SYDNEY, Australia (AP) — The son of slain U.S. civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King Jr. called on the Australian government Tuesday to say sorry to aborigines for past injustices.
Martin Luther King III, who was in Sydney at the start of a five-day lecture tour, said Prime Minister John Howard’s administration could not achieve reconciliation between white Australians and its indigenous population without both symbolic and practical gestures.
“The first step to reconciliation is for someone in a position of authority to acknowledge that some mistakes were made,” said King, who is president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a U.S. civil rights group founded by his father.
“At the end of the day, they should do what is right, not what is politically expedient,” he said.
Aborigines are a minority of about 400,000 in the country’s mostly white population of 19 million. They are the poorest, sickest and most frequently jailed members of Australian society.
Under early white settlement, many aborigines were massacred or rounded up to live on reserves. Thousands of aboriginal children, now known as the “stolen generations,” were taken from their parents and put into orphanages in a failed assimilation policy.
Despite apologies to aborigines from many state and community leaders, Howard has refused to say sorry, arguing modern Australians should not be held responsible for past injustices.
