• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Sydney police prowl beaches, rally calls for peace

Posted on: Saturday, 17 December 2005, 23:26 CST

By Jim Regan

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian police stepped up security around Sydney's beaches on Sunday, fearing fresh racial violence after officers manning road-blocks found knives in cars, and hate messages circulated by mobile phone.

Police patrolled beaches on horseback and set up checkpoints around some of the city's favorite summer playgrounds, including Bondi Beach, where a peaceful holiday mood was edged by fears of fresh violence between whites and ethnic Lebanese.

"I don't think there will be any trouble today, not with 2,000 cops around," Louise Simpson, a young mother with blonde hair in pig-tails, said beneath a postcard blue sky on Cronulla beach, where the violence first erupted a week ago.

"But what's it going to be like in three or four weeks when the cops go away?" she added as she walked with her husband and daughter along the beach, with mounted police in the background.

Cronulla's mainly white beachside community burst into rioting on December 11 after surfers turned on ethnic Lebanese youth whom they blamed for a recent attack on beach life guards.

The unrest revealed tensions between Sydney's territorial surfing sub-culture, united in surfing shorts and wrap-around sunglasses, and ethnic Lebanese youths from poorer western Sydney who have become regular beachgoers.

"We got a text message from our boys to come down today, but we don't want any trouble," said a young ethnic Lebanese man, Ahmad, who wore a camouflage baseball cap backwards and long baggy shorts with a mobile phone clipped to them.

"We just want to meet the surfers," said Ahmad who hails from Punchbowl, a suburb populated by Lebanese immigrants and a world away from Sydney's wealthier seaside communities.

He showed the text message: "All Arabs unite to let the Aussies know we can't be pushed around."

'WE ARE NOT A RACIST COUNTRY'

Police deployed another 500 police on Sydney beaches on Sunday, taking the total security cordon to about 2,000, and reiterated warnings for people to stay away from the seaside.

Overnight, four men attacked a 32-year-old man with an iron bar near an east Sydney beach, police said, adding they had seized knives, a hand spear, axe and knuckle-dusters from cars stopped at seaside check-points.

White supremacists have added to the tension, along with racist commentary broadcast on talk-back radio, though no one has been killed or reported seriously injured in the clashes so far.

The violence has hurt Australia's image and rekindled old stereotypes of white Australians as racist, opposition Leader Kim Beazley said in radio and television interviews on Sunday.

"We are not a racist country by any description. We have an egalitarian culture ... Not everybody knows that overseas," he said. "They think back to an Australia that they had stereotyped in the past and these riots fit in with that stereotype and that does us damage."

In central Sydney, about 2,000 people held a "United Against Racism" rally, including people who blamed Australia's involvement in the U.S.-led war on Iraq and in Washington's war on terrorism for widening the divide between whites and Muslims.

"I have lived here for a long time but now I feel very terrified and scared to walk down the street," said Sahar Dib, 44, wearing a headscarf. She and thousands of other Lebanese fled to Australia in the 1970s when civil war broke out in Lebanon.

Many Australians from both sides of Sydney's cultural and racial divide are trying to ease tensions, with a surf-lifesaving club on the Cronulla coast inviting ethnic Lebanese to join its ranks and asking them to help launch a new surf boat on Sunday.

Someone had also written "PEACE" in huge letters made from black electrical tape on the Cronulla sand. Another had scratched "Sorry" along the high-water mark.

In Bondi, normally packed with sun-worshippers a week before Christmas, special forces scoured the shallows in an inflatable boat while police cars prowled the famous promenade.

"Bondi has never been this quiet. It's sad to see such an icon of Australia not being used because it's here for everyone," said Dave Byron, taking part in a Hawaiian-themed barbecue and surfing contest with fellow members of the Bondi Longboard Club.

(Additional reporting by Michael Perry)

Source: REUTERS

More News in this Category