Perth, Western Australia (Old Edition) Home News Time Out Letters Write a Letter Special Coverage Walsham Classifieds Search Real Estate Trades & Services Submit About Contact Us Advertising Legal	Clarrie Isaacs tells UN about our apartheid Yaluritja Clarrie Isaacs is just back from the UN conference on racism where he was the only Australian Aboriginal to present a paper and speak from the floor to the 3000 delegates. He said he had told the conference, in Durban, South Africa, that Australia had an apartheid policy. He said: "I told them I wanted to say sorry. "I was sorry to the peoples of the world that the Australian governments have failed to implement the genocide convention in their domestic laws. "If all Australians had the same experiences as Aboriginals, a third of them would not be alive today. "The Native Title Act has been condemned as racist because it validates non-indigenous title to land while depriving us of our inheritance. "It grants Aboriginals only residual rights, not proper land rights." He said Aboriginals were wrongly described as an ethnic minority. He said: "The English, Irish, Scots, Germans and others are ethnic minorities in Australia. "We were invaded. Our sovereignty has never changed. "We were hunted and massacred. "Our children were removed from their families to be given to whites while others were pushed into small areas of land called reserves." He and Ellie Gilbert, widow of poet and activist Kevin Gilbert, went to the conference at their own expense to represent the Sovereign Union of Aboriginal Nations and Peoples in Australia (SUANPA). Mrs Gilbert said: "White Australians have a lack of belonging, a lack of identity. "They hook into our icons like the boomerang and Aboriginal art and use them for international tourism and window dressing." BACK TO TOP < PREVIOUS - HOME - NEXT> Copyright © 1999 - 2006 Post Newspapers Pty Ltd. All rights reserved.