Owing Plague Racist Violence

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flat. An incendiary device was then thrown into the middle of the bottles.

Luckily firemen were immediately called by local mini-cab drivers who heard the explosion, and arrived in time to prevent the petrol In ine on ucence JULI dha- off linnann tram being ignited. The police had to admit that it was a determined attempt to burn youths face serious charges, some of which carry sentences of life imprisonment.

The intent is clearly to prove some kind of organisation behind the spontaneous events of July and to hand out exemplary sentences.

But many of the charges relate to the night of Monday July 13 - a night on which no riot took place!

More details from: Leeds 8 Defence Committee, Box L8, LAP, 59 Cookridge St, Leeds 2. out the Amin family.

They had to admit, too, that the attempt was remarkably similar to the one that led to the massacre of the Khan family only two miles away earlier this year.

But they discounted any racial motive, just as they had insisted that there was no suggestion of a racial motive in the Khan case. Neither case will appear in the statistics of racist attacks monitored by the Home Office.

The Home Office's recent report, 'Racial Attacks' is not therefore an accurate assessment of the extent or the growth of racist attacks. Its significance is only that now it's official.

The facts recorded by the Home Office vastly underestimate the situation, but they are stark enough: people of 'Asian ethnic origin' are fifty times as likely to be victims of 'racially motivated attacks' as whites, and people of West Indian ethnic origin are 36 times as likely to be attacked.

Although the Home Office claims there is evidence to prove that the police are not generally insensitive to racial motives, community leaders are unanimous in branding the police as trying to cover up racist motives. There are other sources of underestimation: the police are hardly likely to include their own attacks on blacks - one of the major sources of racist attacks - in their reports to the Home Office.

Violent

The underestimation is not minor. After all, the 'Racial Attacks' report records only "152 reports of racial attacks in 1980 and 224 in the first seven months of this year", while a recent answer to an MP in Parliamentary question time gave the figure for violent attacks on Asians in 1980 at 2,426. A big proportion of these must have been racist attacks.

(In 1979 the figure was 2,075, and in 1977 it was 1,865).

The Home Office report also includes handbag snatching by blacks on whites as racially motivated' Some cases attacks by whites on blacks get reported as attacks by blacks on whites. Take the case of one Asian family in Newham, East London.

Mr and Mrs A and their family were being repeatedly attacked and abused, mainly by white kids on the estate where they lived. They were refused police assistance on the grounds that the family had no evidence as to the perpetrators. One day, Mr A managed to catch one of the boys red-handed, just as the police suggested he should do. His wife phoned the local station. In the meantime, the boy's father had heard that Mr A was holding his son. He armed himWhitelaw self with a knife, and, kicking the As' front door in, abused and threatened the family. At that point the police arrived... and arrested Mr A for assaulting a minor.

A week later Mr A was badly beaten up on his own doorstep by white neighbours. Although he recognised one of his attackers, the police again refused to prosecute and again recommended that he take out a private summons.

The Report of the Working Party on Police/Community Relations in Lambeth - a report which gives a thousand times more accurate picture of policing in Brixton than AN overwhelming majority does the Scarman whitewash - documents scores of such cases where police retuse to prosecute or protect. They just say: 'Take out a private summons, if you can find out who did it"

Scores more of such incidents are cited in the evidence submitted to the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure by the Institute of Race Relations.

If the Home Office 'Racial Attacks' report enormously underestimates the extent of such attacks, the parliamentary answer also underestimates them though to a lesser degree - compared with the Asian organisations themselves.

The figures would seem For instance, Dr Zaka Khan of the Union of Pakistani Organisations has given the following figures: between 50 and 60 Asians are victims of racist attacks every week now, making a likely total of 3,000 for 1981.

Both the Home Office report and the locally monitored reports show that Asians are particularly the victims of arson attacks.

The Home Office has the gall in its report to accuse right wing and left wing groups equally of 'raising the racial temperature.

The report also quite emphatically rejects the idea that racist attacks are Indians are finding the sitorganised: The National Front; the New National Front, the British Movement, Column 88 - none of which are even mentioned by name in the report -are treated as no more than bad influences.

Purpose

The purpose of the report is clear. It is an attempt to demonstrate seeming concern on the part of the usually hard-of-hearing Home Office.

The fear is that the working class as a whole will learn from the militant self-defence struggles of the black community - something that can be seen in embryo in the joint struggles of black and white youth in Toxteth, in St Pauls a year before, and, to a lesser extent, in Brixton this April.

* Meetings of the Brixton Defence Campaign take place at the Black Women's Centre, 41a Stockwell Green. These meetings are open to Black individuals and organisations. * The Brixton Defence Campaign has set itself a target of collecting £10,000. Donations should be made payable to Brixton Defence Campaign, a/c по. 17411947, Nat West Brixton branch.