Racial melting-pot meltdown in Sydney

By GREG ANSLEY

Two years ago, as Sydney put up the final bunting for the Olympics, two 17-year-old girls agreed to go for a ride in a car to smoke some marijuana.

It was the start of a brutal, horrifying journey not only for the teenagers, but also for a city that saw its most cherished beliefs about itself trampled by a series of gang rapes committed in a simmering ethnic cauldron.

Last week, when the ringleader of a gang of Lebanese youths was jailed for a record 55 years - with at least 40 years before he can hope for parole - entirely new agonies were opened.

Lawyers and academics were appalled by the severity of the sentence: did Australia simply want vengeance rather than justice and measured response?

Overwhelmingly, in newspaper columns, letters pages and editorials, on talkback radio and in the streets and pubs, the answer was: yes.

From Mitchelton, Queensland, Felix Hay wrote to The Australian: "Fifty-five years is a sentence; 55 years plus castration is justice."

Even in the remote Northern Hemisphere the case had captured grim attention. Sverre Hov, from Oslo, Norway, wrote after the ringleader's sentence: "Congratulations Australia."

Added Len Lamb, from Toronto, Canada: "Finally someone has the guts to give these animals something approaching what they deserve."

During the continuing trials and sentencing of the rapists, when the barbarity of the crimes began to strike home, angry Australian men in the pubs of western Sydney talked up posses for "Leb-bashing".

Outside the Lakemba Mosque, a television reporter and cameraman were beaten and kicked by a gang of Lebanese men after seeking the views of a leading Muslim cleric on the sentence imposed on one of his flock.

The mother of the multiple rapist collapsed in court when Judge Michael Finnane pronounced sentence. The family are now planning to sell their home to finance an appeal.

The rapist's father, who arrived from Lebanon in 1976 to marry and raise a family, despairs for a second, younger, son, who will be sentenced for his part in the rapes in two weeks.

"He is devastated for his brother and is also now convinced he, too, will be made an example of when he comes up for sentencing on September 6," the father told the Sun-Herald.

For their victims, the sentence came as a relief after terror during the violence of the rapes, the phone calls and threats before the trials, and in the courts, day after day, as they faced tormentors who had pressed guns to their heads as a warning against reporting the crimes.

"I feared for my life so badly if I went to the police, and that's what they wanted me to think, that they were big and powerful," one of the women told the Sydney Morning Herald. "I went to the police thinking, 'Well, if my life's over, it's not that bad'."

Healing the scars of both the victims and of Sydney will not be easy.

There were only 14 men, mostly teenagers, in the gang that preyed on young women, cutting them out from the crowd - "like a baying pack of wolves", said Judge Finnane - and subjecting them to the most appalling of atrocities.

But there was an even uglier, more dangerous element: the thugs were Lebanese Muslims who singled out Caucasian Australians as targets for their anger and contempt.

"They said, 'You deserve it because you're Australian'," one victim reported.

In a city as big and diverse as Sydney, where large migrant populations are compressed together in low-income enclaves and stereotypes ride roughshod over reality, this was social gelignite.

The rapists' turf was the Bankstown-Lakemba area of western Sydney, a melting pot with a population larger than Dunedin's and where more than 60 languages are spoken. Almost one in five are Lebanese, another 16 per cent Vietnamese.

It has the characteristics typical of new migrant communities anywhere: low incomes, unemployment up to three or four times the national average, large numbers living in public housing, frustration and anger among the young.

Crime, frequently violent and fed by drugs, is high and rising. The New South Wales Crime Commission has recorded, for example, an alarming increase in murders, drive-by shootings, kneecappings, and even attacks on police.

In late 1998, following death threats from Lebanese gangs fighting for the control of southwestern Sydney's drug and prostitution trade, Lakemba police station was peppered with shots from a carload of thugs with semi-automatic rifles.

The electorate office of Labor MP Tony Stewart, a campaigner against drugs and gangs, was firebombed twice. His face was cut when a missile - possibly a bullet - smashed his car window, and a supporter's home was stitched with semi-automatic gunfire.

In a frightening five-month period before the rapes, there were more than 40 shootings in the southwest, including street shootouts and drive-bys, and even an attempt to ram an ambulance carrying a gunshot victim.

With such alarming headlines dominating newspapers, and with the natural suspicion of a new community's language, culture and religion, a study by Macquarie University and the University of NSW found that western Sydney is among Australia's least tolerant societies.

The study spoke of "Islamophobia,", heightened by violence in the Middle East, terrorism and boat people. It frequently erupted into attacks on mosques and vilification of Muslims in the street.

On August 8, 2000, the worst possible ethnic fuse was lit. Two white Australian teenagers met a group of smooth-talking Lebanese youths in Chatswood, on Sydney's North Shore, and agreed to drive and smoke dope. They were taken to a park in Greenacre, near Bankstown, where they were raped and forced to perform oral sex on eight men.

This was the beginning of the rapes, planned carefully and co-ordinated by mobile phone, with gang members summoned by calls such as "I've got a slut with me bro, come to Punchbowl", or "There's a slut at Bankstown Trotting Club".

Two days later a 16-year-old girl was taken to another Greenacre park by a youth she had known for eight months who had promised to drive her to the city. She was raped at gunpoint by two men, with another 12 standing by, before managing to escape.

On August 30, the ringleader flattered an 18-year-old woman riding the train and talked her into getting out at Bankstown for a joint. As they walked to a nearby park she became nervous and tried to find an excuse to leave.

It was too late. The gang was being summoned by mobile. Eight arrived in a van, another three in a car. One grabbed her by the hair and said "Allah, boys", others grabbed her arms and forced her to the ground, and the horror began.

Over six hours she was raped first by four men, driven to the Bankstown Trotting Club on the lie of taking her home and raped by another three, and taken yet again to a Chullora industrial estate where she was raped by eight men in two groups.

They told her, "I'm going to f ... you Leb-style"; they pressed a gun to her head and told her "Don't move, bitch, or you're dead,"; and they hosed her down with water.

On September 5, two 16-year-old girls were stranded late at night at Beverly Hills railway station and gratefully accepted a lift home. They were taken to a house in Villawood, raped repeatedly by three men, and forced to perform oral sex at knifepoint.

Inevitably, race became an issue.

Lebanese and Muslim leaders, horrified enough by the rapes, struck out at what they believed was the demonisation of their community.

Said Randa Kattan, executive director of the Arabic Communities Council: "The rapists exist everywhere and this is an appalling crime. But [identifying the rapists as Lebanese] is labelling a whole community regardless of how well-intentioned the reporting or discussion is."

An influential body of commentators, lawyers, academics and community groups agreed. In a press statement, Bankstown Council accused the media of "gross misrepresentation" and of creating a climate of fear.

Sun-Herald columnist Miranda Devine shot back: "Sorry, but the rapists mentioned race first."

When the first group of four rapists were sentenced to between 18 months and five years for the ravaging of the two Beverly Hills girls, community anger exploded. NSW Director of Public Prosecutions Nicholas Cowdery launched an appeal against the "ludicrously lenient" sentences, the State Government increased the maximum sentences for gang rape from 25 years to life, and the courts agreed to treat gang rapists the same as murderers and drug importers.

The first to feel the impact was Belal Hajeid, 20, one of the few whose names have not been suppressed, who was jailed for 23 years. By comparison, the average sentence for murder in NSW is 15 years.

Then, last week, the ringleader, whose name remains suppressed, was sentenced to a minimum 40 years in jail, the longest sentence by far for rape and longer than most imposed for murder.

Judge Finnane, who said he would have liked to jail the man for even longer, took the view that each of the rapes of which he was convicted was a separate, horrific crime and should be treated as such.

Rather than serving the separate sentences together, the rapist will serve them one after the other.

Lawyers and criminologists question the wisdom of the sentence, fearing that it will lift the benchmark of severity in sentencing, introducing new and possibly counter-productive harshness to the courts, and creating new problems in determining responses, for example, to especially horrific cases of murder. With sentences such as this, would a rapist leave his victim alive to testify?

"If the community is satisfied with this sentence ... then we should ask why," said Sydney University criminologist Professor Mark Findlay.

"Do we want vengeance as the primary justification for sentencing?"

State Premier Bob Carr, reflecting universal editorial opinion in Australia's major newspapers, replied: "This is the sort of sentence the community expects."

And echoing the loudest voices in the street, Opposition Leader John Brogden said: "I hope he rots in jail."