Posted on 07/11/2002 3:57:15 PM PDT by knighthawk
A TEENAGER yesterday became the seventh woman to sit in court and watch the men who had gang raped her convicted of their crimes.
Most of the seven have never met. They are victims of 14 young males who now have been convicted or pleaded guilty to five different gang rapes and sexual assaults in western Sydney over two months two years ago. Many of the women, including yesterday's victim, who can only be called D, had to go to court each day and confront the attackers who degraded them and stole their sense of security.
Somehow, through tears and pain, they delivered heart-wrenching testimony of the attacks they suffered during August and September 2000.
Yesterday two brothers were convicted by a NSW District Court jury of their role in the rape of D, ending the final chapter of rape trials which they have faced in the past few months.
The older brother, M, 20, now has been found guilty of his role in three different gang rapes committed 20 days apart involving four women.
His brother, M1, 19, has been convicted of two rapes 18 days apart. The brothers were convicted last month of their role in the rape of a young woman known as C, who was assaulted by 14 males at three western Sydney locations over six hours.
And M also has been convicted in relation to the assault of two young women who were attacked by eight males.
Late yesterday D and C met for the first time. They embraced and held each other for several emotional minutes.
Before long, they were chatting and laughing like old friends. They had both endured days of giving evidence and reliving intimate details of their ordeal before strangers.
The card, which C gave to D yesterday, reflected what they both were feeling. C wrote "Truth is Justice", three simple words whose import could not be overestimated. Earlier, D had sat trembling and clinging to the hand of Salvation Army Major Joyce Harmer, as she waited for the jury to file in and announce the word "guilty".
As realisation set in that her life was about to be returned to her, the tears emerged and she embraced her case officer, Detective Edmund Walsh. Outside the court she ran down the corridor, her arms up in a victory parade.
"I feel complete today, I feel complete. I haven't felt this way in a long time," D told The Daily Telegraph.
"I did this for the girls who didn't go to the police, who were too scared. If it means the streets are safer and one girl doesn't go through what I went through, it is worthwhile. Now they are behind bars."
Crown Prosecutor Margaret Cunneen paid tribute to the "great courage" of all the victims.
"It is a very gratifying result and justifies the hard work of the police investigators," she said.
After the verdicts, Judge Michael Finnane told the jury that this trial brought to an end a chapter of rape trials involving the brothers.
"Although you did not know it, [M] has been convicted of other offences of a similar nature before today. And his brother has been convicted in another trial of similar offences," Judge Finnane said.
And while they are the only two to be charged in relation to the rape of D, photographs of many of the men involved in the earlier rapes were shown to D on police photo boards. However, she did not identify any of these men.
Shortly before the start of this trial and after the end of the June trial, the Judge was told that the older brother M had been admitted to the jail hospital suffering an anti-social personality disorder and his defence was having trouble taking instructions. But it was not enough to delay the trial.
The brothers will be sentenced for all their crimes on a date to be fixed.
The attacks were investigated by Strike Force Sayda, a police unit set up in late-August 2000 to look at a series of gang rapes in western Sydney by males of Lebanese origin. Some of the attacks had included racial taunts to the victims.
The other attacks include:
August 4, when a 14-year-old girl was approached by four males on a train, who asked for oral sex, thrust a condom packet in her face and one exposed his penis. At Punchbowl station she managed to escape, but only after one of the men told another man in a mobile phone call: "I've got a slut with me bro, come to Punchbowl;"
August 10 when two girls, 17 and 18, were taken to Northcote Park at Greenacre and forced to repeatedly perform oral sex upon eight males;
August 12, the case involving D who was taken to Gosling Park, Greenacre where a total of 14 males gathered. She was held down and raped by two, threatened at gunpoint before she managed to escape;
August 30, when an 18-year-old was raped by a group of 14 males at three western Sydney locations in a six-hour ordeal. During this she was called an "Aussie pig" and told "I'm going to f .. k you Leb style"; and
September 5, when two 16-year-old girls were taken to a Villawood home and repeatedly raped by three males at knifepoint.
Cousin was shot the day after he testified THE day after the male cousin of M and M1 gave evidence at their trial and denied any role in the gang rape, he was shot in the leg.
It is not known what was behind the shooting, which happened outside his western Sydney home during an argument between a number of men about 9.30pm on Tuesday. He is still in hospital.
The 20-year-old's reluctant appearance as a Crown witness at the gang rape trial was a late addition to the Crown line-up.
From early on in the trial it was apparent that M's defence was going to be a case of mistaken identity and that he was going to stick by the version he gave police during a recorded interview in April 2001.
In this interview, where M purported he wanted to "tell youse the truth", he had no hesitation in fingering his cousin as the rapist.
In addition, he confidently revealed that his cousin had guns and went out drug dealing in a white van which he later torched.
"I know for a fact when they go out selling drugs in that white van, they carry a gun with them ... I know for a fact, every time they're selling pot they've got the gun hidden in the van," M said.
The victim had said M arrived at the rape scene in a white van and that a gun was held to her head. And he offered to help police by going undercover to set his cousin up. M also offered the names of several other people, his brother's friends and people who drove cars similar to those used in the gang rape, saying he "knew for a fact" that his brother's mates were at the park that night.
M claimed in the interview that he was at home on the night of the rape with his mother, his cousin and his cousin's friend.
He claimed his brother M1 had called and asked to speak with his cousin and that his cousin then took off to the rape scene at Gosling Park.
"He told me he went to the park and slept with the girl, had sex with her ... just, oh yeah, copped a root."
Given that M was going to claim his cousin was the first rapist and that the victim's identification of himself was mistaken, Crown Prosecutor Margaret Cunneen decided it was necessary for the jury to see this cousin in the flesh.
She wanted to make it entirely plain to the jury that the two were different in physical appearance and size.
Story of courage ... a 16-year-old girl, left, raped at a Greenacre park on August 12, and an 18-year-old girl raped over six hours at three western Sydney locations on August 30.
Ok, you're more creative. I was just going to suggest separating these scum from their private parts with a sharp instrument.
Well, Brothers I and S got together and called their cousin L who brought two friends - A and M and then the trouble started.
Unfortunately, the wimps in Australia don't know how to deal with such monsters.
Ok, you're more creative. I was just going to suggest separating these scum from their private parts with a sharp instrument.
Experience cooking at a steak house three decades ago involved preparation of Rocky Mountain Oysters.
Put the gang rapists on the menu, and leave it to cleaver.
But by the above report, the media, police and judges of Australia have no cajones, preferring to lisp pee cee rather than spit out the "Leb style" truth.
Cue Jack Nicholson: The truth? You can't handle the truth!
(. . .but they can certainly ban the guns of the law-abiding. . .)
It's for the same reason that the FBI wouldn't name the LAX shooter for 18 hours after they had his name.
So now we know the facts, straight from the Supreme Court, that a group of Lebanese Muslim gang rapists from south-western Sydney hunted their victims on the basis of their ethnicity and subjected them to hours of degrading, dehumanising torture. The young women, and girls as young as 14, were "sluts" and "Aussie pigs", the rapists said. So now that some of the perpetrators are in jail, will those people who cried racism and media "sensationalism" hang their heads in shame? Hardly.
The journalists, academics, legal brains and politicians who tried to claim last August that the gang rapes of south-western Sydney were just a run-of-the-mill police blotter story being beaten up by racists, scaremongers and political opportunists don't ever want to acknowledge the truth about that ugly episode in Australian history. They don't want to acknowledge the fear and tension that ran through a part of Sydney they rarely visit and can never understand.
This newspaper was the first to report the story, which had been common knowledge in police and media circles, and it has never censored the race element.
Even last week, with the conviction of two brothers for their part in the gang rape of Miss D, who was 16 when she was held at gunpoint in a Greenacre park, there were media outlets that downplayed the story and air-brushed race from it.
Yet the victims have been crying out for the truth to be told. In court on Friday, one victim gave another a card on which she had written
Truth is Justice".
In August, when Judge Megan Latham handed out laughably lenient sentences to three men in one gang rape case, which were later more than doubled on appeal, she made a special point of debunking the race link: "There is no evidence before me of any racial element in the commission of these offences," she said. "There is nothing said or done by the offenders which provides the slightest basis for imputing to them some discrimination in terms of the nationality of their victims."
Except that later one of the victims complained her victim impact statement had been "censored" of any "ethnic" references by prosecutors intent on a plea bargain. She was convinced she was raped because of her ethnicity. "You deserve it because you're an Australian," the rapists told her during the five-hour attack.
It's just so inconvenient of the victims to insist on telling the truth.
"I looked in his eyes. I had never seen such indifference," one 18-year-old victim, codenamed Miss C, told the court, remembering one of the 14 men who called her "Aussie pig", gang raped her 25 times over a six-hour period in Bankstown and Chullora, and then turned a hose on her. "I'm going to f*** you Leb style," he said.
Fourteen gang rapists have been convicted, or pleaded guilty, thanks to the courage of seven victims who testified for days in court as their tormentors smirked nearby, the men's families threatened them and defence lawyers suggested they had enjoyed the rapes.
"They're very brave, very strong and very courageous young women," said Salvation Army Major Joyce Harmer, who held the hands of many of the victims through the trials. "They knew this was something they had to do."
There were encouraging signs by the end of the week that some Muslim community leaders were talking of "Muslims accepting responsibility that they may have failed to do things that would have prevented these things from happening", as Amjad Mehboob, chief executive for the Federation of Islamic Councils, told ABC Radio on Friday.
Keysar Trad, vice-president of the Lebanese Muslim Association, said: "It is certainly a disgrace to our community that people who were born to a Muslim family would commit such heinous crimes." But he went on to say it was "rather unfair" that the rapists' ethnicity had been reported "because these boys themselves have completely disaffiliated themselves from their culture or their religion".
Yes, it is unfair that the vast bulk of law-abiding Lebanese Muslim boys and men should be smeared by association. But their temporary discomfort may be necessary so that the powerful social tool of shame is applied to the families and communities that nurtured the rapists, gave them succour and brought them up with such a hatred of Australia's dominant culture and contempt for its women that they think of an 18-year-old girl, dressed for a job interview in her best suit, sitting on a train reading a book, as a slut.
These were racist crimes. They were hate crimes. The rapists chose their victims on the basis of race. That fact is crucial to this story. If the perpetrators had been Anglo-Celtic Australians, the furore would have been enormous. No newspaper would have left out that fact and you can bet the guilt and shame would have been spread far and wide.
No more excuses for the culture of barbarism
The age, Terry lane, July 14 2002
Murder is something that poor people do to poor people. For those of us who feed the imagination with a diet of snobbish English crime dramas and flash Hollywood lawyer soaps it is easy to form the erroneous impression that murder is what the rich do to the rich, usually motivated by lust, jealousy or greed.
In Melbourne, the most liveable of cities, the facts are these: in the years from 1989 to 1999, 75 per cent of male murderers and 88 per cent of female murderers were unemployed. Of their victims, 60 per cent of men and 70 per cent of women were out of work. And "the number of homicides also appears to be disproportionately high among some ethnic groups", says the Defences to Homicide issues paper of the Victorian Law Reform Commission. This is getting into touchy territory and the commission takes a less-said-the-better attitude to such unpalatable news.
However, the higher homicide rates among migrant groups cannot be overlooked. And it has a bearing on some of the issues relating to defences to homicide.
When the Victorian Law Reform Commission, abolished by Jeff Kennett, was resurrected by Steve Bracks, the Attorney-General, Rob Hulls, instructed it to look at the homicide laws and consider whether "it would be appropriate to reform, narrow or extend defences or partial excuse to homicide, including self-defence, provocation and diminished responsibility".
Self-defence and diminished responsibility - as, for instance, when the murderer is mentally ill - are excuses to a homicide charge that will not get a heated argument, but provocation is problematic. The various defences to homicide developed against the background of capital punishment, so it was appropriate to look for any excuse to diminish the charge and save a life. But, in our more enlightened situation the excuse of provocation looks pretty shabby. And that is one of the issues being considered by the commission on which it invites public comment.
Case study 8 in the issues paper concerns a migrant man who murdered his 16-year-old daughter because she was having sexual relations with a young man with whom she wanted to live. The father found the two together in the boyfriend's bedroom and he stabbed his daughter to death. He was found guilty of the lesser crime of manslaughter because, as a "traditional Muslim", he was understandably angry at his daughter's affront to his patriarchal authority. The judge said that in this case the "ordinary person" the jury imagined had to be "an ordinary man of Mr Dincer's [the defendant's] origin, background and beliefs".
The case study says "ordinary man" and I am assuming that the words are chosen with care. What would an "ordinary woman of Mr Dincer's origin" feel about the verdict? Unless she was the victim of cultural brainwashing, she might feel betrayed by a new country and legal system that she expected would afford her greater protection from male violence and arrogance.
"The commission will be looking at ways to negotiate the difficulties of framing the [ordinary person] test in a multicultural and heterogenous society." I wish it wouldn't. Or, at least, before it does so, it should familiarise itself with what the Koran has to say about women and ask itself if we want to bend our perceptions of the value of female life to fit with this: "Men have authority over women because God has made one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient . . . As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in beds apart, and beat them."
Before well-meaning and soft-hearted people rush to make the law of homicide culturally relative, they had best ask themselves how they feel about standing aside while men beat their disobedient wives. Cultural relativism has no place in a civilised society. We are not bound to make room for barbarism, even when it dresses itself up in the fluffy rhetoric of multiculturalism.
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