950808

French paper

slams Australia

over aborigines

PARIS: A leading French newspaper hit back at Australia on Tuesday for its criticism of French nuclear testing, saying it was ill-placed to invoke ecology, human rights and colonialism given its record with native Australians.

In an open letter to Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, the editor of the conservative, pro-government daily Le Figaro, Franz-Olivier Giesbert, accused Canberra of "fetishist hatred" of France and said it was trying to salve its own bad conscience.

The article highlighted the venom that has entered both sides of the row over President Jacques Chirac's decision to carry out eight final underground tests at France's South Pacific site on Mururoa Atoll.

"When the first European immigrants arrived, there were 300,000 Aborigines in Australia. By 1921, there were only 60,000. Guess what happened in between," Giesbert wrote.

He said it had taken Australia until 1967 to give native Australians the vote and for Australian employers to stop treating Aborigines like slaves by paying them in kind.

Even today, their infant mortality rate was twice the national average and their life expectancy 20 years less than the rest of the population, he said.

"You made an effort by recognising the Aborigines' right to their ancestral land. Bravo. But since you are not monsters, this gesture cannot have salved your bad conscience after so many decades of "ethnic cleansing'," Giesbert wrote.

He said New Zealand, too, had a "heavy cross to bear" for its treatment of the Maori people.

"Dispute our nuclear tests if you wish. Simply for the sake of your own credibility, stop talking about ecology, colonialism and human rights," Giesbert said.-Reuter