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Police presence beefed up in Sydney

Hundreds of police reinforcements took to the streets of Sydney late yesterday to prevent a third straight night of tit-for-tat racial violence pitting whites against Arab-Australians.

Amid reports that racist attacks on Muslims were spreading to other cities, an extra 450 mobile police fanned out in and around the beachside Sydney suburb of Cronulla where a white mob chanting anti-Arab taunts attacked men and women of Middle Eastern appearance on Sunday.

The eruption of racial violence sparked an organized retaliatory assault late on Monday by scores of mostly young men of Lebanese descent who drove to the area in convoys from heavily Muslim suburbs nearby to attack parked cars and store fronts with baseball bats and iron bars.

Rain dissuades

But the heightened police deployment, including road-blocks on streets leading to Cronulla, and a chilly rain apparently helped dissuade troublemakers last night.

"It's very, very quiet," a police spokesman said at 10pm. "The rain's on our side tonight."

Dozens of people were arrested and wounded over two days of the nastiest racially-motivated unrest in Australia for decades.

The outburst was sparked by an incident a week earlier when a pair of Cronulla volunteer lifeguards were assaulted by youths of Middle Eastern appearance who had been ejected from the beach for alleged rowdiness.

The attack unleashed a torrent of pent-up anger from residents of Cronulla, an overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon, middle-class town, against mostly Lebanese youths accused of "disrespecting" white women and cultural norms on the beach.

Stiffer laws

Infuriated by the racist violence, the premier of New South Wales state, Morris Iemma, announced yesterday that he was recalling lawmakers from Christmas recess to rush through emergency laws to help police crack down on what he called the "ratbags and criminals" behind the unrest.

The legislation, to be submitted to an emergency parliamentary session tomorrow, will allow police to seize vehicles, "lock down" neighborhoods and declare alcohol-free areas in a bid to quell social unrest.

The measures, which also triple the maximum jail term for rioting to 15 years, were described as giving local police their greatest powers since the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
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