Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd warned against vigilante action yesterday after ethnic Indians rallied for a second night in Sydney against racially motivated street violence and allegedly attacked three men in retaliation.
Australia and India have held top-level discussions over concerns that some of the 90,000 Indian students in Australia are being racially targeted.
Rallies organized by Indian students have been held in Sydney and Melbourne in recent weeks demanding that authorities prevent violence against ethnic Indians.
PHOTO: EPA
Police say some violence is racially motivated, but much of the crime is opportunistic. Indian students sometimes fall victim because they travel alone late at night to part-time jobs or from universities carrying valuables such as laptop computers, they say.
Rudd said while violence in Australian cities is “a regrettable part” of urban life, vigilante action is equally unwelcome.
“I fully support hard-line measures in response to any act of violence toward any student anywhere — Indian or otherwise,” Rudd told Fairfax Radio in Melbourne.
“We also need to render as completely unacceptable people taking the law into their own hands,” he said.
“Everyone needs just to draw some breath on this and we need to see a greater atmosphere of general calm,” he said.
In Sydney, students took to the streets on Monday and Tuesday night to protest recent attacks that they said were racially motivated, including the alleged assault of two Indian men by a group of ethnic Lebanese on Monday. Three Lebanese men were assaulted in a retribution attack on Monday night.
Police arrested two men during a protest in Sydney late on Tuesday by about 70 Indian students, brandishing the Indian flag and chanting “Australian police, bullshit.”
Meanwhile, Victoria Premier John Brumby announced a race-crime blitz focusing on Melbourne’s train stations, where Indian students have increasingly been the target of robberies and assaults. Uniformed police, dog-handlers and mounted officers will patrol the stations, backed up by the force’s air wing.
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