Australia Is Again Stealing Its Indigenous Children

 Kaawirn Kuunawarn (Hissing Swan), Chief of the Kirrae Wuurong
(Blood Tip Tribe) - (Photographer Unknown)

By John Pilger
The tape is searing. There is the voice of an infant screaming as he is wrenched from his mother, who pleads, "There is nothing wrong with my baby. Why are you doing this to us? I would've been hung years ago, wouldn't I? Because (as an Australian Aborigine) you're guilty before you're found innocent." The child's grandmother demands to know why "the stealing of our kids is happening all over again." A welfare official says, "I'm gunna take him, mate."

This happened to an Aboriginal family in outback New South Wales. It is happening across Australia in a scandalous and largely unrecognized abuse of human rights that evokes the infamous Stolen Generation of the last century. Up to the 1970s, thousands of mixed-race children were stolen from their mothers by welfare officials. The children were given to institutions as cheap or slave labor; many were abused.

Described by a chief protector of Aborigines as "breeding out the color," the policy was known as assimilation. It was influenced by the same eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis. In 1997, a landmark report, "Bringing Them Home," disclosed that as many 50,000 children and their mothers had endured "the humiliation, the degradation and sheer brutality of the act of forced separation ... the product of the deliberate, calculated policies of the state." The report called this genocide...

Today, the theft of Aboriginal children - including babies taken from the birth table - is now more widespread than at any time during the last century.

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