The Militant - April 28, 2003 -- Australian cops attack protests

Vol. 67/No. 14 April 28, 2003

Australian cops attack protests
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BY BOB AIKEN
SYDNEY, Australia--High school and university students protesting the U.S.-led war on Iraq here March 26 and April 2 were confronted by large mobilizations of cops who assaulted both of the protests. The demonstrations were called by the "Books Not Bombs" coalition. This group also organized an antiwar student strike of some 5,000 March 5. Significant numbers of Arab-Australian students turned out for the protests.

The March 26 action of about 3,000 students was met by a heavy and provocative police presence. Several dozen people, the youngest 10 years old, were arrested. A number were hurt as the cops clashed with students at the Town Hall assembly point and then during the course of a march through the city.

When the protesters marched to Australian prime minister John Howard’s offices downtown after a rally at Hyde Park, police blocked off the street, trapping about 600 protesters between two lines of cops for about two hours. The police then cleared the streets outside their lines before letting the trapped demonstrators go.

In a March 27 lead story headlined "Hijacked by hatred," Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported Assistant Police Commissioner Richard Adams’s claim that "A large group of Middle Eastern males started to engage and incite the police."

"When it turns ugly and they come ready to fight and injure police," Deputy Police Commissioner David Madden chimed in, "it is no longer an Australian protest."

Eyewitnesses said that the trouble on March 26 started after the cops arrested two Arab youth and pulled the hajib, the Muslim headscarf, off a young woman protester. Pashwa Rahim, who figured prominently in the Telegraph’s front-page photo of the protest, trying to get out of the clutches of the police, responded the following day that he had acted "in self-defense."

When protest organizers announced that they would call another march the following week, the cops responded by stating they would break it up. New South Wales state premier Robert Carr, of the Labor Party, took the lead in red-baiting the protest. He declared that the April 2 march should not go ahead unless organizers could "control the behavior of extremist elements."

Several hundred police were mobilized April 2 to block some 500 hundred students from marching out of the Sydney Town Hall Square. Under these conditions, protest organizers abandoned their plan to march. They called on participants, instead, to join another antiwar mobilization scheduled for April 13 by the "Walk Against War" coalition. This group organized a series of large peace parades here over the last few months. As the April 2 rally broke up, police arrested eight students when a small group continued to protest.

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