Australian PM urges calm as violence flares in Sydney and Melbourne
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009...dents-attacked
Kevin Rudd, the Australian prime minister, today called for calm amid escalating anger over a spate of attacks against Indian students in Sydney and Melbourne.
Indians in the two cities have been involved in standoffs with police during a wave of protests that began two weeks ago after Shravan Kumar, a 25-year-old student from Hyderabad, was stabbed with a screwdriver in an attack that left him fighting for his life.
The stabbing was the latest in a sharp rise in violent robberies in Australia's two biggest cities, many of which appear to target Indian students.
Melbourne police have estimated that Indians have been the victims in at least 27% of thefts in the city's crime-stricken western district in the last year.
In the last two days protests against the alleged racial violence have shifted to the western Sydney suburb of Harris Park where Lebanese youths – a group often reviled by the media and blamed for starting the Cronulla Beach race riots in 2005 – clashed with Indian students in the streets.
Rudd condemned the violence yesterday, but denied the crimes were racially motivated. "The truth is, in our cities right across the country, there are acts of violence every day. That's just a regrettable fact of urban life," he said.
Police say the attacks are often ordinary thefts and that Indian students are vulnerable because they travel alone late at night to part-time jobs or from university carrying valuables such as laptop computers.
Rudd insisted that Australia remained "one of the safest countries in the world" for international students.
However, Simon Overland, Victoria state's police chief, admitted that some of the attacks were "clearly racist in motivation" as he visited Melbourne yesterday with the state premier, John Brumby, in an attempt to counter the growing perception that it was no longer a safe destination.
Victoria attracts many Indian students. Education is ranked as Australia's third largest export, worth more than AU$15bn (£7.4bn) a year, of which about AU$2bn is earned from the 81,520 vocational and university students from India who have been enrolling into Australian institutions at an ever increasing rate over the past decade.
The violence threatens to undermine the industry as tempers have flared in India, where protesters have been burning effigies of Rudd on the streets of New Delhi, spurred on by a steady rise of racist taunts from Australia.
A Facebook group with about 65,000 members has been used to attack immigrants who "do not adapt to the Australian way of life" and includes discussion topics such as "Will Indian race-rioters be hunted down?" and "All foreigners need to be euthanised".
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off back to india
Originally Posted by Outlaw
