The Dominion - Justin Podur

Canada's Newest Political Prisoners

dawn — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:03:53 +0000

Indigenous leaders jailed for protesting mining exploration on their lands

TORONTO, ONTARIO–On March 18, 2008, Ontario Superior Court Judge Patrick Smith sentenced Chief Donny Morris and six other council members from the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI) First Nation, a community of about 1,200 people in northern Ontario, to six months in jail for "contempt of court."

The group had defied a court order to stay away from a part of their land slated for mining by the Platinex Corporation. The judge applied the jail term rather than the fine as he knew the First Nation had gone bankrupt: the community had been fighting Platinex in court for several years after the company sued for $10 billion (later reduced to $10 million) for opposing drilling on KI territory.

Those charged served over two months in prison, eventually having their sentences reduced to time served. By the time they were released, they had exposed Ontario's Mining Act and the displacement of Indigenous Peoples for profit as a simmering issue throughout the country, awaiting its next crisis.

Legal trickery

Ontario's Mining Act is 135 years old and based on a "wild-west" model. It allows anyone to stake a claim anywhere on Crown land. This means that private companies can exploit public land for profit.

The legal question is whether the Mining Act supersedes all other laws and agreements.

In 2005 and 2006 Platinex attempted to explore and exploit land that, according to "Treaty 9," signed in 1929, belongs to KI First Nation. KI says the Mining Act is unconstitutional, bypassing the 'duty to consult,' and that mining on their land would threaten the First Nation's survival by destroying hunting and fishing habitats.

An attempt by Platinex to enter KI territory for drilling was denied by leaders in the community. The court claimed that if these leaders were not jailed, there would be a loss of respect for the law; the creation of two regimes of justice.

The KI have argued there are already two regimes of justice. "The government accuses First Nations of breaking Canadian laws when they defend their lands, but Canada itself is selective about which of its own laws it will abide by," said the Shabot Obaajiwan's spokesperson Earl Badour in a press release on March 18, 2008. "If the law doesn't serve their purposes, they conveniently ignore it."

In his sentencing of KI First Nation leaders, Judge Smith cited as precedent the jailing of Ardoch Algonquin Nation leader Bob Lovelace, who was sentenced on February 15 to six months in jail for trying to stop Frontenac Ventures from mining uranium on Ardoch Algonquin land, about 60km north of Kingston, Ontario.

Frontenac obtained a court order and an injunction rather than filing trespassing charges against Lovelace and other Indigenous protesters. Trespassing charges would have brought into question whose land was being trespassed upon: a can of worms the mining company wanted to avoid.

The Ardoch Algonquin First Nation and neighbouring Shabot Obaadjiwan First Nation are also pointing to the disregard of the 'duty to consult' - something the Ontario government is legally bound to do, according to previous Supreme Court rulings and the Canadian constitution. The duty to consult means that Indigenous communities must be meaningfully consulted on resource exploration on their lands, a requirement that clashes with Ontario's Mining Act.

Mining Politics

The mining company Frontenac Ventures is shrouded in mystery. Mining researcher Jamie Kneen told IPS's Chris Arsenault, "Aside from the President and their lawyer, no one knows who they are or where they get their money." Frontenac's President, George White, refused to answer media calls.

The lawyer for Frontenac, Neil Smitheman, is also representing Platinex. The two companies have a lot of the same concerns. Indeed, when the provincial court ruled in 2006 that Platinex was to cease operations while consultations were held with KI, Smitheman said: "There are numerous mining companies and exploration companies that could be in a similar situation if there's a failure to have proper consultation on lands that could be subject to a claim by First Nations people." Apparently the court came to the same conclusion, deciding in 2007 that Platinex could in fact drill on KI's territories – that the Ontario Mining Act overruled the constitutional duty to consult.

For a sense of what KI territory might face if uranium mining does take place, there is precedent. The Elliot Lake uranium mine, also in northern Ontario, left 130 million tons of toxic tailings and destroyed the Serpent Lake ecosystem.

"Uranium mining has no record other than environmental destruction and negative health issues," says Doreen Davis, another Algonquin leader who was also sentenced to jail time.

While the environmental and social costs of mining uranium in Canada's north may be huge, the effect, even if the mine does not go through, is chilling.

"As even the mine promoter's lawyer has admitted in court hearings, there is a vanishingly small chance a uranium mine will ever get built at the headwaters of the Mississippi River northwest of Sharbot Lake," notes
Paul McKay, a friend and neighbour of Lovelace's, in an op-ed in the Kingston Whig-Standard. "Compared to other deposits in Saskatchewan, Australia, South Africa and Asia, the ore is laughably low-grade, and the cost to mine fatally high."

So why is the Ontario government allowing Platinex to push ahead, and jailing those who oppose the mine?

The point of these jailings, McKay argues, is a two-fold political message. One, to the mining companies: the mineral wealth of the north is open to access and the government will clear any Indigenous resistance out of the way. Two, to the Indigenous: any resistance against the latest bonanza of extraction and destruction will be met with criminalization and jail time.

Government games and the Indigenous response

A March 20 press release from First Nations of Sachigo Lake, Bearskin Lake, Muskrat Dam, Kasabonika, Wunnimun, Wapekeka, Kingfisher and Wawakapewin called for sustained opposition to the court's decision to jail KI protesters, and the mining companies' stance.

The Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs suggested the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) tear up its Memorandum of Understanding with the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, signed on March 4, 2008.

From their press release of March 18, 2008: "The community members have been jailed for protecting their title and rights to their territories and any continued relationship with the mining industry will be indelibly stained by these shocking events...Given the ugly, thuggish approach demonstrated thus far by the courts and by the mining industry, it is of the utmost importance to show our support of the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation and refuse to have any relationship with the mining industry."

The Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN) suspended mining-related negotiations with the Ontario government the day after the KI leaders were sentenced. "It was a real insult to all First Nations," Alvin Fiddler, Deputy Grand Chief of NAN, told reporters on March 19.

AFN National Chief Phil Fontaine visited some of the jailed leaders in Thunder Bay on March 22 and called the jailing an obstacle to peace. Canada's Anglican Primate, Archbishop Fred Hiltz, wrote a letter on March 25 to Ontario's Premier, saying the jailing arises "out of the continual imposition of the power and values of colonizers."

The Grand Chief of NAN, Stan Beardy, was quoted in the Kingston Whig-Standard, arguing that other political considerations were at work. "The McGuinty government got labelled weak in dealing with Caledonia [Six Nations blockade in Ontario] and now they say, 'We're not weak and we'll show you by throwing these Indians in jail...'"

The federal government has been silent on the issue, sending a message that Indigenous issues are not national issues, but for provincial governments to deal with. The Ontario government is using familiar tactics.

While the Superior Court imposes jail sentences, the provincial government's Aboriginal Affairs Minister, Michael Bryant, offers a ‘compromise': the leaders don't go to jail, pay only some of the fines, and allow the mining to continue. In other words, surrender the land.

"What is happening here is we've been criminalized for practising our way of living," says Beardy. "The government wants to make an example of us. What's being done is, once more, we're being moved out of the way, our valuable resources are being exploited and everybody is benefiting except us."

A version of this article previously appeared in Znet.

Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer and activist, who blogs at killingtrain.

KI Protest

Abandoning Hypocrisy

dru — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 14:44:06 +0000

Canada's foreign policy and Afghanistan

The following remarks are based on a talk delivered in September 2006.

Canada is fighting a counternarcotics campaign and a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Afghanistan currently supplies 90 per cent of the world's heroin. The narcotics Canada is fighting are a product of the occupation. They are a product of the alliances the Afghan government has made with the warlords who actually control the country. They are a product of the falsehood that Canada or the US is interested in 'development' in Afghanistan. They are a product of fact that the only hope a farmer has of earning a livelihood is through this crop that can bring a little cash (not a lot of cash, because no peasant ever gets rich from growing poppy in Afghanistan).

The Taliban, who ruled the country before the US and Canadian occupation, had banned the poppy. That's not praise for the Taliban -- they also banned music, sports, television and laughter. That isn't the solution to the problem either –- it can't be a solution to the livelihood of 2.3 million people, the 10 per cent of the Afghan population who rely on the poppy. Solutions to drug problems are clear enough and well-enough known: treatment for addiction; legalization and control; education; and support for the agrarian economy. But the drug war is a useful pretext for other agendas.

As for the counterinsurgency, the question of how Canada came to be involved in it is important. It is part of an evolution in Canadian foreign policy in recent years.

Canadian foreign policy used to be based on hypocrisy. Canada's leaders have always seen themselves, and presented themselves, as men of the West, involved in the wars the West was involved in, including colonial wars. But Canada has also tried to present itself as a country without a colonial history, an honest broker and peacekeeper that has, and deserves, the trust of the world.

From America's war against the Vietnamese and before, Canada has been a supply centre, a diplomatic supporter and a training ground (see Canada, Empire), but it shied away from direct military participation in colonial wars.

That started to change in the 1990s, for various reasons. Canada was in the process of adopting a "free trade" agreement that was integrating the economies of Canada and the US in new ways. Neo-liberalism was locking other countries into weakness and dependency on the US. Everywhere, the segment of the elite that sought a degree of independence was weakened. People who tried to fight back were told they were on the wrong side of history.

There are three stories about Canadian foreign policy during this period that illustrate the drift from hypocrisy.

Back in the 1980s, there was a little 'blip' in Canadian support for Israel against the Palestinians. During the initial expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948, Canada followed Britain. During the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Canada followed the US. But in the 1980s, when Israel invaded Lebanon, when Israel was crushing the first Palestinian Intifada, some Canadian leaders -- Trudeau and Clark -- actually criticized Israel. But in the 1990s, when the Oslo Accords brought a phony "peace" to Palestine, Canada was able to return to its hypocritical role; supporting "peace" publicly, while supporting Israel privately -- and moving towards increasingly public support.

In 1990 and 1991, Mulroney rushed to Bush Sr.'s side when Bush ordered the beginning of the destruction of Iraq. Canada made sure that its warplanes and ships were active, involved in bombing the relatively defenceless Iraqi military and the completely defenceless Iraqi population. That campaign killed hundreds of thousands of people and was followed by sanctions against Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands more -- sanctions Canada participated in. The sanctions were followed by another invasion that has killed over a hundred thousand more, according to conservative and not-very-recent estimates.

In 1993, the Canadian Airborne Regiment was sent to Somalia. Here, too, Canada went with the US. The US was there to "Restore Hope," and killed several hundred (or was it several thousand?) Somalis in the process, before leaving ignominiously. Canada went along to support the mission. The story was familiar. Somalia was a "failed state." Canada had a "responsibility to protect" the people from evil. So Canada set up a base in a town called Belet Huen. The armed forces set up a well-supplied base in the middle of a miserably poor country, a country of desperate shortages and starving people. Some of those people started to sneak onto the base and steal supplies. If the Canadians were to lock them up, they'd have to lock up a lot of them. So they came up with a series of humiliating punishments: keeping them out under the sun under armed guard, tying them up, beating them up, shooting them, or torturing them. This culminated in a group of Canadian soldiers torturing a 16-year-old child to death over the course of a whole night. The child's name was Shidane Arone and his murder was recorded in a series of gruesome photographs that came to appear in the Canadian press. Today, Canadian commentators talk about the "Somalia Affair" as a national trauma -- for Canadians. This is narcissism. We focus on ourselves, rather than the victims of our actions. The same is true in Afghanistan.

The last hiccup of hypocrisy in Canadian foreign policy was the second destruction of Iraq in 2003. Canada performed, and continues to perform, its historical services of supply centre, training ground and diplomatic supporter. But the US wanted more from its allies and that meant Canada had to 'mend fences,' and it did so on the bones of Haitians, Palestinians, the Lebanese and Afghans. The primary way Canada helped the US invasion of Iraq was by relieving the US in Afghanistan. It isn't much relief: 2,200 troops in a mission that involves some 36,000 troops, including 20,000 Americans. But it goes some way, presumably, to 'mending fences.'

This 'fence-mending' began the new period of Canadian foreign policy, in which Canada has abandoned hypocrisy outright.

Canada's first move towards abandoning hypocrisy was joining the invasion of Afghanistan; until recently, Canada was pretending that the Afghan mission was of the innocent peacekeeping variety that was done in Somalia.

The second move towards abandoning hypocrisy happened in December 2004, on the heels of Bush Jr.'s visit to Ottawa. Previously, Canada had abstained from several votes requiring Israel to comply with its obligations under international law by withdrawing from the territories it occupied in 1967. Canada's Ambassador to the UN at the time, Allan Rock, said that the "value added" of the committees trying to put Palestinian rights on the agenda at the UN was "questionable" and that the process was biased –- against Israel. So Canada started to vote against Palestinian rights.

Next, six months later, in July 2005, Canada's Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier put the "peacekeeping" and "failed states" story to bed with a rhetorical flourish. Talking about the Afghans on the receiving end of Canada's military, he said: "These are detestable murderers and scumbags. They detest our freedoms, they detest our society, they detest our liberties... We are the Canadian Forces and our job is to be able to kill people." Hillier was concentrating his fire directly on the Canadian myth that we are innocent peacekeepers. He was doing that because he wants to see Canada involved in a counterinsurgency that he knows is going to be bloody and brutal. Like Harper, he hopes that by talking tough he can increase the public's tolerance for blood.

These moves by the Liberals preceding the Tories' rise to power set Harper up nicely. He was the first to cut all aid to the Palestinians earlier this year, to starve them for the election they held shortly after the one that brought him to power. This summer, when Israel destroyed Gaza's power plant and massacred hundreds of Palestinians from the air, Harper called the response "measured." While Israel was massacring civilians in Lebanon, suffering largely military casualties at the hands of Hezbollah, Peter MacKay was calling the resistance "cold-blooded killers" and a "cancer on Lebanon."

The abandonment of hypocrisy led Canada directly into this counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan. The escalation of the war in recent months is probably because the many promises made of development and peace in Afghanistan were demonstrated to be lies. Having demonstrated that its interest in Afghanistan is "to be able to kill people," Canada ought to have been able to anticipate the consequences.

Since 2001, the 'international community' has spent $82.5 billion on military operations and $7.3 billion on aid and development. The Canadian figures are similarly skewed. The CIDA aid figures are in the hundreds of millions and most of it has not actually been spent. The military budgets are in the billions and forever rising. Canada has set up Tim Horton's in its well-equipped camps in the midst of a massive humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. This is an affront and an insult to starving people. Canadian soldiers follow the US Air Force, "mopping up" people who are called "suspected Taliban" when they are killed by the dozen or hundred. Major General Andrew Leslie earlier this year told reporters that, "every time you kill an angry young man overseas, you're creating 15 more who will come after you." Despite demonstrating this understanding, the Major General's military machine continues to kill.

By any decent measure, Canada's mission in Afghanistan is an outrage. By the measures claimed by Canada and the US, the mission is a failure. Canada's counternarcotics have placed Afghanistan at the centre of the world's opium trade. Canada's counterinsurgency has the Taliban controlling half the country and going from strength to strength. Canada's development program has led to massive hunger and starvation, right under the noses of the Canadian military presence in the south and within a distance to smell Tim Horton's coffee and donuts. With Canada guaranteeing security, schools are being burned all over the south.

Canada should leave; should apologize for what it has done and make amends; should stop killing people and calling whoever is killed 'Taliban'; and should stop letting young Canadians who have no idea kill and get killed so that colonial powers can 'mend fences.'

And Canada will leave. For all the bluster of Harper and Hillier, the military realities are stark and there are at least some, even in Canada, who know it. It would be tragic if Canadians come to think of Afghanistan as a 'national trauma' in which we were scarred, forgetting our victims like we did in Somalia. If, instead, Canadians could learn that Canada is not an innocent peacekeeper and never was, that the traumas we cause are worse than the ones we suffer and that our place isn't cheering for slaughter but fighting against it, we could actually make the world safer.

Tim Horton's in Kandahar

M777 artillery gun

Canada's Drift on Israel

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 03:49:55 +0000

From abstention to unconditional support

Allan Rock at the United Nations. photo: DFAIR

In December 2004, under the Martin Liberal government, Canada changed its voting pattern at the United Nations. Previously, Canada had abstained from several votes requiring Israel to comply with its obligations under international law and withdraw from the territories it occupied in 1967. The Ambassador at the time, Allan Rock, said that the "value added" of the committees trying to put Palestinian rights on the agenda at the UN was "questionable." Canada began to vote against these resolutions.

Well before this, in October 2003, the UN Special Rapporteur for Food found that 22 per cent of children in Gaza were starving as a direct result of Israel's siege policy: Gaza had long been surrounded by electric fences, its population of 1.25 million imprisoned, and its economy shut down. Unemployment was nearly total; poverty was at 75 per cent. The UN Special Rapporteur's findings were confirmed by the World Bank and by USAID. All understood that the starvation was a direct result of the closures. By 2006, the World Food Program was reporting that 51 per cent of Palestinians – 2 million people – were malnourished.

In addition to the starvation and siege, Israeli warships, snipers, and planes continued to attack Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank.

Between the October 2003 report of the UN and the December 2004 decision by the Martin government, there had passed over a year of unabated starvation and siege. According to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society's figures, Israel had killed over 1000 Palestinians in this same period.

Since Canada changed its voting pattern in 2004, three key events occurred that have changed the Canada-Israel relationship even further.

First, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon implemented his 'unilateral disengagement plan'. Under this plan, Israeli settlers who lived in Israeli-only colonies in Gaza were evacuated. Billed as a peace maneuver and a painful sacrifice for the colonists, the "disengagement" did not give the Palestinians of Gaza any freedom of movement, nor did it prevent Israel from continuing its shelling, bombing, siege, and starvation.

Second, the Martin government fell and was replaced by the Harper Tories. Like their counterparts in the US, they sought to distinguish themselves from the Liberals by more aggressively supporting Israel's violence against the Palestinians. Because the Liberals had already come so far so fast in the same direction, the Tories had to shift the spectrum even further.

Third, Palestinians held a democratic election. The result of this fair election was the party that prioritized resistance (Hamas) defeated the party (Fatah) that had been roped into a perpetual "dialogue" with a state that simultaneously starved, bombed, and imprisoned its people. The response of Canada, under Harper, to this democratic result was to cut aid to the starving and besieged Palestinians. Harper was following senior advisor to Ariel Sharon, Dov Weisglass, who announced a plan to "put Palestinians on a diet." In addition to putting Palestinians on a diet, Israel maintained a campaign of escalating massacres, including the major massacre of an entire family of 7 on a beach in Gaza on June 9, another major massacre on June 13 (11 people), another on June 20 (3 children), and yet another on June 21 (a pregnant woman and her brother).

A central issue for Hamas is the Palestinian prisoners. Some 9 000, including 400 children and 100 women, are locked up in Israeli prisons. Among those who have been tried (at least 1 000 have never been charged for any crime), many were convicted on confessions extracted by torture conducted by their Israeli captors. Israel forces periodically kidnap Palestinians in different parts of the Palestinian territory. Such a kidnapping precipitated the ongoing crisis in the region. On June 24, Israeli commandos kidnapped two Palestinian civilians. On June 25, Palestinians attacked a military outpost, killing two soldiers, losing two of their own, and taking a tank gunner prisoner. Hamas said it would release the tank gunner in exchange for the 400 children and 100 women being held in prison.

When Israel instead launched air raids, destroyed Gaza's power plant, and invaded the area with thousands of troops, Harper said he thought Israel's response, "under the circumstances," was "measured."

On July 12, the Lebanese group Hizb'ullah captured several Israeli soldiers on the Israel-Lebanon border. Hizb'ullah, like Hamas, sought a prisoner exchange. Some analysts have said that the operation may have been intended to take some of the military pressure off of Gaza, since the 'international community' had remained silent, called for 'restraint' like Kofi Annan, or, like Harper, endorsed the Gaza invasion.

Israel responded by invading Lebanon, destroying its airports, roads, factories, homes, displacing over a million people, and killing over 1 000, including eight Canadian citizens and a Canadian UN monitor. In the Palestinian territories, Israel killed about 55 Palestinians in June and 162 in July. Hizb'ullah used rockets to attack Israeli military installations and towns, killing dozens of Israeli civilians, though most of the Israeli dead in the war were soldiers. Most of the Lebanese dead, by contrast, were civilians – a high proportion of whom were children. Harper's Foreign Minister, Peter MacKay, assessed this situation as follows: Hizb'ullah were 'cold blooded killers' and a 'cancer on Lebanon.'

A long-standing campaign by groups like the Canadian Council of Chief Executives calling for a Canadian foreign policy more closely aligned with that of the United States began to bear fruit with the Martin Liberal government, and is rapidly finding its completion in Stephen Harper's administration. Canada's continuous drift towards unambiguous support for Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories reflects the pressure put on politicians for a pro-US foreign policy in general and a pro-Israel foreign policy in particular.

This drift in Canada's foreign policy is unlikely to stop, barring the effective mobilization of forces that will oppose it. Recent polls suggest that Canada's "neutrality" in the region is valued by its citizenry; whether a position that actively opposes war crimes and policies of economic strangulation is similarly popular is not known, as the question is usually not asked.

Justin Podur traces the shift of Canada's foreign policy in the Middle East.

Nourrir la fleur ou couper la tige ?

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 00:53:01 +0000

La démocratie en Haïti promue par le Canada

image caption.

Pour l'élection présidentielle de l'après coup d'Etat, les Haïtiens auront le choix entre 54 candidats le 20 novembre prochain. Le « conseiller spécial pour Haïti » du Premier ministre canadien, Denis Coderre, a laissé entendre hier que cette liste étendue était une bonne chose, un signe que « la démocratie était comme une fleur qui a besoin de soins permanents ».

Mais cette longue liste de candidats accuse une absence notable, celle du Père Gérard Jean Juste qui se trouve actuellement en prison (la discussion sur la raison de sa situation devra être remise à plus tard, mais il faut savoir qu'il est prisonnier politique et répond à des chefs d'accusation qui sont dénués de preuve). Du fait de son emprisonnement, il n'a pas pu déposer sa candidature en personne comme l'oblige le Conseil électoral provisoire d'Haïti. Selon les termes de la constitution haïtienne il est possible de s'inscrire en tant que candidat à la présidentielle même si l'on ne peut le faire en personne, à partir du moment où la candidature est présentée par deux avocats et un juge d'instance. C'est, nous a-t-on dit, ce que les gens de Jean Juste ont tenté de faire, mais leur demande a été rejetée.

Je n'ai pas rencontré en personne le Père Jean Juste, mais j'ai vu son visage ce matin sur un tee-shirt dans le grand quartier populaire de Bel Air. Un militant du Lavalas (parti politique de J-B. Aristide) du nom de Samba Boukman nous a rencontrés dans sa petite cour. En s'approchant, il a montré du doigt le tee-shirt et a dit : « C'est lui le Président du peuple ».

Tout à côté de la cour où nous avons parlé avec S. Boukman, aussi responsable du programme de jeunesse Zakat, se trouvait le quartier général des Nations Unies. Des troupes brésiliennes étaient là, dans des jeeps, en voitures blindées, et à pied afin d'apporter du renfort aux coins des rues. MINUSTAH, la « Mission de stabilisation » des Nations Unies, était là en force.

La MINUSTAH est sur l'île pour ce qu'on appelle le « DDR », Désarmement, Démobilisation et Réintégration. Pourtant, d'après ce que nous avons entendu, il serait plus approprié de l'intituler « DAM » comme Désarmement, Arrêts et Misère. Le programme de la MINUSTAH est de collecter les armes détenues par des jeunes et d'aider ces derniers à « réintégrer » la société. Mais le processus semble faillir après la phase de désarmement. Cela ne sert à rien de le nier : certains de ces jeunes vivent dans des conditions de pauvreté telles qu'ils doivent voler pour survivre. Ils éprouvent alors davantage de désespoir, un sentiment de vulnérabilité, la peur de devenir des proies lorsqu'ils n'ont pas d'arme. Ce dont ils ont besoin - ce que des organisations comme Zakat tentent de fournir - ce sont des nécessités de base et une réelle infrastructure sociale et politique. Zakat, par exemple, offre des petits déjeuners aux jeunes. Ce matin-là, il n'y avait plus de riz et les enfants avaient faim.

La MINUSTAH n'a pas la responsabilité de fournir du riz. Elle s'occupe de la collecte d'armes, de l'arrestation des enfants en les livrant à la Police Nationale Haïtienne (PNH). La PNH est elle-même souvent impliquée dans les affaires de répression et d'abus, comme on nous l'a expliqué aujourd'hui à l'aide d'anecdotes : 18 jeunes gens qui avaient rendu leurs armes la semaine dernière ont été arrêtés peu après. Un jeune homme qui a rendu son arme, a été également retenu par la MINUSTAH, envoyé à la PNH et a été vu plus tard dans la rue le visage défiguré.

« Les élections sont notre dernière chance de résoudre les problèmes de ce pays », avertit S. Boukman. Et, malheureusement, beaucoup veulent que cette chance soit manquée. A Bel Air, grand quartier qui compte quelques 34 circonscriptions, chacune des écoles publiques contenait un bureau de vote pour les élections de 2000. Aujourd'hui, il y a un seul bureau d'inscription électorale pour le quartier Bel Air entier, celui de St. Martin. Les partisans du Lavalas se sont-ils inscrits pour voter ? Oui, du moins jusqu'au 13 septembre, date à laquelle Jean Juste s'est vu refuser sa candidature.

La situation à St. Martin a confirmé les propos de S. Boukman. Pour une ou deux personnes qui s'inscrivent, cinq ou six personnes travaillent. Le coordinateur du bureau de vote nous a expliqué qu'à ce même bureau, actuellement vide, ils avaient inscrit 3 000 personnes en une semaine (la dernière semaine du mois d'août), et que les gens se sont attroupés jusqu'au 15 septembre. Puis, plus personne n'est venu. Boukman affiche un autre point de vue. Selon lui, le prolongement à répétition du délai d'inscription n'a fait que casser l'empressement de la population à s'inscrire.

Le système d'inscription sur les listes électorales n'est vraiment pas destiné à plaire aux défenseurs des libertés publiques. Les Haïtiens doivent en effet fournir des empreintes digitales, une signature et des photos qui seront, à terme, regroupées dans une seule base de données. Ils obtiendront une seule carte d'identité qui sera valide 10 ans. Ils n'obtiendront peut être pas de petit déjeuner, mais il leur sera offert de la vraie identification high-tech. Et ils en auront besoin, des services sociaux aux impôts, aucun Haïtien ne pourra se passer de la nouvelle carte d'identité. Du moins, c'est ce qui a été prévu.

Entre-temps, les policiers de la PNH conduisent des opérations SWAT pour lesquelles ils portent des cagoules…

Traduit de l'anglais par Aroa El Horani

Le système d'inscription sur les listes électorales en Haïti n'est vraiment pas destiné à plaire aux défenseurs des libertés publiques. Par Justin Podur

C'est à cela que ressemble la « responsabilité de protéger » ?

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 00:43:36 +0000

Statut, élections et le Canada en Haïti

Annette Auguste, alias So Ann, chanteuse populaire de musique folklorique, détenue par la Police Nationale d'Haïti. Photo: Projet d'information Haïti

Je suis parti en Haïti pour découvrir un pays qui ne comprend pas vraiment sa place dans le monde ou sur le continent américain. Un pays dont le peuple éprouve trop de fierté et pas assez de responsabilité vis-à-vis du passé, et continue d'agir ainsi par leur gouvernement et leurs élites. Un pays dont la situation semble très difficile à mettre en perspective pour mieux l'appréhender.

Je parle bien entendu du Canada.

Puisque Paul Martin est allé aux Nations Unies la semaine dernière et a remporté la « responsabilité de protéger » -une déclaration signifiant la perdition officielle de toute protection légale internationale de la souveraineté des pays- il serait intéressant de voir à quoi ressemblerait un cas d'étude de cette « responsabilité ».

Etant donné mon emploi du temps, il semblait approprié de commencer mon voyage en me rendant à l'ambassade du Canada, un immeuble neuf et brillant avec un terrain de tennis et une piscine, construit par SNC-Lavalin, l'entreprise d'ingénierie canadienne connue pour son contrat d'approvisionnement en munitions passé avec l'armée américaine et pour ses nombreuses autres opérations globales.

J'ai assisté à une conférence de presse de Denis Coderre, « conseiller spécial » du gouvernement canadien en Haïti. D. Coderre, tout comme SNC-Lavalin, apparaît dans les endroits les plus imprévus. Il est venu en tant que ministre de l'immigration. Encore une nomination spéciale pour s'occuper de la question des « Autochtones sans statut » au Canada.

Cela mérite une discussion. Le système canadien, pour « l'octroi » et le retrait du « statut » des autochtones sur la terre desquels le Canada existe, est soigneusement bâti de manière à faire disparaître les « autochtones » dans quelques générations.

La législation canadienne offre deux types de statut. L'enfant de parents ayant un plein statut autochtone bénéficiera de ce même statut. Mais l'enfant dont l'un des parents sera sans statut autochtone (quel que soit son statut) cet enfant ne se vera pas octroyer un plein statut.

En créant deux degrés de statut, l'Etat canadien s'assure ainsi de voir les autochtones se marier uniquement entre personnes de plein statut (ce qui est presque impossible dans une petite population) ou bien les descendants perdre le « statut ». Quoi qu'il en soit, la carrière de D. Coderre, entre le ministère de l'immigration et la question « autochtone », semble tout avoir à faire avec celui du « statut ».

D. Coderre avait annoncé 2,25 millions de dollars pour les élections en Haïti. Cet argent devait servir à rémunérer 25 officiers de police retraités canadiens. Ces officiers de police vont, selon D. Coderre, aider à « stabiliser » le pays avant les élections qui devraient se tenir le 20 novembre.

D. Coderre a également annoncé un « concert pour l'espoir » le 23 octobre au Théâtre Rex. Nous avons pris un CD échantillon.

Quelques-uns de ses propos méritent d'être souligné.

A propos du nombre ahurissant de 54 candidats aux présidentielles, D. Coderre a affirmé que la « démocratie était comme une fleur qui nécessite des soins permanents ».

Concernant le faible taux d'inscription, avec 2,4 millions de votants sur quelques 4,5 millions d'électeurs potentiels, D. Coderre a répondu qu'il respectait le processus engagé par le peuple haïtien, en assurant que de nouvelles personnes s'inscrivent continuellement.

Restant à savoir si le gouvernement haïtien verrait réellement une partie des 2,25 millions de CAD promis. D. Coderre a conseillé au journaliste d'adresser cette question à l'Agence Canadienne pour le Développement International (ACDI).

Le discours de D. Coderre, qui s'est adressé à 25 journalistes haïtiens venant des médias du courant dominant (radio et télévision) et semblant vouloir à tout prix trouver quelque chose d'intéressant à l'oeuvre, était littéralement parsemé du mot « terroriste ». « Les terroristes voulaient prévenir la tenue d'élections, mais nous avons gagné cette bataille, et, en février 2006, il y aura un événement historique en Haïti. Nous sommes, pour ainsi dire, à la croisée des chemins ». Même le Fanmi Lavalas, parti politique de J-B. Aristide, devenait impliqué dans les élections, a-t-il dit, comme pour prouver son argument.

Ce n'est pas le cas d'Yvon Neptune. Le Premier ministre constitutionnel est en prison depuis plus d'un an, accusé d'un « massacre » à St. Marc sur la base de preuves contestables. Les agents de l'ONU ont ainsi demandé sa libération ou du moins que la procédure judiciaire soit proprement suivie. Incarcéré depuis juin 2004, Y. Neptune n'a été formellement mis en accusation que le 20 septembre 2005.

Finalement, peu importe le vainqueur des élections. Le Canada a promis un « engagement à long terme » afin d'accompagner le peuple haïtien. Quinze minutes d'annonce, trois questions, et D. Coderre était parti.

De là, ce n'était qu'un court trajet jusqu'au commissariat de police où Annette Auguste (appelé aussi So Ann) est également détenue depuis le 10 mai, 2004. Les Marines ont défoncé sa porte, tiré sur ses chiens, menotté sa petite-fille de 5 ans, et emmené cette grand-mère et chanteuse de 70 ans.

So Ann est enfermée dans un commissariat de police avec 147 autres femmes. Lorsque l'on lui demande, assise dans un coin de cellules et sous le regard des gardiens et des jeunes prisonnières, combien de ces femmes sont prisonnières politiques, elle répond « toutes ». Selon elle, ces femmes ont toutes été recueillies dans les quartiers pauvres, et accusées de « s'associer » avec des malfaiteurs - un terme qui a été pris au code civil napoléonien.

Quant à So Ann, elle nous a expliqué les complexités étranges de l'action engagée contre elle. En premier lieu, les Marines l'ont accusée de planifier une attaque en collusion avec des musulmans d'une mosquée locale. Etant donné que cela est arrivé le 10 mai 2004, nous avons conclu à une erreur dans le système d'accusations des forces américaines, lesquelles doivent avoir accidentellement pris un dossier d'accusation relatif à l'Irak.

Lorsque l'absence de mosquée dans le quartier de So Ann a jeté un doute sur cette accusation, ils ont tenté de rectifier celle-ci en attaque contre l'opposition qui fit face au président Aristide en septembre 2003. Elle était à l'hôpital à l'époque. Puis, ils ont fait apparaître un témoin prétendant l'avoir vue broyer un bébé à l'aide d'un mortier et d'un pilon pour que J-B. Aristide puisse boire son sang. Le témoin a dit que So Ann l'avait appelé pour assister au rituel et a même présenté un numéro de téléphone que So Ann n'a acquis que quelques mois après la tenue du prétendu rituel. Puisque cette accusation est soutenue par au moins un témoignage (même si le témoin se trouve actuellement en France et ne s'est pas manifesté depuis longtemps), c'est ce chef d'inculpation qu'ils ont retenu.

Nous n'étions pas les seuls à rendre visite à So Ann. Quelques mois auparavant l'ambassadeur américain James B. Foley avait envoyé Gérard Gilles, l'ex-sénateur du Fanmi Lavalas et candidat aux présidentielles de 2005, et Roudy Heriveaux, une autre figure du parti, pour lui demander son soutien. So Ann a refusé la proposition.

Plus surprenant encore, So Ann avance que les chefs paramilitaires Guy Philippe et Louis Jodel Chamblain lui ont rendu visite dans le but d'obtenir son soutien pour leurs propres projets électoraux. Imaginant une erreur de traduction, j'ai demandé la confirmation de ces propos. « Vous ne pouvez pas en croire vos oreilles ? Je leur ai dit : vous êtes la raison pour laquelle je suis ici », a réagit So Ann. Jodel Chamblain était un des auteurs clé du massacre des Gonaïves sous le régime militaire de 1991-94, et son jugement a été un des rares actes louables du système judiciaire haïtien pendant les années où le Lavalas était au pouvoir. Amnesty International s'en était d'ailleurs félicité. Par contre, l'ONG fut choquée d'apprendre l'annulation du verdict condamnant J. Chamblain sous le nouveau gouvernement.

Sous l'afflût de ce genre de sollicitation, quelle peut-être la position de So Ann sur les prochaines élections ? Elle dit vouloir l'inscription des partisans de Lavalas. « Si on s'inscrit, on sera préparé, quoi qu'il arrive », annonce-t-elle. Elle n'a aucune intention de se présenter aux élections elle-même parce qu'elle considère que le Lavalas devrait se tenir à sa décision de boycotter les élections tant que les prisonniers politiques n'auront seront pas été libérés. Bien que les autorités rendent l'inscription particulièrement difficile dans les quartiers populaires pro-Lavalas tels que Bel Air et Cité Soleil, So Ann pense néanmoins que le Lavalas peut gagner en appelant à l'unité, même en considérant le faible taux actuel de 2,4 millions d'inscrits.

So Ann réagit aux accusations absurdes lancées contre elle et à son éventuelle libération, laquelle apporterait un semblant de démocratie avant les élections. « S'ils me libèrent, ils vont se créer des soucis », a-t-elle répondu, « parce qu'ils savent que les gens vont se mobiliser ».

So Ann est lumineuse, brillante, vive, mais dans une prison misérable. D. Coderre est froid, bureaucrate et sur la défensive dans un univers aux multimillions de dollars. Quelle est son excuse, à votre avis ?

Traduit de l'anglais par Aroa El Horani

Justin Podur se rend à l'ambassade du Canada, un immeuble neuf et brillant avec un terrain de tennis et une piscine, construit par SNC-Lavalin.

Tending the Flower or Cutting the Stem?

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 09:16:08 +0000

Canadian-sponsored democracy in Haiti

UN forces patrolling in the Port-au-Prince neighbourhood of Bel Air. photo: Haiti Information Project

The post-coup, Haitian presidential election, currently planned for November 20, has a list of 54 candidates. The Canadian Prime Minister's "special advisor on Haiti," Denis Coderre, suggested yesterday that this lengthy list of candidates was a good thing, a sign that "democracy is like a flower that needs to be constantly tended."

But that long list of candidates has a notable absence. His name is Father Gerard Jean-Juste, and he is absent because he is in jail (discussion of why he is in jail will have to be deferred, but he is a political prisoner facing accusations that would not hold up to standards of evidence). Because he is in jail, he was unable to present his registration in person, which is what Haiti's Provisional Electoral Council requires of presidential candidates. According to the Haitian Constitution (I was told today), someone can register as a presidential candidate even if he is unable to do so in person, as long as two lawyers and a justice of the peace present his candidacy. This, we were told, is what Jean-Juste's people tried to do but were rebuffed.

I didn't meet Father Jean-Juste today, but I did see his face on a T-shirt in the huge working-class neighbourhood of Bel Air this morning. A Lavalas militant named Samba Boukman met us in a small yard. As he approached, he pointed to the picture of Jean-Juste on his T-shirt and said, "This is the president of the people."

The UN headquarters is just outside the yard where we were talking to Boukman and a few other young people. Brazilian troops were there, in jeeps, armoured cars, and on foot. They had fortified control points on the street corners. MINUSTAH, the UN "Stabilization Mission," was there in force.

MINUSTAH was doing what is called "DDR" (Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration). From what we heard, though, a more appropriate label might be "DAM" (Disarmament, Arrest and Misery). The idea of the program is that MINUSTAH collects the weapons from youths and helps them "reintegrate" into society. But the process seems to break down after the "disarmament" part. There is no point denying it: there are poor youths here who live in conditions that mean they have to steal to survive and who would feel only more helpless, and vulnerable to those who would prey upon them, if they lacked weapons. What they need—what organizations like Samba Boukman's Zakat youth programs are trying to provide—are basic necessities, as well as political and social infrastructure. Zakat, for example, runs a breakfast program for young people, but this morning they were out of rice, so the kids went hungry.

MINUSTAH is not in the business of giving out rice. It is in the business of taking away guns. It is also in the business of arresting kids and handing them over to the Haitian National Police (Police Nationale Haïtienne, PNH). The PNH, in turn, is still very much in the business of repression and abuse, we were told today. We had the dynamic explained to us through some anecdotes: 18 young people who handed in their weapons last week were arrested shortly afterwards. A young man who gave up his weapon was arrested by MINUSTAH and was later seen in the street with his face badly smashed by the PNH.

"The elections are our last chance to solve the problems of this country," Boukman told us. Unfortunately there are all too many who want that chance to be missed. Bel Air is a huge neighbourhood with 34 districts. During the 2000 election, each of the national state schools had a polling station—at least one for each district. Today there is one for all of Bel Air, the St. Martin electoral registry. Was the Lavalas base in Bel Air registering to vote? They had been, until September 13, when Jean-Juste was barred from candidacy. Since then, they've stopped.

The scene at St. Martin confirmed Boukman's story. There were one or two people registering and five or six people working. The coordinator of the polling station explained to us that at this currently empty station, they had registered 3,000 people in a single week (the last week of August). People had been coming in droves until around September 15, but after that no one had come in. Her explanation, different from Boukman's: the registration deadline keeps on being delayed, so people stopped feeling the immediate pressure to register.

The registration cards are not designed to please civil libertarians. Haitians registering to vote give fingerprint, signature, and photo information, which will eventually be collected in a single database. They will get a single identification card that will be good for 10 years. They may not get breakfast, but they can get some high-tech identification. They will certainly need it—from social services to the tax office, no Haitian will be able to do without the new identification card, or so goes the plan.

Meanwhile, the Haitian police, when they are doing SWAT operations, wear masks.

In his second update from Haiti, Justin Podur examines the state of the Canadian-sponsored elections there.

Is This What 'Responsibility to Protect' Looks Like?

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 09:06:16 +0000

Status, Elections and Canada in Haiti

Popular folk singer 'So Ann' Annette August, in the custody of the Haitian National Police. photo: Haiti Information Project

I came to Haiti on a short trip to study a country that doesn't really understand its place in the world or in the Americas, a country whose people feel too much pride and not enough responsibility for what has been done, and continues to be done, by their government and elites, a country that it seems very difficult to keep in perspective or understand. Of course, I am talking about Canada.

Since Paul Martin went to the United Nations last week and won the "Responsibility to Protect," which is a declaration that the sovereignty of weak countries has officially lost all international legal protection, it's interesting to see what a case study in "Responsibility to Protect" looks like.

Given my agenda, it only seemed fitting to start my trip at the Canadian Embassy, a shiny new building with a tennis court and a pool, built by SNC-Lavalin, the Canadian engineering company famous for its bullet contract with the US military and its many other global ventures.

I was there for a press conference by Denis Coderre, the Canadian government's "Special Advisor" on Haiti. Coderre, like SNC-Lavalin, pops up in the darndest places. He did a turn as Minister of Immigration and another special appointment dealing with the question of "non-status Indians" in Canada.

This merits a bit of discussion itself. The state of Canada's system for "granting" or revoking "status" to the indigenous peoples on whose land the state of Canada exists is carefully built to disappear the indigenous in a couple of generations. You see, Canada's legislation provides two kinds of status. The child of a full-status Indian mother and full-status Indian father has status, but the child of a status Indian with a non-status Indian, while having status, does not have the same kind of status—because if this child in turn has a child with a non-status Indian, the result is a non-status child. By creating two levels of status, the Canadian state has ensured that indigenous people must marry only status people (which is almost impossible in a small population) or see their children and grandchildren eventually lose "status." At any rate, Coderre's career, between the immigration ministry and the "status" question, seems to have everything to do with status.

Coderre was announcing $2.25 million more dollars for Haiti's elections. This money is for paying 25 retired Canadian police officers who, according to Coderre, will help to "stabilize" the country in advance of the elections that are to take place on November 20.

Coderre also announced a "concert for hope" on October 23 at the Rex Theatre. We took a sample CD.

Several of his other lines deserve to be noted as well.

When asked whether a list of 54 Presidential candidates was bewildering, Coderre said that "democracy is like a flower that needs constant tending."

When asked whether registration seemed low, with 2.4 million registered out of some 4.5 million possible voters, Coderre replied that he respects the process of the Haitian people and that more people are registering all the time.

When asked whether the Haitian government would actually see any of the money, Coderre suggested to the journalist that he take that question up with CIDA, the Canadian International Development Agency.

Coderre's speech, made to a group of about two dozen mainstream Haitian journalists (from radio and television) who seemed hard-pressed to find anything exciting going on there, was liberally peppered with the word "terrorist." The terrorists wanted to prevent elections, but we have won that battle, and in February 2006 we will have a historic event in Haiti. "We are at the crossroads, so to speak." Even Fanmi Lavalas is now getting involved in elections, he said, as if to prove his point.

(Not Yvon Neptune though. The constitutional Prime Minister has been in jail for over a year, accused of a "massacre" in St. Marc on sketchy evidence, provoking UN officials to ask for his release or at least due process to be followed. So, put in jail in June 2004, Yvon Neptune was formally charged... yesterday, September 20, 2005.)

In any case, no need to worry, since no matter who wins the elections, Canada promises a "long-term commitment" to the Haitian people. 15 minutes of announcing, 3 questions, and Coderre was gone.

From there it was just a short trip to the police station where Annette Auguste, or So Ann, has also been imprisoned since May 10, 2004, when US Marines kicked down her door, shot her dogs, handcuffed her 5-year-old granddaughter and took the 70-year-old grandmother and singer away.

So Ann is locked in a police station with 147 other women. She was sitting in a corner in the open area between locked hallways of cells under the eyes of guards and young women prisoners when we asked her how many of these women were political prisoners. She answered, "All of them." They were all rounded up from the poor neighbourhoods and faced charges of "associating" with malcontents—something out of the Napoleonic legal code.

As for So Ann herself, she told us about the bizarre twists and turns of the case against her. The first set of charges the Marines brought was that she was colluding with Muslims in a local mosque to attack the Marines. Given that this was May 10, 2004, we concluded there must have been a mix-up in the US occupation filing system, and they accidentally pulled out an accusation file for Iraq. When the absence of a mosque in So Ann's neighbourhood cast some doubt on this accusation, they tried to charge So Ann with attacking the anti-Aristide opposition in September 2003. She was in the hospital at the time. Next they produced an eyewitness stating that So Ann had ground up a baby with a mortar and pestle, so that Aristide could drink the baby's blood. The eyewitness said So Ann called her for the ritual and even produced the phone number, which So Ann did not acquire until months after the ritual supposedly took place. At least this last charge has a witness, even though that witness is apparently in France and has not been heard from in some time, but that's the charge they are sticking with.

We were not So Ann's only visitors. She told us that months before, US Ambassador Foley had sent former Fanmi Lavalas senator Gilles and another Lavalas figure, Heriveaux, to seek her support (Gilles is running for president in the upcoming elections). So Ann said she would not support them.

Even more surprising, So Ann reported that paramilitary leaders Guy Philippe and Louis Jodel Chamblain had visited her, also seeking her support for their bids for election. Suspecting a problem in the translation, I asked that this be repeated. "You can't believe what you hear? I told them, "You are the reason I am here," So Ann said. Jodel Chamblain was one of the key authors of the Gonaïves massacre under the 1991-94 coup regime, and his prosecution was one of the few laudable achievements of the Haitian justice system in the years Lavalas was in power. (Amnesty International lauded it, for example. Amnesty was also quite upset when the current government reversed the verdict against Chamblain months ago).

With all these people seeking her support, what was So Ann's take on elections? She wants Lavalas supporters to register. "If we register, we will be prepared, whatever happens," she said. She herself has no intention of being a candidate because she thinks Lavalas should stick to the position that it will not participate until the political prisoners are free. Even though the authorities are making voter registration particularly difficult in the working-class, pro-Lavalas neighbourhoods like Bel Air and Cité Soleil, So Ann still thinks that if Lavalas unites, Lavalas can win. Even without the other 2 million unregistered voters who, So Ann thinks, are all Lavalas supporters, Lavalas would win.

Before we left, we asked her about the preposterous charges against her and whether they would let her out in order to provide some semblance of reasonableness before elections. "If they let me out, they are in trouble," she replied, "because they know that people will mobilize."

So Ann is radiant, vibrant and open, despite being locked in a miserable prison. Coderre is cold, bureaucratic and defensive, but free to come and go from his multimillion-dollar compound. What's his excuse, do you think?

In his first report from Haiti, Justin Podur takes a look at Canada's intervention on the ground.

Refugees and Citizens

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 23:50:29 +0000

Displaced Louisianans settle in Houston's Astrodome. photo: Houston Indymedia [video]

Jesse Jackson and Bruce Gordon are just two of many high-profile Black leaders who have expressed indignation at the description of those displaced by Hurricane Katrina as 'refugees'. 'It is just wrong', Jackson said, 'they are citizens displaced by a disaster'.

After 9/11, 2001, some victims of war and of bombing campaigns wondered, in writing, whether the experience of being bombed would increase America's empathy towards the rest of the world.

There was, of course, no single response of America to 9/11. It did increase the empathy of some Americans and caused many to question the relationship of the US to the rest of the world. But the net effect was to accelerate the march towards militarism and to strengthen, rather than weaken, the idea that America was different from the rest of the world. The 'War on Terror' was launched, and it featured bombing Afghanistan, a country full of internally displaced people long before 2001 - those people were referred to as 'refugees' in the media. It featured domestic legislation that tightened borders and deported international migrants - some of whom were referred to as 'immigrants', others as 'refugees'. It featured support for Israel in its own military campaigns against the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, many of whom were refugees, though they weren't referred to that way. And ultimately, it featured the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which turned much of the population of Fallujah, among other places, into internally displaced people who, when they are referred to at all, are referred to as 'refugees'.

Nationalism in America did not come from 9/11. It was forged over hundreds of years of conquest of indigenous territories, a process of growth into the greatest power on the continent and then in the world. Racism was built into the ideology from the start, but it was complex as well. Within America, there was a hierarchy that left Black people at the bottom - first slaves, then second- or third-class citizens. But there were also those who were outside America: non-citizens, or to use the legal term, aliens. These people too were victimized by racism, of a xenophobic sort. So there have been two different kinds of racism, and they play out differently. Tragedies bring out the best and the worst in communities. After 9/11 there were many tales of heroism and self-sacrifice in saving lives, and there are countless such tales about Katrina as well. But after 9/11 elites sponsored a cruel nationalism, an impulse first to blame foreigners, and then to strike out at them, expel them, and bomb them. With Katrina, there was no foreigner to blame, only poor and Black people who needed evacuation, water, food, and resources to repair their lives. The government's response to Katrina was a different kind of racism: not hatred of foreigners, but contempt and utter disregard for Black people's lives, and for the extraordinary city they had made.

If 9/11 showed Americans the horrors of being bombed, after Katrina many Americans have the experience of being displaced. The horrific scenes of refugee camps that are the lot of millions of people in different parts of the world are on display in America. Americans also have the experience of a government that is unable or unwilling to help them or protect them, a government that is arbitrary and violent and unresponsive. For Black Americans this isn't new, but it is also much more stark than it has been in a very long time. It seems that the American government is treating Black Americans on the Gulf Coast with the contempt that it normally reserves for the citizens of other countries. After decades of struggle and sacrifice for the right to be full American citizens, Black people are being treated like the rest of the world is treated - as problems to be solved as cheaply as possible, not fellow citizens and human beings with dignity.

Are Jackson and Brown right, then, in bristling when they hear Black Americans referred to as 'refugees'?

The reason the term 'refugee' has a stigma attached is not because of what the refugee is - it isn't like the label 'criminal', for example - but because of how the refugee is treated. A refugee is someone who is kicked around, disregarded, made invisible, someone with no protection and nowhere to go for help. Someone who, in other words, is being treated as those who have been displaced by Katrina have been treated. Calling them 'refugees' is accurate: treating them that way - or treating any human being that way - is unconscionable.

The idea that America is unable to bring its awesome wealth and power to bear to save its own citizens or one of its major cities is one that is shocking to the rest of the world. But beneath that shock there is also a glimmer of hope - hope that, before it is too late for all of us, the idea that Americans rate more than non-Americans will disappear.

Hope that the idea might arise that 'citizens' and 'refugees' deserve the same treatment.

Justin Podur is based in Toronto. He can be reached at justin (at) killingtrain.com

Justin Podur asks what it means to be a refugee, and why the title is considered disparaging in the USA

Canada, Empire

Wed, 21 Jul 2004 17:48:47 +0000

Humanitarianism, peacekeeping, and other myths

The United States is engaging in a bloody occupation in Iraq; it overthrew the democratically elected government in Haiti, enforced by the Marines; it sowed already devastated Afghanistan with cluster bombs and replaced the Taliban with warlords; it is engaging in ongoing efforts to oust Cuban and Venezuelan governments; it is supporting repression in Colombia; it is constantly threatening Iran, Syria, and North Korea; it offers unconditional support to Israel's bloody occupation of Palestine.

These actions are part of a very deliberate agenda to deny self-determination to the peoples of the world, keeping the world 'safe' for investors, corporations and militarists. This agenda undermines democracy on behalf of elites in the rich countries and their clients in the poor countries.

In most of these ventures, Canada has been openly supportive; in others, its support has been behind the scenes. What is the historical pattern of Canadian foreign policy? What is Canada doing today and why? Opposing imperial depredations is something everyone of conscience must do, but in order to change Canada's policies it is important to know what that entails. The record is mainly one of complicity and hypocrisy, with the occasional open crime.

Justin Podur is a writer and activist living in Toronto. He has written for Dollars and Sense, Frontline India, New Politics and Z Magazine, where he serves as a editor. An earlier version of this essay originally appeared on ZNet. A previous version of the article, complete with footnotes and references, is available here.

Canada's real role in the world is covered by a lot of mythology. There are a variety of narratives about Canada-what it is, how it works. Canada is seen as an 'honest broker', a moderating influence on the United States. It is said that Canada doesn't have the power or will to have imperial aspirations, and if there is a division between the US and the rest of the world, Canada stands with the world. These are myths a lot of people subscribe to.

Yet, there are a lot of people who know better. The Council of Canadians held a series of events across the country called: "Canada: Country or Colony?" They point to free trade pacts, defence sharing agreements, US investment in Canada, US encroachments into Canada's public sector, the majority of Canadian trade going to the US...and conclude that Canada is in a colonial relationship with the US. What the US says goes. Canada imports manufactured goods and exports natural resources. It's colonialism.

I have a lot of respect for the Council of Canadians, and for that Canadian 'nationalist' sentiment. I recently read a book by David Orchard, who twice ran for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party. David Orchard is not an ordinary conservative. In his view, the Conservative Party is the force that built the national railway system, that built up the public sector, that defended Canadian sovereignty against US encroachment, and only recently betrayed its noble traditions with Mulroney and the North American free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

For Orchard, the entire history of Canada is one of resistance to US attempts to take it over: alliances of indigenous-French and indigenous-French-British repelled repeated military invasions. Visionary politicians realized that unity alone could create a state and economy that could be independent. Those visionaries passed and were replaced by venal men who don't care for independence or sovereignty and who want to sell the country to the US. Those colonial collaborators, Orchard points out, have always existed in Canadian history: for every invasion there were those in Canada eager to be absorbed.

John Ralston Saul, the husband of Canada's Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson, not a conservative, someone who would probably call himself a 'humanist', makes similar assertions about Canada. To Saul, the defining characteristic is the intertwining of British, French, and indigenous that created something unique and worth preserving here in this northern country. He always goes back to the alliance between Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine in Lower Canada (Quebec) and Robert Baldwin in Upper Canada (Ontario), an alliance that enabled these politicians to outflank those who wanted union with the US and bring about 'responsible government' in Canada.

This, too, is an interesting story, but I'm not sure that it is true. Struggles between elites are rarely between those with vision and those who lack it. They are, instead, based on different interpretations of how elite interests are best served. The men who built the railway (and it is interesting that when people talk about "the men who built the railway" they are referring to the capitalists and government officials here, and not the people who actually laboured on it, sweating and dying in terrible conditions for terrible wages), the men who sought tariff protections for Canadian manufactures, they had their own reasons for doing so. And in recent years, even the most 'nationalist' parts of the Canadian elite dared not assert too much independence.

Years ago in Mexico a friend lamented her country's problem: "We are too far from heaven and too close to the US." Canadian nationalists would say the same-but for Canada there is another aspect. On the one hand, there is a question about how independent Canada could be even if it wanted to be. On the other, there is a question about whether Canada wants to be independent. In other words, the Council of Canadians question: "Canada, Country or Colony?", should be expanded to: "Canada: country, colony, or colonizer?" And the answer isn't pretty.

Gwynne Dyer, in his foreword to Victor Levant's excellent history of Canadian involvement in the Vietnam war, puts this issue very clearly:

The fact is that Canada did have choices about its behaviour in Vietnam in the 1950s, and chose to behave badly. The same is true of the 1960s. We have choices in the 1980s too, although every choice involves a potential price.
We cannot know how high the price would have been if we had...refused to serve US interests in Vietnam. Nobody in Ottawa even considered the question seriously until the very end...Nobody knows what the cost to Canada of serious dissent from US policy would be today, either, though the United States could clearly hurt us a lot if it chose to do so. But always behind the lines...looms the vast misery and suffering that Canada's complicity helped to perpetuate in Vietnam, and that is a kind of cost too. In many cases Canada does have the ability to choose, and it has a duty to itself and to others to make the right choices.

I want to look here at just a few of Canada's choices. Why does Canada make these choices? What are the effects of these choices? How could we change things?

Vietnam

Some might think of Paul Martin as a liar and a gangster. Unsurprisingly, it is a family tradition. Paul Martin Sr.'s own words are some of the most eloquent on why Canada got involved in the US war on Vietnam. What follows comes mostly from Victor Levant's fine book, 'Quiet Complicity'.

We know Canada is an economic power of some consequence. There was just a G8 summit in Georgia, where protesters couldn't get anywhere close. Canada was there, making decisions about the rest of the world as part of this elite club. Canada is a major exporter both of raw materials and of manufactured goods.

Subject to US Power?

A lot of Canada's manufacturing is automotive. Before Canada had NAFTA, it had the Auto Pact of 1965, which created a continental auto industry and thus made the main part of Canada's civilian manufacturing base subordinate to US capital. The alternative was to develop an indigenous auto industry: "insistence on high domestic content for vehicle assembly operations, high tariffs, quotas, and licences. Argentina, Brazil, Australia, Britain, and Europe had gone this route." But Canada under Pearson opted for integration with the US.

Some of Canada's manufacturing is military. The Defence Production Sharing Agreement of 1959 turned Canada into a major exporter of military goods-really, a subcontractor-to the United States. US procurement in Canada between 1959-1973 totalled $3.2 billion. Today, "Canadian Defence Industries Association figures show that Canadian 'defence' industry revenues grew 35% between 1998 and 2000, far outpacing growth of the rest of the economy, which grew at approximately 3%. Canada's 'defence' market grew from $3.7 billion in 1998 to $4.08 billion in 2000, up 22.6%. Exports to the USA grew by 17% from just under a billion to $1.25 billion. And our arms exports to the rest of the world grew a staggering 75% in the same period from $798 million to $1.5 billion" (quoting Stephen Kerr). Canada's arms industry does $5 billion in business annually, with 650 firms and 57,000 direct jobs. The business is handled through the Crown Commercial Corporation.

Most of the Canadian manufacturing economy is owned by the US, and the final destination of the goods - and most of the resources - is the US. This was true during the US war on Vietnam and it is true today. During that period US interests controlled 47% of the manufacturing, 61% in petroleum and natural gas, 59% in mining and smelting (figures cited by Levant). After NAFTA, US control has grown further.

Former Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, who the mythology treats as a peacekeeping hero (and who we will be hearing more from), said at the time: "[N]o country in the world has less chance of isolating itself from the effect of American policies and decisions than Canada. If Washington 'went alone' where would Ottawa go?"

The prime minister who preceded Pearson, Diefenbaker, himself no anti-imperialist (he established his anti-communist credentials by saying he had "no ear for the lullabies of the neutralist"), showed a slight inclination for an independent foreign policy for Canada. He criticized US tactics in Laos. He kept Canada out of the Organization of American States, which the US used to isolate Cuba's revolution and which Che Guevara called the 'Department of Colonies'. Diefenbaker was unenthusiastic about posting US nuclear missiles in Canada. He tried to establish greater trade ties with Britain.

How did the US react? With regime change, of course! According to Levant, "In the 1962 Canadian election, US action played a role in the Conservatives' decline from a 208 seat majority to a 116 seat minority. President Kennedy received Opposition Leader Pearson for a forty-minute conversation three days after the election was called, and the Kennedys lent their polling expert, Louis Harris, to the Liberals. One billion dollars in US funds left Canada in the first quarter of the year." The next election saw even more blatant US intervention. Levant cites a US columnist who commented on the event: "Adroit statecraft by the American State Department brought down the bumbling crypto-anti-Yankee government of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, and replaced it with a regime which promised to be faithful to the concept of Canadian-American interdependence."

"The lesson," Levant notes, "was not lost on succeeding governments in Ottawa."

Canada's own imperialist ideas

But be careful. David McNally points out that "Canadian capitalists are also major players in the world of foreign investment and global takeovers...Between 1994 and 2001, for example, 384 more US businesses were bought up by Canadian corporations than the number of Canadian businesses that US companies managed to purchase. Judged in dollar amounts, Canadian capitalists spent $46 billion more purchasing US businesses than did the latter buying firms in this country."

Levant notes that during the war on Vietnam, Canada exported $21.3 billion to Asia and imported $14.6 billion-a big surplus. Canadian business didn't want to 'lose' Southeast Asia to what they called 'communist aggression' and what we might call 'self-determination' any more than the US did. Canadian elites wanted to make sure Asia was 'safe' for their investments just as US elites did.

Lester B. Pearson himself stood up in the House of Commons in the 1950s and told the parliament that "aggression" by the Vietnamese against France, in Vietnam, was only one element of worldwide communist aggression and that "Soviet colonial authority in Indochina" was stronger than French control!

Now we are ready to meet Paul Martin Sr., who was capable of wielding US President Dwight Eisenhower's "domino" theory with the best of them. Remember that the domino theory is a justification for intervention anywhere, any time, because any place is a domino that, if it is allowed to "fall", may well lead to the collapse of the entire world. As External Affairs Secretary, Martin told the House of Commons in 1965:

Vietnam is a test case. I suggest that if the North Vietnamese aggression with Chinese connivance succeeds, it will only be a matter of time before the next victim is selected...If the US were to leave Vietnam at the present time, what would happen to that country? What would happen to Burma? What would happen to India, a commonwealth country?

Martin helped the US aggression by calling the Vietnamese national liberation movement "Viet Cong aggression". Martin even compared the Vietnamese to Hitler: "If North Vietnam succeeds in taking over the whole of Vietnam by force, if the rest of the world is prepared to sit back and see this happen...we would, in my judgement, be guilty of an error of the same nature as the mistakes at Munich... Aggression is agression, whether it takes place in Europe, Ethiopia, or Vietnam."

But aggression is not agression, according to Martin Sr. and Lester B. Pearson, if the United States is the aggressor.

The US is capable of bullying Canada and has certainly done so. But it is also the case that Canada's elite has its own corporate interests in plundering the poor countries. Canada's elite has the same contempt for self-determination-once called "communism"-as the United States does. Canada jumps to help imperialism. If it didn't, the US has demonstrated that it can push.

Consequences

What did Canada jump to do, in Vietnam? A number of things. In Levant's words:

Canadian food and beverages fed US troops, Canadian war material was used on the battlefields of South Vietnam and flown in sorties over Hanoi and Haiphong, auto parts fabricated in Canada were installed in US army vehicles, and many Canadian raw resources stoked the fires of the US military-industrial complex.

Everything from napalm components to green berets, from gunsights to whiskey, from radio relays to rocket warheads, were provisioned. The Toronto Star's weekly magazine tracked TNT from a plant in Quebec to Crane Indiana where it was poured into bombs. The May 27, 1967 supplement commented that "With luck, the explosive that left [Quebec] could be hailing down on a Vietnamese village six weeks later." These were boom years for the whole Canadian economy, a boom the Vietnamese paid for with their lives, by the million.

To be sure, the Canadian government compensated Vietnam by providing 'humanitarian' aid-but only to the South Vietnamese regime, the US client, whose principal victims were the South Vietnamese people. Canadian aid escalated with American bombing: the more the Americans bombed, the more the Canadians 'aided'. However, the main purpose of these few millions of dollars, according to External Aid Office Advisor Michael Hall, was to "demonstrate publicly that they were on the same side of the war as the US".

Claire Culhane went to Vietnam as a nurse with one of these "aid projects" and became one of the most outspoken activists against the war. She presented the real face of these Canadian aid projects in her book, Why is Canada in Vietnam?, in 1972. She describes a tour of a hospital ward she conducted with a supervisor.

Dr. Mosely was keeping a careful check of the time as she had to meet a friend to play tennis at 12:30, and was getting ready to leave. When I straightened the patient's bedsheets, I found a ghastly condition of disembowelment and shattered limbs, lying in a mixture of crushed bone and blood-altogether an unbearable sight, in need of much more work. When I called this to [Dr. Mosely]'s attention, she stopped long enough to laugh and say: "Don't be silly, why bother, she'll be dead by morning anyway, she will just smell a little sweeter when she dies."

Back in Canada, Culhane wondered about a Canadian project to fund artificial limbs.

I sought out Dr. Claude Gingras of the Montreal Rehabilitation Institute, who had initiated the Qui Nhon Rehabilitation Hospital (he was later decorated by President Thieu) to enquire why he was making no attempt to provide trained surgeons who could save limbs, instead of fitting artificial ones. His reply consisted of a ten minute dissertation on the other-worldliness of the oriental mind and how its attitudes towards death differed from our own!

The medical teams that went over as part of the aid program also helped out the US war effort by denying that US chemical warfare was harmful and that napalm was bad for you.

On the subject of chemical warfare, Canada allowed testing of defoliants in New Brunswick in 1966. From a US Army technical memorandum:

In March 1965, the Canadian Ministry of Defence offered Crops Division large areas of densely forested land for experimental tests of defoliant chemicals...the test site selected contained a mixture of conifers and deciduous broadleaf species in a dense undisturbed forest cover that would provide similar vegetation densities to those of...Southeast Asia.

B-52s practiced bombing runs over Saskatchewan and Alberta in 1968 and 1970.

Canada participated in what was called the International Control Commission (ICC), along with Poland and India. ICC teams travelled in Vietnam and determined whether ceasefires were being violated. Canada used its presence on the ICC not only to help whitewash what the US was doing and deny the facts, but also to spy on the Vietnamese, providing intelligence to the US on what the effects of its weapons were on the population and more.

There is no way of teasing out the damage inflicted by Canada's role specifically, in Vietnam or anywhere else. But one can summarize what the effect of the war was as a whole on the Vietnamese. I like David Orchard's summary:

[O]n April 30, 1975, the last of the US military fled in helicopters from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon, abandoning millions of dollars of weapons, helicopters, tanks and other equipment, hundreds of thousands of CIA operatives, more than five hundred thousand prostitutes and drug addicts in Saigon alone, over eight million refugees and orphans, hundreds of thousands of wounded, deformed and chemically damaged Vietnamese, the world's greatest demand for artificial limbs, and 150,000 tons of unexploded bombs in the fields and forests. More than 10,000 Vietnamese, mostly farmers and their families, died in the years following 1975, when their ploughs inadvertently hit these hidden bombs containing delayed-action fuses.
Approximately six million died in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and countless others were maimed and wounded as the result of American military aggression. For its war crimes in Southeast Asia, the United States has never paid.

And neither has Canada.

The use of sanctions

Vietnam is a good demonstration of the myths and their relation to the real patterns of Canada's behaviour in the world. Canada came out of that war smelling like a rose, in spite of everything, and there are still legends that Pearson challenged Johnson over bombing North Vietnam. According to the Pentagon Papers, Pearson actually made a tactical suggestion to Johnson not to use nuclear weapons on Vietnam, but "iron bombs" were just fine. In 1965, Martin and Pearson were engaging in all manner of apologetics for the US assault.

Kim Richard Nossal, a mainstream Canadian foreign policy academic, compiled a brief list of the use of economic sanctions by Canada. Sanctions were used against-guess who?-Vietnam in 1979 for its invasion of Cambodia (one of the only interventions that actually had a humanitarian effect, stopping Pol Pot's murderous regime). Against the USSR for invading Afghanistan in 1979 (though not against the US for doing the same in 2002). Against Iran after seizing the US embassy in 1979. In 1981 against the USSR and Poland after the latter declared martial law. In 1982 against Argentina for the Falklands war with the UK. In 1983 against the USSR after shooting down a Korean airlines plane. In 1984 against South Africa. In 1989 against China after the Tiananmen Square massacre. In 1990 against Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait. In 1991-2 against Yugoslavia. In 1991 against Haiti after the coup against Aristide. Aid was also suspended against Afghanistan, Cuba, El Salvador, Fiji, Guatemala, Indonesia, Libya, Suriname, Sri Lanka, and Uganda, at various times.

But Canada, Nossal himself notes, never considered sanctions against the US for its invasion of Grenada in 1983, or its bombing of Libya in 1986, or its shooting down of an Iranian airliner in 1988, or its invasion of Panama in 1989, or its ignoring of the World Court ruling and Security Council condemnations while it escalated the terrorist war against Nicaragua through the 1980s.

And rather than imposing sanctions on the US for its 1990-91 Iraq slaughter, Canada joined in.

The War on Iraq, 1990-91

Canada sent warplanes and ships to participate in the US attack on Iraq in 1990-91. In an unusual role for Canada, the Canadian military was used directly against Iraq, and thus Canada shares responsibility for the horrors that the Iraqis suffered then and since

Again, quoting David Orchard:

This was a war to give the United States control of Arab oil, from where much of the wealth of the seven major British and American oil companies has come, and which is also the energy source of its major industrial competitors, Europe and Japan.
The price tag...was between 150,000 and 300,000 dead in Iraq-90% civilian. Since the end of the war, more than 100,000 infants have died from malnutrition, dysentery, and other effects of the bombing and ongoing blockade of Iraq...

Canada's minister of external affairs, Joe Clark, said early in the war that the reason Canadian forces were in the Gulf was that Canada would not stand for the invasion of small countries by powerful ones. In the last 200 years, the United States has invaded smaller countries more than 300 times.

From local 'threats' to global 'threats'

Desmond Morton, another mainstream, conventional historian, makes a good point about the implications of Canada's military relationship with the US. The only plausible military threat Canada has ever faced has been the United states, and in Morton's words: "Canadians found that one good way to keep the peace is not to prepare for a hopeless war. Imagine if Canadians had dutifully assumed the old British defence burden...hundreds of thousands of Canadians would have spent their youth drilling and maneouvring for a war they could never win. Ottawa would have spent millions of dollars on defence, but it could never be enough. Alarmed at military threats on their border, Americans would have mobilized armies and matched cannon for cannon."

What does a military do when it is not focusing on plausible external threats? Too often, it becomes an instrument for suppressing the local population.

Many of the major Canadian military mobilizations in recent history have been against the population, especially the indigenous. In 1990 in Mohawk communities at Oka, Quebec, and Akwesasne Ontario, 5,000 soldiers were mobilized. In 1993, the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), and the military coordinated another mission against these same communities. 800 RCMP were mobilized, backed by "several thousand soldiers", to "take control of the reserves." The Second Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment "requested seven M113 armoured personnel carriers, 13 heavy machineguns, and large stocks of riot gear...the 5e Groupe Mecanise du Canada... asked for an extra $4.2 million worth of ammunition." Luckily for everyone involved, that operation was called off before massive violence ensued. But the Canadian authorities are confronting these same communities again today.

Not too long afterwards, 400 RCMP officers mobilized in British Columbia against a small group of Secwempec indigenous at Gustafson Lake who were claiming a part of a ranch as an ancestral burial site. The RCMP fired thousands of rounds into the forest. This operation, too, was called off, thankfully, before bloodshed.

These kinds of mobilizations against indigenous people were practice runs for Canadian units to work in other countries. Joint Task Force Two, a secret commando unit (which may or may not have been present at these indigenous assaults), helped train the Haitian police in the mid-1990s: "JTF2's job was to train Haitian police officers in the art of 'door kicking' and building takedowns...SWAT team would be used to hunt down and seize arms caches held by extremists and former army officers intent on overthrowing the Preval government." JTF2 went off to Zaire in the period between the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the genocidal war in the Congo of 1998-2001. JTF2 helped train the Royal Nepalese Army in counterinsurgency techniques, advising that institution on "tactics and the best use of its forces against the guerrillas."

A long tradition of profiteering

War profiteering in Canada went on before the war on Vietnam (WWI and WWII have their own shining examples). The Vietnam War took it to new heights, and Canada has stayed at those heights since, providing arms and other services for human rights violations all over the world. Following are just three instances in a very long list.

Chile

Chile is an interesting historical example. On the University of Toronto campus there is a building called the Munk Centre. Its namesake, Peter Munk, had a remarkable view of the events in Chile.

At a shareholders meeting in Toronto on May 9, 1996, Peter Munk, Chairman of Barrick Gold corporation, praised General Augusto Pinochet for "transforming Chile from a wealth-destroying socialist state to a capital-friendly model that is being copied around the world." Regarding Pinochet's human rights record, Munk said, "they can put people in jail, I have no comment on that, I think that may be true...I think [the end justifies the means] because it brought wealth to an enormous number of people. If you ask somebody who is in jail, he'll say no. But that's the wonderful thing about our world; we can have the freedom to disagree."

Pinochet's protection of the "freedom to disagree" went as follows, in Asad Ismi's words:

In the year after the coup, the armed forces and police murdered 5,000-30,000 Chileans for their beliefs and associations. A quarter of the organized work force were dismissed for political reasons. Every labor right was suspended and most labor federations were dissolved. The regime's opponents were tortured, kidnapped, exiled, jailed and sent to concentration camps. During 1975-79, between 1,600 and 2,500 Chileans disappeared after detention by Pinochet's secret police.

With his opponents killed, jailed, or in exile and the union movement crushed, the general reversed 35 years of economic development. Pinochet's monetarist model was supervised by Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago. Starting in 1975, the "Chicago Boys" reduced import duties, deregulated industry, eliminated limits on foreign investment, sold public enterprises at low prices, freed the prices of basic necessities and privatized such government services as parks, prisons, utilities, schools, health care, and pensions.

Despite Munk's admiration, Pinochet did not help Chile's economy by doing all this killing and deregulation, instead bringing about the worst economic crisis in Chile's history. By 1982, after all the 'privatization', the state controlled more of the economy than it had under Allende, after bailing out investors and Chile's own elite. Even today, Chile's economy relies on the nationalized copper company, CODELCO.

Pinochet did, however, help set the stage for Canadian mining to make handsome profits. Canadian investment in Chile was $4 billion in 1997, making Canada the biggest foreign investor there. At Barrick Gold's mines, workers are paid $500-1000 a month, while Canadians at the same mines make $5000. Gold mining company Placer Dome and gas company Nova Corporation also cleaned up in Chile.

Indonesia and East Timor

Indonesia was taken over by brutal dictator Suharto in 1967. Suharto's first act was to kill several hundred thousand people: communists, independent nationalists, and any others who might have been rivals to his dictatorship. The United States helped Suharto out because of his anti-communist credentials. So did Canada. Prime Minister Trudeau visited Suharto in 1971 and announced a $4 million interest free loan.

Suharto visited Canada in July of 1975, while Indonesia was planning the invasion of East Timor. Canada offered him a $200 million line of credit. Sharon Scharfe's book Complicity: East Timor and Canadian Foreign Policy quotes a Prime Minister's Office memorandum as saying: "[A] successful Canadian aid program in Indonesia...will contribute to a range of Canadian...interests including economic growth and quality of life...the commercial spinoff is proving to be a not insignificant benefit."

East Timor was set to become an independent country when it was invaded by Indonesia in 1975. The Indonesian military killed some 200,000 people in the conquest, one of the worst slaughters ever relative to population (the inhabitants numbered about 600,000) and occupied the country for 24 years until it was forced out in 1999.

In August of 1976 , Allan McEachen, Secretary of State for External Affairs, visited Indonesia. By that time, Indonesia had already admitted to killing 60,000 Timorese in the course of the invasion. Two UN Security Council and one General Assembly resolutions had condemned Indonesia (Canada abstained from the General Assembly resolution). McEachen signed for the $200 million line of credit promised the year before.

Glen Shortliffe, Canadian Ambassador to Indonesia, visited occupied East Timor in September of 1978, and provided useful propaganda service to the Indonesian occupation in the process. His insights included: "East Timor is not self-sufficient in food" (he was unable to figure out that the invasion's mass destruction of crops and animals might have something to do with it); "[I]t is impossible to consider that the bulk of the population is even capable of being politicized in any sophisticated sense"; and "[M]any, if not a majority of Timorese, live in rugged mountain areas connected only by footpaths" (he was unable to figure out that these people might be living in the mountains because they were escaping the Indonesian military). He also provided figures on displacement and hinted that perhaps no one had been killed in the invasion. Jack Whittleton, ambassador in 1987, went even further, helping the government party candidate, Golkar, during his campaign tour for the sham elections of that year, during which some districts had voter turnouts of 327.6% and more than 100% of registered voters elected Golkar with 93.7% of the vote.

Prime Minister Jean Chretien visited Indonesia in 1994, announcing $1 billion in new trade deals and pledging $30 million in new aid projects. Between 1988-1994, Canada's total exports to Indonesia amounted to $2.66 billion. Military exports were at least $22.26 million. When the Canadian government was asked why at least these military exports couldn't be cut off, an anonymous foreign affairs official said: "If Canada decided unilaterally not to sell to Indonesia, it could be removing market opportunities for Canadian companies and creating a gap which other countries would run to fill." Again, quoting Asad Ismi:

As the Indonesian army and its militias set fire to Dili and killed thousands of East Timorese in September 1999, the Canadian government refused to stop the export of military goods to Indonesia. This at a time when even the United States, Jakarta's main backer, had suspended military sales to Indonesia, as had the European Union and Australia.

According to documents obtained from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) through the Access to Information Act, six military export permits for the Indonesian Air Force and Ministry of Defence, worth a total of $119.3 million, were granted by the Canadian government during 1998-1999 to unidentified companies. The permits were for aircraft engines, navigation systems and training simulators or parts.

Israel/Palestine

The Canadian Highways Infrastructure Corporation calls itself a "world renowned, full service, toll highway development company specializing in public-private partnerships with capabilities in finance, design and engineering, operation and maintenance of large-scale toll highway projects". CHIC helped build the infamous 407 toll highway in Ontario, courtesy of the neoconservative government there.

Now they are building settler-only highways in Israel/Palestine: "The Derech Eretz Consortium (DEC), led by CHIC, is the State of Israel's private sector partner in the development of the all-electronic Cross Israel Highway...DEC won a two-year international competition to finance, design, build and operate the 86km toll road, which will run north-south through the heart of Israel near Tel Aviv." You would think that this $1.2 billion road was just an innocuous path. The only hint that something might be amiss is this little line: "Instead of adding roads and interchanges in already densely populated areas, the Cross Israel Highway is diverting traffic to the central region of the country, thus reducing vehicle density and pollution in the greater Tel Aviv region."

Israel's network of bypass roads is designed very deliberately to reach from the core areas of Israel itself into settlements in the West Bank without allowing traffic or communication between West Bank towns. These bypass roads are an integral component of what Israeli activist Jeff Halper calls the "matrix of control", by which Palestinians are isolated, surrounded, and disconnected from each other, made wholly dependent on the whims of the Israeli regime. It is an appalling program of imprisoning an entire population. It is also good business for the Canadian Highways Infrastructure Corporation.

Canada's place today

Afghanistan/Iraq

A good researcher on Canada today is Stephen Kerr who, in addition to his written investigative reports, does a weekly radio show called "Newspeak" on CIUT-FM in Toronto. Last year, Kerr wrote a piece on Canada's role in the current Iraq war that was very valuable. He noted that three Canadian warships escorted the US fleet in 'Operation Apollo'. The US fleet was firing Tomahawk missiles at Iraqi targets at the time. Canadian aviators manned AWACS aircraft to direct missiles at their targets. Canadian officers worked at Central Command in Qatar, helping with logistics. US troop transport planes used over-flight and refueling privileges in Canadian aerospace. Quoting Kerr: "US military doctrine describes refueling as the 'key' to US global airpower. This reporter's request for a full accounting of these over-flights was refused by the Canadian Department of National Defence." US troops were relieved by Canadian troops in Afghanistan and Canada took command of the Afghan occupation. 35 Canadian soldiers served on 'exchange' with the Iraq invasion forces.

Haiti

Despite Canada's rather extensive assistance to the US's aggression in Iraq, there was a widespread line in Canadian media that Canada had to "mend a fence" for its defiance of the US on Iraq. Canada's politicians duly complied, "mending the fence" on the bones of Haitians, acquiescing in the coup against democratically elected President Aristide, and sending troops to occupy that country.

Relying on Stephen Kerr again:

Prime Minister Paul Martin first committed approximately 180 troops from the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment, as well as the Joint Operations Group from Kingston, to provide "security" for the criminal Haitian thugs. When on Thursday it became apparent that the political facade created for the coup was crumbling, Martin scaled back Canada's commitment to 60 soldiers. Martin claims he is keen to get Haiti "on the right track."

Aristide, Kerr notes, "had Haiti on the wrong track...feebly trying to deliver what Haitians have been demanding for years"-an agenda made almost impossible by the embargo against Haiti by the US, an embargo Canada participated in. Kerr quotes from Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT), which provides various services to corporations doing business in countries like Haiti: "[S]ome Canadian companies are looking to shift garment production to Haiti." Kerr notes that "Montreal based Gildan Activewear is already subcontracting work to Haitian owned sweatshops, and they have opened a new factory in Port au Prince which employs 400 to 500 people." Gildan is one of the largest T shirt makers in the world. It pays its Montreal workers 10 times the wages it pays Haitians, who get less than they need to live on and not enough to keep up with inflation.

The above, from Kerr, does not come close to describing Canada's full role in the coup. Aristide's attempts at changing Haiti's pattern of poverty were so "feeble" because Haiti was denied development loans by the InterAmerican Development Bank. Those loans were vetoed by the US (no one in Haiti even knew the US could veto IADB loans) after the US decided to oust Aristide some time around 2000. There was an election that year, in which some senate results were contested-all international observers concluded that all irregularities aside, Aristide would have won the election handily. But this was "contested", and so the US cut off aid to the starving country. So did Canada.

After the coup, Canada led the way in repressing Aristide's supporters. The RCMP picked up Oriel Jean, Aristide's security chief, at the Toronto airport, and handed him over to the US, who gave him some bogus drug charges, and sent him off to a Miami jail, where he now sits. This while real drug traffickers and paramilitaries were released from prisons all over Haiti and are now terrorizing the population-while US and Canadian soldiers look on. (Similarly, Canadian security services probably handed bogus information on Syrian-Canadian Maher Arar over to the US immigration authorities who sent him off to Syria for 10 months of torture. No one twisted Canada's arm to do this either.)

The details of a meeting in Ottawa a year before the coup, called the "Ottawa Initiative", at which the future of Haiti was discussed by countries all over the Americas except for Haiti, have yet to be revealed. But a special representative of the OAS secretary-general, Luigi Einaudi, told a crowd at Hotel Oloffson on New Year's Eve 2003, "The real problem with Haiti is that the international community is so screwed up that they're actually letting Haitians run the place." That contempt for self-determination, going back through Pearson and Martin Sr.'s "anti-communism" to the 19th century and Canada's Indian Act-which was a model for the South African apartheid regime-and continuously throughout Canada's history, is something Canada's elites share with the British and French imperialists who founded colonies here, and with the US imperialists who are colonizing the world today.

Even Diefenbaker, who got "regime-changed", shared this contempt for the people of the Third World. This contempt, this racism, coupled with the many corporate and capitalist interests, would be enough to make Canada somewhat imperialist even if it wasn't so vulnerable to US power. The integration of the economies, the integration of the elites, and the innumerable opportunities the US has to retaliate against a show of independence only make Canada's elites even more eager to do the wrong thing.

Conclusions

I've tried to present some of the realities behind the various myths about Canada and its role in the world. First, there is the myth about Canada's benevolence: that one is handily shattered by the evidence. The other one is the myth about Canada's helplessness before US power: that's almost like a Nuremberg defence: Canada was only following orders-there was no scope for a moral decision. Well, it's worth remembering that that defence didn't work at Nuremberg. There are always choices; some are costly. But how could Canadians morally argue against choosing not to profit from murderous policies because such choices were too costly?

If we don't opt for such a sleazy way out, what's left? A country like Venezuela, much weaker, more subject to US power if less interdependent, is paying the costs of an independent course. That isn't the Chavez regime alone that is doing that-it is a result of powerful social movements, and of class struggle in that country. Because of those pressures from below, Venezuela was able to condemn the war in Afghanistan while Canada participated. Venezuela condemned the war in Iraq while Canada applauded. Venezuela refused to recognize the paramilitary criminals who replaced Aristide in Haiti, while Canada joined the forces guaranteeing their power. Venezuela puts Canada to shame, and is facing regime change, violence, and coups because of it.

Borrowing a page from Paul Martin Sr., Venezuela's elite, along with various US political authorities, accuse Chavez of wanting to implement "communism" in Venezuela. But all Venezuelans want is self-determination, a chance to develop their own way, according to their own choices. Instead they are getting a well-funded, orchestrated destabilization campaign. It is only self-determination that Iraqis want, and they are getting an occupation. It's all Haitians want, and they got a coup. If Canadians decided they wanted that, instead of a thin slice of imperial profits and power and all the nightmares and hatred that come with it, there would be a price to pay as well. But, as Dyer noted, empire has a price, too.

Humanitarianism, peacekeeping, and other myths