شجار لليوم الثالث بعد مسابقه ملكه جمال جنوب السودان بملبورن أستراليا

Quote: Over the past three days, young Sudanese immigrants in Melbourne engaged in deplorable acts of violence including the use of machetes – a weapon still associated with the horrific scenes of the Rwandan genocide – after a beauty pageant held in Springvale, southeast of that city. Streets brawls have since continued in other suburbs and community leaders have expressed fears there may be more fights after the police was targeted. This is not the first time this has happened. Last year, the beauty contest was held in Adelaide and similar levels of violence ensued. Put Miss South Sudan Australia aside, and you still have several episodes of Sudanese youth killing (or at least attempting to kill) each other with knives, crowbars and gearboxes. Besides the pageant-related brawls, the stabbing to death of Adelaide school boy Daniel Awak is a famous example of this concerning degree of inexplicable savagery. In all of these incidents nothing whatsoever involves white people or their institutions until violence erupts. So why has the imminent University of Melbourne academic and Head of African Think Tank, Dr Berhan Ahmed linked this to the oft-preached white Australia’s penchant to mistreat people of darker skin? According to him Africans in Australia experience racism daily and this stops them from participating in society. I don’t know, this may be a fair point, but why would that make them attack each other? Shouldn’t they attack people who represent the system that “has a problem accepting their blackness” as Dr Ahmed so phrases? Dr Ahmed is a good man who has contributed a great deal to the African-Australian community and I have a lot of respect for him but I think he is blaming the bystander for witnessing his brothers bringing the opprobrium of senseless violence to themselves and his community. His argument that Australian humanitarian help to African refugees is increasingly “stopping at the airport” is at least misleading or at best deliberately contrived to deflect attention away from the kind of debate we need to have. I am referring of course, to personal responsibility. I am a former Sudanese refugee myself and I, like every other immigrant, have benefited from the superior settlement services this country has to offer. When I landed in Adelaide at the age of 21, Centrelink immediately started supporting me and gave me three months to decide between pursuing paid employment and continuing studies. The repeated line of advice was “continuing studies give you skills for a future career; paid work gives you independence”. There are other avenues of assistance including the English language program and the services of government-funded operators like the Migrant Resource Centres. What more can you ask? The idea that entrenched discrimination works against Sudanese so much as to turn them into violent sociopaths is also questionable. If that were the case, then, by the same logic, we can expect other Australian minorities who experience discrimination to launch into intra-ethnic violence. That to my knowledge hasn’t happened. Furthermore, Dr Ahmed goes to the extreme by comparing Sudanese disadvantage to Australia’s difficult relationship with the Indigenous people. With all seriousness this is unfair. Aboriginal disadvantage is fraught with a degree of historical injustices that makes comparing their plight to Sudanese-Australians’ almost irresponsible. Instead of making tenuous comparisons and pointing fingers, we should just acknowledge that there is a serious problem in the community and the best people to diagnose it will be community leaders rather than the police. Elders have the duty to identify the kinds of lazy drunks who destroy the community’s reputation. They are the ones to blame. Racism, though it exists, has nothing to do with intra-community problems. Peter Run is a tutor in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland.