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Sydney, Australia

Hearing on U.S.-NATO war crimes in Australia

By Jan Allen

Sydney, Australia

Following hearings on U.S./NATO war crimes in Yugoslavia held in the United States and Europe, the International Action Center drew over 300 people to its Commission of Inquiry hearing held Dec. 17 in Sydney, Australia.

The hearing heard evidence and eyewitness reports of the war crimes committed against the peoples of Yugoslavia during the 78-day U.S./NATO terror-bombing campaign.

The featured speakers included the well-known Aboriginal activist Ray Jackson, Serbian National Federation of Australia President Elija Glisic, and Ethnic Communities Council of New South Wales Vice Chairperson Angela Chang.

The program was moderated by Ray Jackson, who represented the Aboriginal Nation. Jackson welcomed the hearings to Aboriginal soil. Jackson has a long and distinguished involvement in defending Aboriginal rights and union struggles.

Elija Glisic delivered a riveting account of the Yugoslavian peoples' heroic resistance to the mass destruction of NATO bombs. He described how the arms industry in the United States profited from the war, and analyzed the Rambouillet agreement, describing Yugoslavia as negotiating with "a cruise missile to their head."

Angela Chan represented the Chinese community in Australia. She condemned the deliberate NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, pointing out that the Chinese government had rejected the U.S. explanation that the attack was a mistake.

She described the history of racism against Chinese people in Australia and condemned the attacks going back to the 1830s. Chang made links with other nationalities in Australia who suffered under similar inhumanities such as the Vietnamese, Arabic, Jewish and Muslim peoples.

Chan is a practicing barrister--a trial lawyer. She addressed the issue of racism applied to the Indigenous peoples of Australia--including the legal principle of "terra nulliu" (land with no one) used to deny the very existence of any human habitation of Australia before the British invasion.

Successive Australian governments continued this British policy, refusing until 1967 to count Aboriginal people in the census.

A Serbian refugee from the NATO terror bombings of Bosnia described how his Belgrade apartment was bombed, killing his wife with flying glass and inflicting serious injury on the children. The family felt trapped because of the continuing bombing of the neighborhood and NATO attacks on trains and buses used to flee the horrors of the bombing.

The refugee described how NATO refined the Nazi technique of terrorizing civilians with bombings by repeating the attack a few minutes later to target emergency medical workers who arrive to help the victims. The repeat of the attack serves not only to intimidate medical workers, but to greatly increase the trauma to civilians.

Mila Staples from the University of Newcastle described the toxic and radiological effects of depleted uranium on both the civilian population and the occupying troops from the NATO countries. A member of the audience later told how a single radioactive atom of DU lodged in the lungs is equivalent to an X-ray every hour for the rest of a victim's life.

The International Action Center was represented by Malcolm Cannon, who spoke of the importance of Commissions of Inquiry and urged the audience to continue the inquiry's work of outreach and education. Cannon urged participants to organize among local anti-war activists to attend the War Crimes Tribunal in New York next spring.

Copyright © 1999 workers.org