More Ethnic Violence In Australia. Is Its Multicultural Experiment Unraveling?

Shocked Australians wrestled on Tuesday with fresh signs of simmering tensions in the country's multicultural melting pot after ethnic violence erupted at the glamorous Australian Open tennis tournament.

Unprecedented courtside clashes between Serb, Croat and Greek fans on Monday came just a year after the worst racial violence in the nation's history, when white mobs attacked Lebanese youths at Sydney's Cronulla beach in December 2005.

And they followed an ugly series of ethnic incidents in the first two weeks of 2007, with Aboriginal groups attacking police, Muslims unleashing and receiving insults and a town banning African refugees.

Apart from fewer than half-a-million Aborigines, all 20 million Australians are immigrants or descendants of immigrants and old ethnicities at times override the new national identity, to the despair of critics.

"We're Australians and love our sport - all that political stuff does not belong here in Australia," said Serbian community leader John Pavasovic after the violence on the first day of the Australian Open in Melbourne. Local Croatian radio producer Nikola Rasic agreed: "It is true there is no love lost between the groups, but it's unfortunate some people have chosen to bring their kids up in this country with this rivalry."

More than 150 fans, many draped in national colours, were ejected from Melbourne Park at the first Grand Slam of the year after the outbreak of kicking, punching and hurling of chairs and bottles. Front page newspaper photographs of the violence recalled the Cronulla riots, which sparked a wave of national soul-searching over racism.

Even before the intra-European tennis violence, incidents involving Muslims, Africans and Aborigines this year had brought the debate on race relations back to the comment pages of Australia's major newspapers.

The country's top Islamic cleric, Sheikh Taj Aldin al-Hilali, last week sparked the latest round of a religious war of words by mocking the convict ancestry of many white Australians. Egyptian born Al-Hilali said in an interview on Cairo television that Muslims had a greater claim to Australia because they had paid for their tickets while the first white settlers arrived in shackles.

Writing in Tuesday's Australian newspaper, a senator for Prime Minister John Howard's conservative coalition used Al-Hilali's comments to attack the policy of multiculturalism. "It looked really good on paper. Immigrants would be encouraged to retain their distinct cultural identities on condition that they subscribed to the tenets of Westminster democracy," wrote Brett Mason. "But since September 11, multiculturalism has been taking a beating at home and abroad," he said, pointing to what he called the emergence of Islamic extremism in Britain and Australia.

The spotlight has also fallen on the eastern country town of Tamworth, where the town council has been accused of racism for refusing to accept five Sudanese refugee families. Tamworth mayor James Treloar said the Africans were rejected because cultural differences could lead to another "Cronulla riot". Under pressure to reverse the decision, the council was due to vote again on the issue later on Tuesday.

In another black-white confrontation, this time involving the country's original inhabitants, anti-police riots erupted in two Aboriginal communities in Queensland state last week.

In an opinion page article headed "Riot sets racial time bomb ticking", the Daily Telegraph linked the violence to the refusal to prosecute a police officer blamed for the death of an Aboriginal prisoner.

After the Cronulla riots, Howard played down charges that racism was rife in Australia, calling it one of the most successful cultural melting pots in the world.

However, an AC Nielsen poll at the time found that 75 percent of respondents agreed with the statement: "There is an underlying racism in Australia." (Channel Newsasia)
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