The oil-for-food accusations coupled with the staff association protests have prompted other UN staff members to

The oil-for-food accusations, coupled with the staff association protests, have prompted other UN staff members to write an unprecedented petition expressing support for their beleaguered chief. It’s worse than under Boutros, and that’s saying something,” said a senior UN official yesterday.Mr Annan also faces an internal revolt from the UN staff association which represents 5,000 employees and has accused him of failing to properly investigate accusations of cronyism and sexual harassment against the UN’s internal watchdog, Dileep Nair. Britain, France, China and Russia, expressed support for Mr Annan yesterday, but the US pays a quarter of the UN’s budget and could make life difficult for the Ghanaian secretary general – as it did for his predecessor Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whom it refused to back for a second term “They are pounding the UN They are pounding Kofi. But he did say, somewhat ominously: “In order for the taxpayers of the United States to feel comfortable about supporting the United Nations, there has to be an open accounting.”Paul Volcker a former US Federal Reserve chief, who is leading the UN inquiry, has refused to hand any documents to the US investigations until his office issues its reports next month.There is no love lost between the Bush administration and Mr Annan, who declared the US-led invasion of Iraq to be illegal. According to Norm Coleman, the US senator who demanded Mr Annan’s resignation on Wednesday, Saddam Hussein illegally diverted $21bn (£11bn).Mr Coleman, the Republican head of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said Mr Annan should resign because “the most extensive fraud in the history of the UN occurred on his watch”.President Bush, asked yesterday whether Mr Annan should resign, did not reply directly. He said: “We think it’s time to set a new agenda in indigenous affairs and, of course, in reconciliation.” Boni Robertson, an Aboriginal academic, expressed horror at the episode on the Queensland farm.

“This, on top of Palm Island, is really too much,” she told The Australian newspaper. “How much more do they think our people can cope with? We are in a crisis, racially, in this country.” Aboriginal leaders have announced a national day of action a week tomorrow, in protest at indigenous deaths in custody. Black people make up 20 per cent of jail inmates, despite being only two per cent of the population.The Indigenous Affairs Minister, Amanda Vanstone, said this week that deaths in custody had fallen by 50 per cent since the 1980s. “This government is hell-bent on a philosophical view that it’s all about equal treatment, without recognising that in many communities they’re behind the eight-ball, so equal treatment often means a perpetuation of the same,” he said.Fred Chaney, who co-chairs Reconciliation Australia, also entered the debate, saying he believed the anger felt by many Aboriginals was justified.Mr Chaney, who was a government minister responsible for Aboriginal affairs in the 1970s, said progress on indigenous issues had gone “off the boil”.

The country’s only Aboriginal politician, Aden Ridgeway, was voted out of office in the recent election. Mr Ridgeway said this week that the government’s policy of treating all Australians equally did not take account of the vast gulf between black and white. Locals claim that children as young as nine were forced to lie face down in the dirt at gunpoint. Twenty-one people have been arrested, and are demanding to be allowed out for the funeral.A local Aboriginal activist, Sam Watson, said: “We have absolutely no confidence in the Australian so-called justice system.” Aboriginals are entirely without a voice at national level. Officers armed with stun guns and semi-automatic weapons reportedly stormed houses after the riot, searching for suspects. One local indigenous leader has threatened “payback” against the police.The island, usually out of sight and out of mind, has a troubled history.

It earned itself the title of the world’s most violent place outside a combat zone in the 1988 Guinness World Records. Deaths in custody are a particularly sore issue for Aboriginals; too many of their number have died in prison and police cells in the past. Last Friday night, 300 people vented their fury.The police tactics only inflamed the situation. And we’re reminding the community in general, and also the police, it is not free season on black fellas.” Palm Island remains a tinderbox, patrolled by heavily armed police. Mr Doomadgee’s funeral, to be held next week, will be the focus of high emotion Police have been warned to stay away. The results of a second autopsy have yet to be released, but locals are convinced that he died after being beaten up by his guards.

Last year he abolished the popularly elected Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, replacing it with a government-appointed body, the National Indigenous Council. Long was offered a seat on the council, which will meet for the first time next week. He declined, saying it would not give Aboriginals a real voice.Australians, meanwhile, are waiting with trepidation to see whether the attack on Alan Boland provokes more eruptions of violence. Mr Button said: “The community feels saddened in what arose, and we’re all angry, particularly still with the fresh memory of the thing in our minds about Palm Island.”We also still got fresh in our minds about the young kid that was impaled on a steel fence paling down at Redfern.