SYDNEY, Aug 26, 2009 (AFP) - A group of Aborigines from Australia's desert Outback have asked the United Nations to declare them refugees in their own country, saying a military-led crackdown has left them powerless.

The 4,000-person Alyawarra nation said Wednesday they wrote to the UN special rapporteur James Anaya during his visit to remote Top End communities last week and asked him to declare them internally displaced persons.

Alyawarra spokesman Richard Downs said his people had been marginalised by a controversial "intervention" into Aboriginal communities, launched two years ago by the former conservative government.

"We've got no say at all," Downs told public broadcaster ABC.

"We feel like an outcast in our community, refugees in our own country."

About 100 people had also walked off their land at Ampilatwatja, outside Alice Springs, to protest against the squalid living conditions in government housing, Downs added.

Thousands of police and soldiers were in August 2007 deployed to the desert camps in response to a damning report about alcohol-fuelled sexual abuse and domestic violence.

Dubbing the situation "a national emergency", the government introduced restrictions on welfare payments, alcohol and pornography, and introduced measures to encourage Aboriginal children to attend school.

Centre-left Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made Aboriginal rights a priority when he won office in 2007, delivering an historic apology in parliament for the wrongs they suffered at the hands of white settlers since 1788.

But Rudd has refused to scrap the intervention policy, disappointing many Aboriginal leaders.

Anaya's two-week visit here was the first by a UN rapporteur on indigenous human rights - a position that sees him act as a roving representative for the international body. He will report back to the UN Human Rights Council.

Australia's original inhabitants, Aborigines number just 517,000 out of a population of 21 million and have disproportionate rates of infant mortality, health problems and suicide.