The Dominion - Isabel Macdonald

Into the Fire

Martin Lukacs — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 06:18:32 +0000

Deportation ends Salvadoran family's long wait for asylum in Canada

MONTREAL—Ever since Canada deported her family to El Salvador in December 2010, Jessica Vides says she fears for her life—and the lives of her young children.

“I am afraid to leave the house. The children can't go to school,” said the mother of three, two of whom are Canadian citizens, in a telephone interview from San Salvador, El Salvador's capital.

She and her husband, Eduardo Vides, fled their native country of El Salvador five years ago, she said, due to death threats from one of the country's notorious street gangs. Now that the family is back in San Salvador, she says the death threats have returned with a vengeance.

Two weeks after they were deported, Jessica Vides said the family received a menacing visit from men they suspect are gang members, who threatened to kill them if they failed to pay thousands of dollars.

“We all hid in a room at the back of the house,” she told The Dominion.

Such threats are exactly why she says the family left their home in San Salvador in the first place, and sought refuge in Canada.

But the peaceful refuge they’d dreamed of turned into a nightmare five years after they settled in Montreal. The family’s plight in the hands of Canadian immigration authorities raises serious concerns about Canada’s refugee policy. The Vides family accuses authorities of injuring their child while she clung to her dad as he was being carted off to an immigrant detention centre.

Eduardo Vides’s difficulties began when, as a passerby, he randomly witnessed the assassination of a woman on the street in San Salvador five years ago. Men he suspected were gang members soon started following him, he said in an interview with The Dominion.

Then the death threats started. He was warned that if he did not pay thousands of dollars, his whole family would be killed.

“I didn’t have the money,” he said. And so the family fled, escaping to Guatemala, and from there, to several US cities. In Buffalo, New York, with the help of a nonprofit group called Vive el Casa, they came to Canada as refugee claimants, according to Jessica Vides.

When they arrived in Canada, their first-born child, Eduarda, was just one year old. While awaiting a final decision on their asylum claim and subsequent judicial review of the decision, years passed. While they waited, Jessica and her husband established a home on Crevier Street in Montreal's Ville St. Laurent neighbourhood, where they had two more children: Andrea, now aged five, and Gustavo, now aged two. Originally trained as a pilot, Eduardo Vides found industrial maintenance work through an agency.

But their asylum claim was eventually rejected. Canada has in the past accepted Salvadoran refugees fleeing gang violence. However, given that asylum claims are heard before a single member of the Immigration and Refugee Board, it is, to some extent, the “luck of the draw,” according to Janet Dench, the executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR).

The Vides family went to Federal Court for a judicial review, but after a long wait, they learned that the verdict on that too was negative.

At a November 23, 2010, meeting at Citizenship and Immigration Canada's offices in downtown Montreal, Eduardo Vides was informed that the family was slated to be deported three weeks later. Vides said he pleaded at the meeting for the government to allow the family to stay until his daughter had completed her school year. Eduarda Vides, who is now seven years old, was enrolled as a first-grade student at Ville St. Laurent's Bois Franc-Aquarelle elementary school, and her dad had been working for more than a year at job repairing boilers, when the government ordered the family's deportation.

According to Vides, they responded by arresting him on the spot.

Three weeks later, in an interview with The Dominion, it was still difficult for Eduardo Vides to speak about the events of that fateful day. The slim man with gentle mannerisms spoke with a shaky voice about how his seven-year-old daughter, who was present at the meeting and witnessed the emotional exchange between her father and the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) agents, had thrown her arms around him. He recalled with a pained expression, “She hugged me, [and] I hugged her back.”

According to Vides, two male immigration agents grabbed him—from either side, an officer clamped onto his arms.

A third, female, officer grabbed the frightened first-grader. The girl “held on hard with her arms,” her father recounted.

Vides claims that the female officer injured his daughter as she wrestled the seven-year-old girl off of him. She had “wounds all over her back, stomach, and also scars on her leg,” he said. “She couldn't walk.”

Meanwhile, Canadian immigration agents hauled Eduardo Vides off to the CBSA's Laval detention center.

Reached by telephone for comment, Dominique McNealy, a CBSA agent at the centre, clarified that immigrants are detained primarily because authorities are not sure of the immigrant's identity, or in cases in which the immigrant poses a “flight risk” or a menace to Canada. However, he would not comment on why the authorities decided to incarcerate Vides, who had declared his identity to the authorities, and, as an employed worker concerned with the continuation of his daughter's schooling, seemed to pose little risk of either flight or danger to the public.

Immigration attorney Jared Will observed in a telephone interview that, “Immigration officers have a great amount of power over people's lives. Yet there’s no accountability process that is comparable to even something police officers have.”

While Will noted that it is possible to file complaints against immigration officers, “In terms of holding them accountable, there’s no process that has any teeth.”

Locked up in the immigrant prison in Laval, Eduardo Vides took matters into his own hands. He began a hunger strike in protest of his family’s treatment.

CBSA put him in his own private “room” (like the term “prisoner,” the word “cell” is avoided in the parlance of the immigrant detention system), isolating him from the general population.

Meanwhile, Jessica Vides was desperately seeking medical treatment for her eldest daughter, who she said had still not recovered from the injuries suffered in the hands of the immigration officer three weeks prior. Upon the advice of a local nonprofit, she brought Eduarda to Montreal’s principal francophone children’s hospital, St. Justine. However, staff there refused to examine the girl upon hearing that her injuries had stemmed from a confrontation with immigration authorities, according to Eduarda’s parents.

The St. Justine ombudsperson failed to respond to a request for comment for this article.

In a telephone interview on December 13, Jessica Vides said that the pain in the seven-year-old's stomach had not improved, and she also had a fever.

When The Dominion called Jessica Vides two days later, the mother-of-three’s number had been disconnected.

On December 15, the day the government had ordered that the family be deported, the Vides’s first grader still had a fever and pain in her stomach, according to her mother. Local solidarity activists had urged her to bring the child to a sympathetic Montreal doctor. But the family’s lawyer, Stephane Dulude, told Jessica Vides to go instead to the airport, as ordered by CBSA. Upon this advice, Jessica arrived at the airport with her three children, and presented herself to the immigration authorities. She appealed on her daughter's behalf for medical attention.

Reached by telephone, CBSA spokesperson Stephane Malepart said that, “we make sure that everybody's in good health to travel. If that person has to go to the hospital before travelling, we'll then we take them to the hospital and that's it.”

However, Jessica Vides told The Dominion that the immigration agent she appealed to responded by asking whether the girl was a Canadian citizen. Vides says she was told, “If not, it doesn’t matter. She has to leave.” The seven-year-old was thus refused treatment again. And then she, her little brother and sister (both Canadian citizens), and their mom, were all immediately deported.

The Vides family’s deportation was executed on day 22 of Eduardo's hunger strike.

Two days later, The Dominion, accompanied by Sarita Ahooja, an organizer with No One Is Illegal and Solidarity Across Borders, visited Eduardo in the Laval detention centre.

An activist with long experience working with immigrants in detention, Ahooja expressed surprise when the CBSA guards led us to a private office-style room equipped with office chairs, a desk, and a computer to wait for Eduardo Vides. (She pointed out the usual meeting room as we exited: a sparse common room with plastic chairs.)

Ahooja commented that she had never seen such measures taken in the Laval detention centre. Eduardo was being kept in isolation “to avoid the possibility that his resolve would spread and inspire others to defy an unjust and repressive system,” she later explained in an email to The Dominion, adding that this was not just her analysis but also Eduardo Vides’s.

When asked about CBSA’s response to the hunger strike, Malepart said the agency takes such actions very “seriously.” In fact, they had even put off Vides’s deportation, originally scheduled for December 15.

But upon hearing about his wife and kids’ deportation, the Salvadoran man broke his hunger strike. He wished to be with his family, even despite the threats on his life in El Salvador, he explained.

Late on the afternoon of the following Friday, CBSA informed him that he would be deported very late that Sunday night—a timing Vides found “suspicious,” given that it left very little time for legal recourse.

In the 2008–2009 fiscal year, the last year for which figures are available on the CBSA’s website, 13,249 people were deported from Canada—an increase of well over 50 per cent since 1999. Of those deported, 9,672 were, like the Vides family, asylum seekers whose claims had been turned down by the Canadian government. And, since last summer’s passage of a new refugee reform bill, this trend seems to be on the rise, as the government shifts ever greater resources into what CBSA euphemistically refers to as “removals.”

Bill C-11, which will go into effect over the next year, is, amongst other things, supposed to eliminate the excessively long delays that families like the Videses have faced in waiting for a final decision on their asylum claims. “It was a fact that many people had been waiting for years” for final decisions on their refugee claims, according to Dench. This problem has been made worse in recent years by the federal Conservatives’ failure to fill dozens of vacancies on the Immigration and Refugee Board.

Moreover, the lack of a refugee appeals process in the current system means that asylum seekers whose claims are rejected are forced to go through a lengthy judicial review by the Federal Court. These delays have serious consequences for asylum seekers, making it very likely that families like the Videses will settle in Canada over the course of the excessive waits they are forced to undergo, and then face undue hardships if their refugee claims are turned down and they are forced to leave the country.

Bill C-11 is supposed to address these problems by shortening the timelines for asylum decisions, and creating a new refugee appeals process that will expedite the processing of asylum seekers whose claims are rejected. According to the Canadian government’s backgrounder on the bill, the new system also entails “hiring more officers to expedite removals.”

Groups like the CCR assess the new legislation as a positive development overall, although they express concerns that the new timelines may not allow sufficient time for all asylum seekers to prepare claims, and they are critical of the way the new system creates a discriminatory two-tier system based on asylum seekers’ country of origin. As well, given that many families like the Videses have already built lives for themselves in Canada due to the excessive delays of the old system, the new emphasis on “removals” raises serious concerns.

Already, there seem to be changes in how immigration authorities are dealing with outstanding deportation orders, according to Will. “There are situations where before they would have waited, and now they’re just plowing ahead as quickly as possible,” the Montreal-based immigration lawyer observed. “There’s definitely been a very obvious hardening in carrying out deportations in situations in which there may have been more leeway in the recent past,” he added.

As the country lurches from the old dysfunctional system in which thousands of asylum seekers spent years waiting for a decision, to a renewed emphasis on deportations, one can only guess how many families will suffer the consequences.

Back in San Salvador, Jessica Vides is worried about how her family will survive. If they pay the money to the gangs, “how will we feed the kids?” she asked, adding that with the threats to their lives, “Eduardo can’t go to work.” The family cannot possibly stay in El Salvador, she said.

More than a month after his family’s deportation, the young father who had defied CBSA with his hunger strike sounded tired, and sad.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do here right now. We’re in a very hard situation,” he said.

The family yearns to return home—to Canada.

Brought to Canada when she was just one year old, it is the only country Eduarda Vida has ever known. “She tells me that she misses her country,” Jessica Vides told The Dominion. The seven-year-old girl’s mom says she corrects her daughter’s “mistake.” For as CBSA has made painfully clear to both of Eduarda’s parents, Canada is not their country.

But for the girl who was abruptly yanked out of her first grade year at Montreal’s Bois Franc-Aquarelle elementary school in December, this is no easy lesson.

“I miss my friends,” the seven-year old told The Dominion mournfully, in a telephone from San Salvador more than a month after her family’s deportation. She also misses the snow, and her school, she said.

“I don’t have school here,” she added, explaining, “we can’t leave the house.”

Isabel Macdonald is a Montreal-based journalist and media scholar who has written for The Nation, The Guardian and The Toronto Star, amongst other publications.

Canada cuts refugees loose

The Freedom of the Press Barons

hillarybain — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 18:56:45 +0000

The media and the 2004 Haiti coup

In February 2004, the US, Canadian and French governments supported an illegal coup d’etat that overthrew Haiti’s democratically elected government of the Lavalas party, led by Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In late 2003, “civil society” groups--financed and supported through US and Canadian government-funded “democracy enhancement” programs--began calling for Aristide’s ouster. They were joined in early February 2004 by armed terror squads. In the pre-dawn hours of February 29, 2004, President Jean Bertrand Aristide, who had been elected with 92 per cent of the popular vote, was forcibly removed from Haiti on a US government airplane, while Canada’s Joint Task Force 2 secured the airport.

Critics of the 2004 coup d’etat in Haiti have argued that biased international media coverage played a role in justifying the coup and Canada’s involvement. However, in interviews that I conducted as part of a research trip to Haiti in late 2005 and early 2006, many of the leaders of the US, Canadian and French government-backed movement that toppled Haiti’s elected government went much further in their assessment of the media’s role of the media in the coup.

In the eyes of Guy Philippe, the US Special Forces-trained commander who led the armed movement against Aristide, the “international media, the media leaders helped us a lot. And thanks to them we were able to overthrow the dictator. And without them I don’t think that we could have.” Leaders of the aforementioned “civil society” groups also emphasized that the media were very important in their movement. The Association National des Medias Haitiens (ANMH), an association of the owners of the largest Haitian commercial media stations in Port-au-Prince, was formally a member of the anti-Aristide “civil society” coalition. In the lead-up to the coup, the ANMH, which meets weekly, acted as a space of “co-ordination, decision making, enabling the different commercial media outlets to forge agreements” and enabling a “very strong impact on public opinion,” according to one of its members. As the association’s vice president explained, “It was our own way as the media to combat the dictatorship”. She added that the ANMH media owners "made it our job to cover all the demonstrations" against Aristide.

Many anti-Aristide demonstration organizers report that they were able to advertise their events for free on these stations, and many of the 184-affiliated media organizations had a policy of refraining from identifying the anti-Aristide demonstrators’ numbers (particularly if they were not impressive). As one ANMH media owner explained, “we always support the pro-democracy demonstrations,” and “sometimes we advance fantastical numbers because we don’t want the public to draw the wrong conclusion.” He added that if a group has 10 people but they want you to say 2000 or 300,000, if you say 10…you can make enemies, you can damage the group and their credibility. It can create animosity, so it’s better not to talk about…if the media are interested in the greatest number of people coming out…they will talk about how [the demonstration] is just starting.

In this context, one anti-Aristide demonstration organizer reports that at one demonstration in January 2003, “we were 20,” but when they called in to the radio, “we said we were thousands.”

In contrast, many Haitian commercial media organizations did not cover the pro-Lavalas demonstrations that were taking place around the same time and which were, according to independent journalist Kevin Pina, often much larger in size. In fact, in the lead-up to the coup, they instituted an ANMH-wide ban barring Aristide, the president of Haiti, from speaking on the airwaves. When the ANMH stations did provide coverage of pro-Lavalas events, meaningful media access for Lavalas-affiliated organizers was completely precluded. The ANMH’s Radio Signal FM continued to report on Lavalas events; however, the goal of this coverage was, in the words of one of its journalists, “to be there at the chimere’s[an epithet commonly used to refer to Lavalas supporters as gangsters] demonstrations because [we] had to inform the population that there was a risk…Aristide’s partisans are known to be violent and we described their violence—that’s all.” ANMH journalists whom I interviewed reported heavy editorial pressures from their bosses.

Several Canadian and international newswire journalists told me they relied on the ANMH radio stations, particularly the association’s Radio Metropole station, around the time of the coup. One deputy bureau chief at a major international newswire agency stated that the agency’s staff reporter in Haiti “relied heavily on Radio… Metropole, [sweatshop owner and coup leader André] Apaid’s radio stations;” it made him “wonder if we could trust any of what we’d been reporting.” However, many international journalists, including Canadian journalists, were relying on this wire service in the lead-up to the coup.

Canadian journalists’ reliance on ANMH sources has a broader institutional dimension. The Haitian media owners’ association has a longstanding relationship with Reseau Liberté, an NGO whose staff includes CBC and Radio Canada journalists, and which is financed by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). According to CIDA, this Canadian tax-payer funded alliance between Canadian journalists and the anti-Aristide media owners cartel is sowing the seeds for the development of “professional journalism,” which is a cornerstone of the Canadian government’s promotion of “democracy” in Haiti. US and Canadian government-sponsored “democracy promotion” is generally acknowledged by critical researchers to promote a model of rule by elites, in which popular participation is curbed. In other words, these programs seek to export the very same undemocratic systems that are a hallmark of political life in the US and Canada. It could be said that Canada promotes the “professional journalism” needed for “democracy” by supporting the Haitian equivalents of Conrad Black.

Anne-Marie Issa

Protesters Denounce Illegal Occupation of Somalia

dru — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 22:28:12 +0000

Coalition of Concerned Somali-Canadians calls for immediate withdrawal of Ethiopian troops

On January 20, several hundred people protested in front of the US consulate in Toronto to demand the immediate withdrawal of Ethiopian troops from Somalia. “Somalia should not be a theatre of proxy wars and the hidden agenda of Ethiopia and its American allies,” said Shukria Dini, an organizer with the Coalition of Concerned Somali-Canadians (CCSC), the group that organized the demonstration. The CCSC emphasizes the illegality of the occupation, which violates the principle of state sovereignty enshrined in the UN Charter, as well as UN Resolution 1725, which forbids neighbouring states from deploying troops to Somalia. The occupation is also a violation of the African Union Charter. Dini emphasizes the gendered impact of the occupation, citing reports of Ethiopian soldiers raping women in Somali towns and villages.

CCSC demands an immediate end to US diplomatic and military support for the occupation, and a halt to the US bombing of Somalia. The coalition also demands that the Canadian government join the international community in denouncing this illegal aggression against Somalia.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has not made any official statements about Ethiopia's occupation of Somalia.

The rally included speakers from the Trade Unions Against the War, the Canadian Arab Federation, the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid, the Canadian Peace Alliance and the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, as well as an anti-occupation coalition of people from one of Ethiopia’s largest ethnic groups, Oromos Against the Ethiopian Invasion of Somalia.

Acting with US support and funding, Ethiopia invaded Somalia in the last days of 2006, replacing the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) with a government led by US-backed warlords. The ICU, which took power in Somalia six months before the Ethiopian invasion, were credited with restoring stability for the first time since civil war tore the country apart in the early 1990s. The ICU had been criticized for imposing unpopular religious rules in the country, but remained popular for its stabilizing effect; during its brief reign, the Mogadishu airport had been opened for the first time in over a decade.

Former CNN and BBC producer Tim Lister reported that, "When the Islamic Courts were expelled, some residents of the capital were relieved that strict Sharia law, which had forbidden movies, televised soccer and the chewing of the narcotic qat leaf, was gone. But for most, apprehension was the dominant sentiment."

Last week, the Washington Post reported that US Special Forces had participated in the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia.

Immediately following the invasion, US-backed warlords staged a crackdown on media outlets, including one founded by Somali refugees who lived in Canada but who returned in 1999.

US planes bombed Somalia several times, claiming to target Islamic terrorists. A reported 70 people were killed by the air-strikes, with hundreds reported injured. Hundreds of families have fled the area of the bombings, fearing more attacks.

"The answer to terrorism is stable, democratic states, not rule by army warlords," Africa Action director Nii Akuetteh told the New York radio and television show Democracy Now! "Some of these people that the US has armed are actually terrorists, so even if the US is trying to protect its interests in the region, it is going about it in a terrible way... It seems to me it will make the situation much worse."

Speaking on the same program, Salim Lone, former spokesperson for the UN mission in Iraq, said that, "The US has been trying for many months now to try to undermine the Islamic Courts Union. They have been violating the existing UN resolutions since 1992, which forbid any armed assistance to Somalia... the US has been violating the arms embargo, over the UN, and using private contractors to funnel arms to the warlords."

In 1993, Canadian troops operating in Somalia tortured and killed Shidane Arone, a 16-year-old Somali, and tortured several other Somalis, many of them children. The ensuing scandal was known as the Somalia Affair, but a commission charged with investigating the incidents was shut down before it finished its work. No one was ever officially held responsible.

It is estimated that 100,000 Somalis now live in Canada.

Background:

» Dominion: Whose Trauma? The "Somalia Affair" and Canadian mythology

» Democracy Now: Conflict in Somalia

» World Politics Watch: Is Somalia Doomed to Repeat History?

Toronto: Protesting Proxy War in Somalia

Toronto: Protesting Proxy War in Somalia #3

Toronto: Protesting Proxy War in Somalia #2

Arrested Developments

Thu, 30 Sep 2004 20:29:40 +0000

New York hosts Republicans... and the largest US demonstration in decades

Demonstrators lay pairs of shoes to symbolize Iraqi and US casualties of war. all photos: NYC Indymedia

"New York certainly is an exciting city."

Thus remarked Brad Freeman, a Republican delegate from LA, and friend of George W. Bush, regarding the several hundred thousand protestors who flooded Manhattan on Sunday, August 29, the eve of the Republican National Convention."

Given the scale and volume of the demonstrations that unfolded on the streets of NYC during the week of the convention, it was quite an understatement---although one would hardly know that from the scant coverage the anti-GOP demos received in the Canadian mainstream media.

The organizers United For Peace and Justice estimated that over half a million marched that day under the banner "The World Says No to the Bush Agenda"; the number was greater than they had expected. Despite a number of fear-mongering articles about the dangerous protestors descending on the city in the local New York press, it was the largest march that New York City had seen in 20 years.

photos: NYC Indymedia

Hundreds of people took part in a procession carrying coffins wrapped in American flags to represent the almost one thousand American soldiers who have been killed in Iraq, urging the government to bring home the troops.

The march was joined by "Stone Walk," a group that had come all the way from Boston pulling a 1400 lb granite memorial honouring the "Unknown Civilians Killed in the War."

I talked to a member of the group "Koreans who oppose the US war and occupation" and he told me that the group was protesting because "we want to show that as people of colour, we oppose aggressive wars throughout the world." A number of placards read "the mission is not accomplished" and highlighted the US military's prisoner abuse scandals.

For Bill Smith, a member of School of the Americas Watch (SOAW), the recently publicized prisoner torture was nothing new. "We've been saying for years that [torture] has been part of government policy," said Smith. SOAW has for years been pressuring the US government to shut down its military training institute in Fort Benning, Georgia, which is notorious for training Latin American death squad leaders.

Some Republican officials responded to the Sunday demo by connecting the demonstrators with Democrats, in an effort to paint Kerry as non-mainstream. There was a sprinkling of "Vote Kerry" buttons in the crowd.

However, at the heels of the standard protest chant of the day"No Bush!" one often heard shouts of "Or Kerry!" tacked on, exposing the most prominent of many differences between demonstrators.

On the streets, in panel discussions, and between marches, there were heated discussions about the ultimate goal of the demonstrations--about whether it was to "re-defeat" Bush, or something more. At an August 30 panel discussion "Can we do any better than anyone but Bush?", Democracy Now's Jeremy Scahill argued that Kerry is really no alternative because he is not anti-war, and not opposed to the attack on civil liberties associated with the war on terror. At the same event, Canadian journalist Naomi Klein made the case to Americans that it would be an international disgrace for the nation to reelect Bush.

At a panel discussion on the corporate media the week before, one audience member, excited at what he saw as broader implications of the emerging social and political movement against Bush, was interrupted by fierce retorts from a fellow audience member, who decried any kind of radical protest tactic that could be spun by Republican propaganda mills into pro-Bush propaganda. "Not until after the election!" he screamed. This prompted a long-winded response from an anarchist, who began: "No! We need to overthrow the capitalist system..."

The week was crammed full with protest actions. There were various marches--from the "Still We Rise" people of colour's march, to a women's rights march, to an immigrant workers' rights march, to a poor people's march. The latter event ended in a scuffle between a police officer on a scooter and a protestor, which the media covered extensively (after a week of well-behaved protests, the scuffle was one of the few instances of the much-anticipated "violence").

A tent city christened "Bushville" was set up in Brooklyn to emphasize the negative social impact of the Bush administration's policies while activists confronted Republican delegates in the streets, and around theatres and hotels.

While heavily patrolled police barricades made it difficult for any protests to get within a radius of three blocks of Madison Square Garden, several demonstrators managed to infiltrate the convention. Particularly successful were the activists from Code Pink, an anti-war women's organization which uses the symbol of the pink slip (they often wear a pink slip--the garment--while protesting) to highlight job losses under Bush, and to call for his dismissal. By sending brigades of attractive women from within their ranks to woo male Republican delegates at bars, Code Pink managed to obtain a number of guest passes.

Alongside the numerous marches, there were a number of less conventional protest events, including anti-Bush street theatre performances and art shows.

Anyone within a two block radius of ground zero on August 28 would have heard the eerie chiming and tolling of hundreds upon hundreds of bells. The ringing filled the air just before dusk, as hundreds of people walked around the pit where the World Trade Centre had been prior to September 11, 2001, in "Ring Out," a mourning ceremony for those killed in terrorist attacks and wars around the world. Each participant rang a bell, either one of a thousand identical tiny metal bells brought to the site by "Ring Out" organizers, or another bell brought from home.

Another placard-free anti-Bush protest event was the "Billionaires' Ball," organized by the satirical group Billionaires for Bush, formerly Billionaires for Bush and Gore, who now boast dozens of chapters across the US, and who staged a number of events during the RNC. While the Republican delegates gathered at Madison Square Gardens to cheer for another four-year term for the President, the Billionaires, dressed to the nines in top hats, tuxes and ballgowns, and political buttons proclaiming "Free the Enron 7," gathered at a bar on the Chelsea Piers for an evening of their own over-the-top entertainment. Periodically, the crowd would erupt in jubilant screeches: "Four More Wars! Four More Wars!"

The anti-GOP demonstrations were contained by the largest security force ever assembled in New York City.

Undercover cops swarmed one of the main hubs of organizing, St. Marc's Church, to the point where many activists were steering clear of the place altogether. At every demonstration, the undercovers could be spotted cruising in close proximity to the protestors on new Italian scooters, sporting Harley Davidson t-shirts. Jokes were cracked about protesters attacked by an Upper East Side biker gang.

The New York Police Department (NYPD) had announced that it was deploying 10,000 officers for convention security. The National Guard, the FBI, and 200 officers from the Federal Protective Services of the Department of Homeland Security also descended on New York for the occasion.

Demonstrators repeatedly found themselves face to face with police officers' video cameras. The Homeland Security officers were outfitted with helmets with built-in video surveillance cameras, which sent live footage to a central control room, enabling greater coordination between different agencies. Choppers and an occasional blimp supplied aerial surveillance.

The NYPD used pepper spray on protestors at the poor people's march. During a protest at Union Square on August 31, police chased down and beat one protestor. At a smaller protest the same day, a police officer grabbed another kid by the neck and held him against a wall. Cyclists in the critical mass bike ride reported that cops on bicycles rode into them. However, that was the extent of the violence I--and it seems, most others--witnessed in the streets. The most prevalent police strategy used against the protestors was systemic, indiscriminate mass arrests.

* * *

Karen Agugliaro and her two friends, Cynthia and Cliff, were standing on the curb on Manhattan's West 34th Street, near Broadway, on a balmy Tuesday evening, the second day of the Republican National Convention, when a spontaneous protest erupted on the sidewalk beside them.

A group of about 30 people converged on the corner singing "these streets are our streets."

The three passersby, who had no intention of getting themselves arrested, dutifully obeyed the cops when police officers ordered the crowd to "stand by the wall on the side of the sidewalk if [they] didn't want to get arrested."

"We said OK," Agugliaro recalled; the three friends heeded the police warning, moving aside. To her surprise, when she looked back at her two companions a moment later, they were both being arrested. "There were my two friends, who were co-operative and polite, caught up in handcuffs."

The police placed metal fences around everybody on the sidewalk at the corner of Broadway and West 34th, informing them they were being arrested for "disturbing the peace." I saw a police officer running after two pedestrian bystanders who tried to escape; one man in an orange Buddhist robe managed to get away, though not before the police gave him a shove. I watched another man narrowly dodge out of reach of another police officer's grasp and sprint away to the freedom of Fifth Avenue, with a petrified expression on his face.

Aglugliaro's friends were two of over 1000 arrested on August 31.

That afternoon, the police conducted mass arrests at a peaceful march commemorating the casualties of war and terror. The procession, organized by the War Resisters League, in conjunction with School of the Americas Watch, had not advanced less than a block from its departing point at Ground Zero when the police rounded up and arrested 80 people.

The majority of the arrestees had been walking in rows of two on the sidewalk--exactly as they had been instructed to do by police. They had not advanced more than a block when they were fenced in and surrounded by over a hundred police officers, cruisers, vans and buses on the corner of Church and Fulton Streets. The cops penned the protestors in with orange netting, and told them that they were all under arrest for "obstructing governmental administrations."

As the police transported the arrestees from the plastic pen into the awaiting NYPD buses, a legal observer from the National Lawyers Guild informed the remaining protestors of the police's most recent communiqué: those protestors who chose to could continue with the march, in double file, on the sidewalk, without blocking the sidewalk. Also, there was a strong possibility of arrest for those who chose to march.

An hour later, the remainder of the march continued. A couple of hundred protestors set off down the sidewalk, two by two, like a procession of obedient school-children on a class trip, attracting jeers from young anarchists as they passed. The march culminated in a "die in" on Broadway, around 28th St, where 54 people lay down in the middle of the street and were promptly arrested.

As the cops told those lying on the road they were under arrest, a young woman began reading aloud from the US Constitution. The passage that she shouted out read: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

She continued reading until the police drove the remaining protestors down side streets. As they were pushing people back, the police told about a dozen people, including a reporter from the New Standard, that they were under arrest. They were penned in, and then allowed to escape.

The mass arrests had begun during the Critical Mass bike ride, in which 264 people were arrested.

All the arrestees were brought to a processing centre in the warehouse Pier 57, and were then transported to a jail. Many were held for over 48 hours without charges, some for as many as 5 days, without being read their rights. There were a number of complaints of oil and chemical residue on the floor of the warehouse where they spent the night.

Although the NYPD had told the city that they anticipated 1000 arrests per day of the convention, they rationalized the delays in releasing protestors by invoking the volume of the arrests. Finally, the delays in processing led a judge to invoke fines against the city. On September 2, State Supreme Court Justice John Cataldo fined the city $1,000 for every protester held past a 5 p.m. deadline he had set for their release.

The impact of the mass arrests was evident in the climate of fear at subsequent actions. On the last evening of the convention, 600 protestors gathered at Union Square for a candlelight vigil organized by United for Peace and Justice. The vigil group, in concert with a number of other groups, had been planning to march to Madison Square Garden. However, a number of protestors began expressing fears of arrest.

During discussions over whether to proceed with the plan to march up to the convention site, one protestor began shouting "Don't do it. It's a trap! They'll pen you in!"

The NYPD finally told the protestors that they should march in pairs, on the sidewalk. The crowd obeyed, and formed lines. They waited in double file for half an hour. Then, spontaneously, a river of people surged into the road, taking it over completely.

However, it was only an hour before the police set up a police barricade in the middle of the march, splitting it in two, and preventing the last half of the march from moving. The first half of the march proceeded, but was soon stopped by another police barricade, long before it approached Madison Square Garden.

New York hosts Republicans... and the largest US demonstration in decades

"New York certainly is an exciting city."

Thus remarked Brad Freeman, a Republican delegate from LA, and friend of George W. Bush, regarding the several hundred thousand protestors who flooded Manhattan....

by Isabel Macdonald