I’d like to be able to say as I watched the video footage of three Sudanese men kicking the absolute crap out of a guy on his own that I was shocked and surprised. Sadly whilst the violence was hard to watch the fact that the men involved were Sudanese didn’t raise any eyebrows.

Watch the graphic footage, taken from Sunshine station in Melbourne on the early hours of the 24th February below:


For a while now Sudanese crime has been in and out of the mainstream press. Every so often we’ll hear an absolute shocker of a crime perpetrated by the Sudanese and then nothing for a few months until it happens again. From memory this seemed to happen with some frequency from about 2006′ish.

Here are some examples of Sudanese crime over the last few years;

  • July, 2007 Melbourne: “At least 30 youths gatecrashed a private 16th birthday party at St Albans on Friday night, wielding machetes, iron bars and broken bottles.”

  • September, 2007 Melbourne: “Three people have been arrested in South Australia over the bashing death last week of a Sudanese-born teenager in Melbourne’s south-east. Assistant Commissioner Paul Evans said investigators were dealing with a tribe mentality among refugees who had come from a culture of boy soldiers and social violence.”

  • April, 2008 Melbourne: “Hundreds of young Sudanese and other African refugees have been arrested following a five-month crackdown by Victoria Police on gang violence and crime in Melbourne’s southeast. Assistant Police Commissioner Paul Evans says the 276 arrests and more than 280 charges against young Africans for crimes including violent assault and possession of firearms reflect a gang culture among some Sudanese youngsters living in urban areas.”

  • August, 2008 Queensland: “A young woman has been snatched from an Ipswich street and sexually assaulted by four men. Police said she was then taken to an unknown location and physically and sexually assaulted for several hours. Detectives are now looking for four men of Sudanese heritage, one of whom had a golden front tooth.”

  • November, 2008 Adelaide: “Daniel Awak was stabbed to death and another teenager was admitted to hospital in a critical condition with knife wounds after a fight among a group of 12 Sudanese  Australians. Police said about 15 Sudanese youths started fighting in City Cross Arcade at 3.40pm.”

  • December, 2008 Melbourne: “A Melbourne man has been charged with attempted murder after allegedly stabbing a 19 year old in the head with a screwdriver.”


I'll teach you not to steal my empty coke bottle! You know I can get 5c for these things in South Australia right?!?

I'll teach you not to steal my empty coke bottle! You know I can get 5c for these things in South Australia right?!?

The brutality and sheer daring of some of the crimes is amazing, and these are only the crimes that make it to the mainstream media.

In response to public fear over rising Sudanese crimewaves Victorian Police Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon answered in 2007 that “Sudanese people represented only 1 per cent of the criminals her force deals with”. This statistic put things into perspective and was widely accepted until Andrew Bolt publicly challenged it.

He claimed that Nixon’s statistic was accurate if you used the total number of African immigrants and the total number offenders. If you focused on the Sudanese, which was what everyone was actually interested in the numbers were much, much higher.

Out of the 6200 Sudanese living in Victoria at the time, 316 were alleged offenders, which as Bolt puts it is “about one in 19 Sudanese each year gets picked up for alleged crimes – more than four times the one-in-83 rate for all Victorians.”

It isn’t just Melbourne that has a problem with the Sudanese either. The Realists write:

Reports from Adelaide show that over the past 16 months, 450 offences had been committed by 93 members of Adelaide’s 1500-strong Sudanese community, or put another way, a staggering 1 in 16 Sudanese refugees commits on average 1 crime every 3 months.

This is “double that of the Adelaide general crime rate” as the Port Macquarie Preservationists point out.

Clearly a worrying trend is emerging here.

In October 2007 Liberal Immigration minister Kevin Andrews announced:

The Government squeezed the African component of the refugee program because “some groups don’t seem to be settling and adjusting into the Australian way of life”.

He also stated that no more African migrants would be proccessed because Australia’s quota had already been reached. The exact reduction numbers of African immigration out of the total immigration pool were reported to be from about “70 per cent two years ago to 30 per cent.”

Unfortunately it later came to light that at the time of this announcement the quota had yet to be reached. Furthermore to that the Rudd government Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Senator Chris Evans stated in March 2008 that:

No freeze had been imposed on the intake of African refugees and processing of applications continued. African migration continues and we want to do more next year.

So here we are in 2009 with the government wanting to increase African immigration which includes the Sudanese and no apparent real contingency plan to deal with the obvious increase in crazies who are being shipped out of the troubled region. Of course anyone who publicly touches on the issue is instantly labelled a xenophobic racist so there isn’t much public discussion on the issue, just the random horrific crime that filters through the media every few months.

They are obviously a troubled people from a troubled country and we really need to make sure we’re screening them properly and doing everything we can before letting them out into the Australian public. In Sudan calls for a teacher to be shot for naming a Teddy bear Mohammed in the UK. Really, this is the kind of rubbish we don’t need to be letting into Australia.

I myself don’t have any answers on this one and whilst I’d like to admit I’m above irrational fear I already know this isn’t the case.

Late last year I was cycling home from work in the late afternoon. I’d taken a slightly different route into the CBD and at one particular point ran out of road and had to lift my bike over a curb. As I dismounted to do so an African man behind me (I instantly recognised the accent) asked me for help.

I ignored him presuming he was talking to someone else and was almost back on my bike when I heard is voice again right behind me, ‘excuse me, can I ask you something’. I thought I was seconds away from handing over my wallet, though luckily he just wanted directions to a main street in the northern suburbs.

He left me standing there on my bike feeling like an idiot. While it’s easy to label me a racist I don’t feel that was the case, guilty of stereotyping yes but given where I was (flemington road public housing is a known trouble spot) I don’t think it was completely unjustified.

It’s not a case of prejudice against the race per say, more it’s a genuine lack of confidence in the government to process African immigration responsibly. If all you read about these people is brazen daylight bashings and machete stabbings in the media, it’s very easy to feel vulnerable when you are approached on your own by a random person of African appearance.

Bozwell writes:

Well that’s just great isn’t it? I have to worry about getting my arse kicked by a bunch of Sudanese thugs because this country is kind enough to let them in–then allowing them to run riot in the streets!

Some would argue that’s media sensationalism at work, I’d counter that it’s passive condemnation of failed government policy regarding the issue with no clear alternative or counter measures in sight.


Update (02/03/2009): Monda Mentel, 21, of Flemington, Maluac Kir, 19, of St Albans, and Ahmed Mohamed, 21, of Brooklyn have been charged and arrested. “All three have been remanded in custody to reappear in court on March 31 for a contest mention.” (News.com.au)



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