THE AGE http://www.theage.com.au/daily/990309/news/news6.html Tuesday 9 March 1999 Germans agree to look at uranium By GEOFF KITNEY BERLIN, MONDAY The German Greens Party has given an Aboriginal activist the platform of its national conference to seek support for the end of Australian uranium exports to Germany. The conference, attended by German ministers including the Foreign Minister, Mr Joschka Fischer, gave a commitment to work to stop German nuclear power utilities buying Australian uranium. The Greens, the junior partner in the German centre-left coalition Government, will also host a visit by Jabiluka Aborigines opposed to the next stage of development at the Ranger mine in the Northern Territory. The purpose of their visit is also to lobby for a ban on German purchases of Australian uranium. The weekend party conference in Erfurt heard a 15-minute impassioned appeal from Mr Michael Anderson, the chairman of the Euahlai native title claim group from north-western New South Wales. He asked for the Greens to use their position within the German Government to help stop uranium mining on Aboriginal land in Australia. Australia provides about 20 per cent of the uranium used to fire Germany's 19 nuclear power reactors, with contracts that earn about $10 million a year for Australian exporters. The German Government is committed to phasing out the nuclear industry but this will not happen until next century. An internal Government row is preventing attempts by the Greens to speed up that process. Mr Anderson said Aborigines had to turn to the international community and to countries such as Germany for support because they were effectively locked out of the decision-making process in Australia. The Wik native title legislation had given mining companies a ``statutory guarantee of carte blanche access to mineral wealth on Aboriginal land''. ``We are being imprisoned for so-called `trespassing' on land which we consider to be Aboriginal land, the land with which we have strong spiritual links. Mining on this land is striking at the heart of the people's spirituality and we have no alternative but to conduct an international campaign to try to get people in the rest of the world to help us defend our rights.'' Mr Anderson will join other Aboriginal activists in Geneva on Friday for a special session of the United Nations committee on the elimination of racial discrimination to consider the treatment of Aboriginal people. He said that European political parties that professed concern for human rights should be actively supporting the Aboriginal people in their fight to decide what happens on traditional lands. After his speech to the Greens Ms Angelika Loeback, who heads the German Government's human rights committee, asked Mr Anderson to present a written submission on the impact of mining on Aboriginal communities and on what assistance these communities wanted from the German Government. The UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination adopted an ``early warning'' against Australia last August, raising questions about the Wik legislation and treatment of Aboriginal people. Aboriginal groups, led by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, have put submissions to the committee and the Federal Government will respond at a formal hearing of the committee on Friday. Copyright (c) David Syme & Co 1999. Any unauthorised use, copying or mirroring is prohibited. ************************************************************************* This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use." Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
