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Canberra: Aborigines feel a strong sense of injustice over an Australian government intervention into scores of troubled remote communities and believe the programme is racist, an independent review said on Sunday.
Australia's former conservative government sent police and soldiers into outback towns and settlements in June 2007 to stamp out widespread child sex abuse, fuelled by chronic alcoholism from "rivers of grog" in indigenous communities.
But an independent review of the intervention, set up by the centre-left Labor government after it won power last November, found widespread problems with the programme, which was aimed at 73 Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.
"In many communities there is a deep belief that the measures introduced by the Australian government ... were a collective imposition based on race," said the review, released on Monday by Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin.
Australia's 460,000 Aborigines make up about 2 per cent of the population.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has made indigenous affairs a priority of his government, winning praise for apologising in parliament for historic injustices against Aborigines.
He has also promised to continue the controversial intervention, but to review the way it operates.
Former prime minister John Howard ordered the intervention in the final months of his 11-and-a-half years in office, declaring the widespread sexual abuse of Aboriginal children to be a national emergency.
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