apologies for cross-postings...
Kim
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ABORIGINAL COMMUNITY TO LEAD PEOPLE'S MARCH ON CHOGM
By Karen Fredericks -Green Left Weekly, 29 Aug, 2001 www.greenleft.org.au
BRISBANE - The traditional owners of Brisbane and surrounding areas will
throw their backing behind planned protest plans against the Commonwealth
Heads of Government Meeting in October,deciding at a mass meeting at
Musgrave Park on August 17 to establish an Aboriginal Tent Embassy in the
park during CHOGM and to lead the People's March on the opening of the meeting.
The People's March will gather at Roma Street Forum at 9am on October 6 and
will proceed across the Brisbane River to the tent embassy at Musgrave
Park, located just a few hundred meters from the CHOGM venue at the
Brisbane convention centre.
Sam Watson, a spokesperson for the Brisbane Murri community and the CHOGM
Action Network (CAN), told Green Left Weekly the proposal received strong
support from traditional owners from all areas in and around Brisbane.
"The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service will be providing
legal observers and legal support and the medical service will be setting
up a clinic", he said. "All community organisations will be providing
transport to ensure that our elders and young children can participate."
The community meeting's proposals for the march and tent embassy received
enthusiastic support at the ATSIC board meeting that took place in Brisbane
a few days later. Land councils and other Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander community organisations around the country will be encouraged to
come to Brisbane to participate.
The People's March on CHOGM will take up the call for a treaty between
indigenous and non-indigenous people in Australia and participating groups
will also raise further specific demands, such as compensation for the
thousands of Aboriginal people who worked to develop pastoral leases and
other rural infrastructure in Queensland and were never paid for their labour.
CAN spokesperson Karen Fletcher said that environmentalist, socialist and
human rights groups in the network see the demand for a treaty as
inextricably linked with the other issues to be raised at the Peoples'
March, such as human rights, trade liberalisation, climate change, and
Third World debt.
"To demand an end to corporate globalisation is to demand an end to
colonisation", she told GLW, "and colonisation is still happening right
here under our noses."
"CHOGM is an important symbol of the process of colonisation that
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been resisting for more
than 200 years. The movement against corporate globalisation has much to
learn from the ongoing struggles of indigenous peoples - they have been
suffering massive state repression since well before we were born."
The sacred treaty circles of Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal, custodian of
the land Minjerribah, will be conducting "treaty business" in Musgrave Park
following the march, encouraging individuals to sign up for a treaty.
The sacred treaty circles have issued a statement, via the CAN website,
calling for a treaty to end the war on Aboriginal people:
"The first act of multinational imperialism in this country was the
declaration of terra nullius. This was the legal basis of the deliberate
introduction of smallpox and other diseases, massacres, poisonings,
hangings and other methods of genocide. This was also the first economic
rationalist war.
"Twenty-first century global capitalism exists in this country because of
Britain's groundwork over the past two centuries, it is the same beast as
terra nullius.
"The queen, the prime minister and the `who's who' of the invader
hierarchy will be in Brisbane during CHOGM. So will the descendants of
those who survived the genocidal onslaught. In the focus of the whole
world, all the relevant people will be together in one place at one time.
CHOGM provides an opportunity to end the war against Aboriginal people.
Don't wait for the queen, though!"
--
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