LOS ANGELES — Thirteen years later, the Number One unlearned lesson from the nation’s first multiethnic urban upheaval still remains: the failure of the established leadership of the various minorities to break out of their own tribal box in this City’s volatile there-is-no-ethnic-majority chemistry.

Sitting on a smoldering volcano for years, the System (City Hall, LAPD, the District Attorney, the courts and the media) were utterly unprepared for the explosion that signaled a radical departure from the enduring black-white dialogue since time immemorial. Ditto the established leaders among the communities of color — black, brown and yellow.

What’s worse, they are still in denial, as if nothing did happen during the three days and nights of looting and mayhem, portending a future minority-versus-minority race war in this nation of contending groups and interest. For the mainstream power structure, 4-29 was a knee-jerk way of deflecting and successfully diverting black rage (in the aftermath of the acquittal of the four white cops) into the nation’s first media-inspired, manufactured race war, pitting one established native minority against a non-English-speaking immigrant group.

Remember, it was the English-speaking children of 4-29 victims in their teens and 20s who, along with their voiceless immigrant parents, almost overnight organized the nation’s largest Asian rally and march of more than 30,000 demonstrators with a sprinkling of young blacks, Latinos and Asians. A singular irony was that these victims, young and old alike, marched along the still smoldering buildings, chanting, “We shall overcome fear and hatred” of the Civil Rights Movement.

It’s time to remember the burning and looting in Los Angeles from 13 years ago.

But where were the established Asian American leaders in government and the advocacy sectors who purport to represent these powerless people? Where were the established African Americans who call themselves civil rights leaders?

They were nowhere to be found.

The much vaunted pan-Asian American “unity” turned out to be empty rhetoric, as our entrenched AA leaders were conspicuously absent, far removed from the struggling and stumbling new-immigrant communities that stay disparate, fragmented and mutually isolated from each other.

4-29 demonstrated the inability of first-generation immigrants to lead out of their own ethnic trap. You can taste their deeply felt alienation from their own established American-born leaders in positions of influence but who stay aloof from their own ethnic roots, language and culture.

No wonder both blacks and Latinos remain in the dark as to the subterranean predicament of their Asian immigrant neighbors.

Asian American history is replete with examples of each Asian ethnic group shying away from each other whenever there’s racial trouble, in wishful hopes that they alone, not other Asian groups, would be accepted by not only mainstream but other larger minority groups such as Latinos and blacks. This moral ambiguity has bedeviled each Asian ethnic group since the first arrival of yellow men in the mid-19th century. Further, the enduring all-Asians-look-alike syndrome helped drive each Asian group not to be identified with other “problem” Asians, say, Koreans during the 4-29 fiery siege of Koreatown.