday for the tournament’s opening ceremony to protest the government’s policy of locking up asylum seekers.
”In view of rugby union crowds’ history of support for human rights, we believe they are fair game for actions against today’s abuses,” Children Out of Detention group coordinator Dianne Hiles said in Sydney on Thursday.
”It is a major international event so we want to let the international community know a sizeable sector of Australia is disgraced with the policy.”
Indigenous organiser Gracelyn Smallwood said placard-carrying Aborigines would make anti-racism speeches outside the stadium in Townsville where Japan play Scotland on Sunday.
Smallwood said the Rugby World Cup was not being specifically targeted but Aborigines wanted to use the high profile of the tournament, hyped as the third-largest sporting event in the world.
”It’s about black Australia in general … it’s about the lack of social justice towards indigenous [people],” Smallwood said.
Smallwood, a councillor with Australia’s main Aboriginal body, Atsic, said indigenous people in Townsville, on Queensland’s sub-tropical north coast, regularly encountered racism.
”It’s like we’re in Alabama in the 1960s,” she said, pointing to a recent suspended sentence handed down to a hit-and-run driver who killed a young Aboriginal woman.
Australia’s 430 000 Aborigines represent only about 2% of the population, but suffer far higher rates of poverty, ill health, imprisonment, sexual assault and substance abuse than the rest of the population despite the efforts of successive
governments to find solutions.
Threats of Aboriginal protests at the 2000 Sydney Olympics were largely abandoned after organisers held talks with indigenous groups in the lead-up to the Games.
An Atsic spokesperson said he was not aware of any more protests planned around the rugby tournament. — Sapa-AFP