Aborigines say little done to help stolen children

MELBOURNE, Apr 26 (Reuters) Ten years after a report detailed the ''attempted genocide'' of Australian Aborigines and demanded a government apology and compensation, black leaders are still waiting to hear the word ''sorry'' or see any compensation.

The 1997 report described the forced removal of aboriginal children, known as the ''Stolen Generations''. Up to 100,000 were seized from their parents from 1910 to 1970 under government policy to assimilate them into white culture.

But aboriginal leaders said today that about two-thirds of the report's recommendations on helping those forcibly taken from their families have been ignored.

They said Australia compared poorly with Canada, which recently announced a compensation package for its indigenous people, and other countries, including the United States and New Zealand.

''The report's recommendations could do much to heal the wounds,'' said Lowitja O'Donoghue, a former chairwoman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC).

She said the plight of Aborigines in Australia contrasts sharply with Canada, where the government has agreed to pay compensation to native Indian children who were forced to attend ''residential schools'' thousands of miles from their homes.

''I think this is the absolute worst time in the history of Aboriginal affairs,'' she said.

The 1997 report by Australia's human rights commission found an assimilation policy used until the 1960s was ''systematic racial discrimination and genocide''.

It called for a government apology and compensation, but conservative Prime Minister John Howard will not issue an apology for past atrocities against Aborigines.

In recent years Aboriginal leaders have moved away from calls for racial reconciliation to a more pragmatic call for help on health and drug and alcohol abuse.

Aborigines have far higher rates of imprisonment, unemployment, welfare dependency, domestic violence and alcoholism than the rest of the population. Most live in remote communities in Australia's outback, with smaller groups in squalid conditions on the fringes of larger country towns.

Former conservative prime minister Malcolm Fraser, one of the patrons of the Stolen Generations Alliance, said Australia should follow Canada's example in setting compensation for the ''stolen'' children.

Fraser said education and health services for Aborigines have gone backwards over the past 10 years and there is little political interest in improving the situation. ''The political process has virtually pushed indigenous people off the agenda.

''Some of the things that are being said now remind me of policy that are many decades old,'' he said.

Aboriginal leaders said a service set up to reunite separated families was chronically underfunded, and could only help up to 200 families a year, with thousands waiting for assistance wading through government records and files to find lost family members.

REUTERS AM DS1243