Racial Tensions Rise in Australia Over Vietnamese Immigrant Community : Demographics: Longtime residents of a Sydney suburb blame Indochinese newcomers for rising crime, gambling and heroin use.

For decades, the Sydney suburb of Cabramatta was known as the gateway to Australia.

Located an hour’s train ride west of the ultramodern architecture of the city’s central business district, Cabramatta’s neat rows of two-story houses have served as the temporary home for generations of immigrants from Italy, Lebanon and Yugoslavia.

In recent years, Cabramatta has been transformed into a slice of Indochina, with signboards written in Vietnamese, vegetable stands overflowing with ginger and exotic vegetables, and streets that are redolent of the fiery spices of the Asian kitchen.

A quarter of Cabramatta’s population--20,000 people--is Vietnamese, reflecting Australia’s changing population.

Demographically, the city resembles sections of Orange County, where the Vietnamese population surged more than 270% in the 1980s, giving the county the largest concentration of Vietnamese outside Vietnam.

However, instead of being renowned as a colorful transit community--an Aussie Bowery on the road to New World affluence--Cabramatta has become notorious as Australia’s heroin bazaar.

Many of the travelers disembarking at Cabramatta’s railroad station have the glazed, haunted look of drug addicts. Heroin is so prevalent that gardeners have refused to tend the station’s wilting flower beds because of fears that they will contract AIDS from the scores of hypodermic needles discarded there.

For five years, the Australian government has been preaching the need for the country to integrate with Asia if it is to survive economically. In Cabramatta, the two worlds collide. It is a community divided by fear and suspicion.

White Australians disdainfully call it “Vietamatta,” and newspapers talk of the streets being ruled by a secretive Vietnamese gang.

Divisions have deepened since the murder in September of John Newman, Cabramatta’s representative in the state’s Parliament. Australia is not a violent country by U.S. standards, and Newman’s death was immediately pronounced its first politically motivated assassination.

Newman was gunned down in the driveway of his Cabramatta home only days after complaining that his life was in danger because of his outspoken campaign against Asian gang violence.

“The gangs are very menacing and bold,” Newman had warned. “They have complete contempt for the law and police.”

The head of the Cabramatta police station, Chief Inspector Alan Leek, said in an interview that, despite an exhaustive investigation, the police had not turned up a shred of evidence that Newman was killed by a Vietnamese gang or even an Asian gunman. In fact, inquiries revealed that, for a member of Parliament, Newman had unusually friendly relations with the Italian Mafia.

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Yet Newman’s death has further strained the already tense social fabric in Cabramatta, home to 15% of the nation’s Vietnamese population. The intense news coverage that surrounded the killing scared off many of the white Australians who had flocked to the town on weekends because of the bargains in mom-and-pop shops there.

What’s more, the nation’s television networks night after night aired reports on the high quality and easy availability of drugs in Cabramatta, prompting narcotics users from across the country to descend on the town to buy heroin. Leek said there are far more heroin buyers in Cabramatta these days than before Newman’s murder.

“It’s a very high grade of heroin at cheap prices,” he acknowledged.

Even at midday, in a small park only a five-minute stroll from the police station, groups of men with ragged hair and body tattoos stand in small circles with Asian youths in what many believe are drug transactions. As one youth explained to a reporter, the dealer usually keeps a single dose of heroin in a balloon or condom concealed in his mouth, ready to swallow if the police should appear.

Many of the youths have “5T” tattooed on the back of their right hands or the letter T written on each knuckle, representing the Vietnamese words for love , money , prison , crime and kill , which when transliterated all begin with that letter.

Cabramatta is also plagued by street crime, but it is a far cry from a U.S. urban ghetto: New cars line the streets, there is no graffiti, and shops are filled with goods. Other than Newman’s killing, just one other person was murdered in Cabramatta last year.

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Still, the presence on the streets of tough-looking young men has scared a lot of shopkeepers, but they are too afraid to complain to the police. Instead, they either hire armed security guards or pay the gangs directly.

“The people are right to be afraid--the police won’t do anything to protect them,” said David Giang, managing editor of a Vietnamese newspaper called Chieu Duong. “In the past, there has been a lot of unreported crime. These guys say they will come back and kill you if you talk.”

One of the most alarming trends is a crime called “home invasion,” which some Australians believe is an idea imported from Southern California. A gang of youths uses a sledgehammer to knock down the door of a home, then terrorizes an entire family while stealing their possessions. There were 14 home invasions reported in Cabramatta last year, but residents believe that many similar crimes went unreported.

Dei Le, a Vietnamese reporter who has covered Cabramatta for several years, said homes believed to be used as illegal gambling dens are often targeted because of the large amounts of cash on hand and the reluctance of residents to make a complaint.

Also, many first-generation immigrants from Communist Vietnam still have no trust in banks, she said, and stash their cash at home. One of Newman’s campaigns encouraged shop owners to leave their money in banks.

Newman himself was a Yugoslav immigrant, but his death has stirred up an old and emotional debate about Asian immigration that has haunted white Australia for decades. Until the 1960s, the government followed an apartheid immigration policy that allowed only white immigrants to settle here. Now, about 5% of Australia’s 17 million people are either first- or second-generation Asian.

“It is regrettable that some commentators have taken this opportunity to blame Asian immigration as the cause of it all,” said Stepan Kerkyasharian, the state’s commissioner for ethnic affairs.

Phoung Canh Ngo epitomizes the successful Vietnamese immigrant to Cabramatta, yet he detects a greater sense of racial tension since the Newman killing. Ngo, who escaped Vietnam in 1981, owns a chain of businesses, including a casino in Cabramatta, and sits on the County Council.

“Since the killing, there has been more anti-Asian feeling in Australia,” Ngo said. “When economic times are hard, new arrivals get the blame. If we don’t have work, we’re accused of living off the welfare system. If we do work, we’re accused of stealing jobs from the majority.”

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Asian youths maintain that they get tougher treatment from the police than do white youngsters, as well as longer jail sentences from judges.

Unlike in California, where authorities have tried to recruit Asian police officers to combat crime in Asian communities, police in Cabramatta have no Vietnamese officers and only three civilians who translate Vietnamese, Chinese and Lao.

Journalist Le noted that Australia’s mainstream television channels have no Asian anchors or reporters despite the growing importance of the Asian population.

“People say they can feel the anti-Asian feeling in Cabramatta, but I hope it’s just a cultural thing, like a language problem,” a travel agent named Tang said. “Hell, people still get mad at me when I smile at the wrong time. For us, it’s a way of showing embarrassment. But the Australians do not understand.”