John Pilger: Making the World a More Dangerous Place

The Australian parliament building reeks of floor polish. The wooden floors shine so virtuously they reflect the cartoon like portraits of prime ministers, bewigged judges and viceroys. Along the gleaming white, hushed corridors, the walls are hung with Aboriginal art, one painting after another as in a monolithic gallery, divorced from their origins, the irony brutal. The poorest, sickest, most incarcerated people on earth provide a facade for those who oversee the theft of their land and its plunder. Australia has 40% of the world's uranium, all of it on indigenous land. Prime Minister Julia Gillard has just been to India to sell uranium to a government that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and whose enemy, Pakistan, is also a non signatory. The threat of nuclear war between them is constant. Uranium is an essential ingredient of nuclear weapons. Gillard's deal in Delhi formally ends the Australian Labor Party's long standing policy of denying uranium to countries that reject the NPT's obligation "to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament". Like the people of Japan, Australian Aborigines have experienced the horror of nuclear weapons. During the 1950's the British government tested atomic bombs at Maralinga in South Australia. The Aboriginal population was not consulted and received scant or no warning, and still suffer the effects. Yami Lester was a boy when he saw the nuclear flash and subsequently went blind. The enduring struggle of Aboriginal people for recognition as human beings has been a fight not only for their land but for what lies beneath it. Since they were granted a status higher than that of sheep, up to 1971, unlike the sheep, they were not counted. Many of their modest land rights have been subverted or diminished by governments in Canberra. In 2007, prime minister John Howard used the army to launch an emergency intervention in Aboriginal communities in the resource rich Northern Territory. Lurid and fraudulent stories of paedophile rings were the cover. Indigenous people were told they would not receive basic services if they did not surrender the leasehold of their land. Gillard's minister of indigenous affairs has since given this Orwellian title of "Stronger Futures". The tactics include driving people into hub towns and denying decent housing to those forced to live up to a dozen in one room. The removal of Aboriginal children has reached the level of the infamous "Stolen Generation" of the last century. Many may never see their families again. Once the intervention had got under way, hundreds of licences were granted to companies exploring for minerals, including uranium. Contemporary politics in Australia is often defined by the power of the mining companies. When the previous Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd, proposed a tax on record mining profits, he was deposed by a backroom party cabal, including Gillard, who reduced the tax. Diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks reveal that two of the plotters against Rudd were informants of the US embassy, which Rudd had angered by not following to the letter US plans to encircle China and to release uranium for sale to US clients such as India. Gillard has since returned Australia to its historic relationship with Washington, similar to that of an east European satellite of the Soviet Union. The day before Barack Obama arrived in Canberra last year to declare China the new enemy of the free world, Gillard announced the end of her party's ban on uranium sales. Washington's other post cold war obsessions demand the services of Australia. These include the intimidation of Iran and destruction of that country's independence, the undermining of the NPT and prevention of nuclear free zones that threaten the the nuclear armed dominance of the US and Israel. Unlike Iran, a founding signatory of the NPT and supporter of a nuclear free zone Middle East, the US and Israel ban independent inspections, and both are currently threatening to attack Iran which, as the combined agencies of US intelligence confirmed, has no nuclear weapons.