Hundreds of Indian students protested and launched violent reprisals overnight in Australia’s biggest city in the latest flare-up in racial tensions in recent weeks, police said on Monday.
Police said they had to call in the dog squad to control the crowd in west Sydney, where protesters wielding sticks and baseball bats attacked men of “Middle Eastern appearance” in apparent retaliation for an earlier assault.
It was believed to be the first time Indian students had reacted violently to a series of attacks on them in Australia which have caused outrage on the subcontinent and strained diplomatic ties between Canberra and New Delhi.
The protesters gathered after an Indian man in his early 20s was attacked by a group of men of Middle Eastern descent, police said.
Police superintendent Robert Redfern denied reports members of the crowd, which finally dispersed at about 2am, were armed with knives.
But he said: “There were certainly suggestions people had either baseball bats or hockey sticks and the like.”
Redfern said the violence in Harris Park was not race-related and stemmed from a series of “opportunistic” crimes against Indians.
But New South Wales Lebanese Community Council spokesman Elie Nassif said there had been tensions between small sections of the Lebanese and Indian communities.
“Whether we like it or not, it is happening, but as community leaders we should work together to wipe all this [out],” he told ABC radio.
Recent assaults on Indian students have been dubbed “curry bashings” in the Indian media and prompted frantic diplomatic efforts in Canberra to ease New Delhi’s concerns about the issue.
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd this month called in the former head of Australia’s elite Special Air Service regiment to lead a task force examining the attacks.
The issue came to a head late last month when student Sravan Kumar Theerthala was left comatose after being stabbed with a screwdriver by gatecrashers at a party he was attending in Melbourne.
India’s foreign minister yesterday urged Indian students in Australia to stay calm.
“I would like our Indian students to be patient ... restrained. They have gone there to pursue higher studies, they should concentrate on that,” Indian Minister of External Affairs S.M. Krishna told reporters in New Delhi.
Krishna said Canberra had assured New Delhi that steps would be taken to ensure the security of Indian students.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing