Beirut and Sarajevo in the streets of Sydney and Melbourne...

[Melvin Loh]

During the Yugoslav wars of succession over the early-mid 1990s, there were fears in Australia of outbreaks of similar interethnic violence between rival Serbian and Coratian communities, and there were in fact substantial nos. of young men of Yugoslav extraction who went back to their parents' homelands to fight and commit atrocities as part of various ethnonationalist militias- such as Serb Melbourne gangster and ex-Light Horse officer Capt Dragan Vasiljkovic commanding the the KNINDZAS who ethnically cleansed Serbian-conquered areas of Croatia during 1991-92 (and has just recently been arrested on war crimes charges back in Australia- see http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/captain-dragan-arrested/2006/01/20/1137553748143.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragan_Vasiljkovi%C4%87)

Now, WI such fears had actually materialised, and there had been large-scale ethnic violence among Australia's Yugoslav immigrant communities ? WI say also during the 1980s there'd been similar ethnic tensions and intercommunal clashes among the Lebanese Muslim vs Christian community in Sydney ?

[fortyseven]

Vasiljkovic should be jailed just for KNINDZAS :rolleyes:

[birdy]

This is interesting, i didnt think Australia had enough members from these communities for a lot of violence and by the 90's werent most of them intergrated into Australian society (ie older people might not like other side, but no youngsters going off on a race riot.

[Melvin Loh]

birdie, there's always been a certain sense of ethnic tension re certain groups in Australian society even today- just look at the Cronulla race riots against the Lebs last Christmas, and prior to that the animosity of Anglos towards Lebs due to the Bilal Skaf case in 2002 (a Leb gang-leader who organised pack rapes of white Australian young women on Sydney trains), and against Vietnamese due to the Triad gangs in neighbourhoods like Cabramatta (which became renamed Vietnamatta).

btw, I've been told that Melbourne's actually got the largest population of ppl of Balkan descent outside of the former Yugoslavia, as is the case with the Greeks (largest city with Greek ppl in the world, outside of mainland Greece, being Melbourne, 2nd only to Athens and Thessalonika).

[TheLoneAmigo]

I think Melbourne's "race relations" situation is a lot better than Sydney's - we don't really have problems on the scale of the ones in Sydney that led to Cronulla. Or Redfern, for that matter.

[Berra]

If we give the gangs more fanatism (or whatever you want to call it) for some reason then they go to Yugslavia and fight.

[Larrikin]

Wodonga, which has a large number of both groups (because of Bonegilla), also has a Serbo-Croatian Club, and when the young dickheads got all hot under the collar the older generation called a meeting and told them that if any of them went, or caused trouble at home, they would be immediately disowned, and cut off completely from the community. At leasst one family threatened to hold a funeral, with or without the body of the guest of dishonour. The mutterings of stupidity stopped quick smart.

[TheMann]

birdie, there's always been a certain sense of ethnic tension re certain groups in Australian society even today- just look at the Cronulla race riots against the Lebs last Christmas, and prior to that the animosity of Anglos towards Lebs due to the Bilal Skaf case in 2002 (a Leb gang-leader who organised pack rapes of white Australian young women on Sydney trains), and against Vietnamese due to the Triad gangs in neighbourhoods like Cabramatta (which became renamed Vietnamatta).

btw, I've been told that Melbourne's actually got the largest population of ppl of Balkan descent outside of the former Yugoslavia, as is the case with the Greeks (largest city with Greek ppl in the world, outside of mainland Greece, being Melbourne, 2nd only to Athens and Thessalonika).

The Cronulla race riots were dumb people on both sides, many of them drunk, doing stupid things. That wasn't because of out and out meanness, I think. I don't know much about Bilal Skaf, but I do know many Muslim communities here tend to look after their own, no matter how disgraceful their crimes. That has a lot to do with what went down in Sydney.

As far as ethnic battles between Serbs and Croats go, I don't think you'd see that in Australia, the backlash from everybody else would be too strong.

[birdy]

maybe there'd be an effort to turn people into 'proper' Aussies rather then Hypens.

[Berra]

One pssibility is an attac on a embassy.