The Dominion - peacekeeping

Myths for Profit: Canada's Role in Industries of War and Peace

Amy Miller — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:22:02 +0000

MINUSTAH Intimidates Journalist on World Press Freedom Day

dru — Thu, 10 May 2007 00:12:09 +0000

On his way to cover a UN Stabilization Mission (MINUSTAH) police operation in Cité Soleil's Little Haiti neighbourhood, freelance reporter Jean Ristil, who was riding his motorcycle, was stopped by a group of Brazilian soldiers who surrounded him and pointed their guns at him.

"Three of them grabbed me and twisted my arm" Ristil said through a translator. They held him by his neck and took him inside a nearby school, which has been transformed by MINUSTAH into a military base inside Cité Soleil.

When they took him inside the school, they saw that he was wearing press identification around his neck.
"It was Thursday, May 3, the World Day of Press Freedom," Ristil said.

Inside, he saw somebody in handcuffs. MINUSTAH troops asked him if the man was a bandit. "I told them I didn't know him," Ristil said. Then they started kicking the man.

They made Ristil face the wall and spread his arms apart to search him. "One of the soldiers was going to hit me in the back, but another stopped him saying, 'No he's a journalist.'"

After about 30 minutes they brought in another man who had been beaten. "I saw them hit him with a gun," Ristil said. The man was wearing a badge that showed he worked as security at the Chapi Clinic. The man asked the soldiers to loosen his handcuffs because they were hurting him and they replied that if he asked again they would beat him.

Meanwhile, people outside were calling for his release. Ristil was able to leave, but by that time the soldiers had damaged parts of his motorcycle while attempting to search it.

Ristil did not report the arrest directly to authorities, but went on the radio to inform listeners of what had happened.

Twice in recent weeks while riding his motorcycle Ristil was approached from behind by a UN tank which then put on its brakes just behind him, in an effort, he thinks, to intimidate him.

"Right now I'm very afraid." If no one were around, he says he could have been seriously hurt.

Ristil is a freelance reporter for the Black Commentator, Radio Lakou in New York, Associated Press, and HaitiAnalysis.com, among other news outlets.

Ristil, along with an American journalist, was arrested and briefly put in jail by SWAT members of the Haitian police force in September 2005 after they allegedly witnessed the police officers planting weapons at the church of Father Gerald Jean-Juste.

Ristil was also arrested in November 2005, this time near the Central Headquarters of the Judicial Police (DCPJ). He recalls being beaten after he refused to hand over photographs that he had taken showing the results of violent raids carried out by the Haitian police and UN forces in Cité Soleil.

Freelance journalist Jean Ristil recounted the incident to Bay Area journalist Judith Scherr by telephone through a translator on May 6, 2007.

Freelance journalist Jean Ristil recounted the incident to Bay Area journalist Judith Scherr by telephone through a translator on May 6.

MINUSTAH Troops in Haiti

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

Peacekeeping moves

dru — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 13:52:52 +0000

According to the Times of London, the US is making a move to take over leadership of the UN's Peacekeeping forces. The report speculates that this is part of a strategy for getting US troops out of Iraq.

Whose Trauma?

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 18:50:35 +0000

The "Somalia Affair" and Canadian mythology

From the cover of Dark Threats and White Nights. During the "Somalia Affair," Canadian soldiers captured and tortured Somalis from Belet Huen.

During Canada's 1993 peacekeeping mission in Belet Huen, Somalia, Canadian soldiers captured impoverished Somalis who were said to have stolen food and supplies from the Canadian military encampment. The captives were subjected to beatings, torture and public humiliation. Most victims were children, many of whom were tied to one another around posts in the street, blindfolded and left next to signs that read 'thief' for all passers by to see. On March 4 of the same year, two Somalis were shot in the back by Canadian soldiers, one fatally. In what came to be known as the "Somalia Affair," 16-year-old Shidane Arone was tortured over the course of an entire night before being killed by Canadian soldiers barely two weeks after the shooting. Six Somalis were killed in total. A series of shocking "trophy photos" of detainees were later exposed, often depicting children detainees being degraded by members of the Canadian Airborne Regiment. In the case of Shidane Arone, an infamous series of photos of the boy at various stages of his torture was revealed, including one of a Canadian soldier using a baton to hold up his head, which is covered in blood. The soldier is grinning at the camera. A video of soldiers on the base making blatantly racist comments about Somalis was discovered a little later, in January of 1995. In it, one of the soldiers announces to the camera that their Somalia operation is called 'Operation "Snatch Nig-Nog."'

The revelations came as a shock to Canadians accustomed to a steady image of armed forces dedicated to benevolent and competent "peacekeeping." Canada's "national mythology" is a central focus in Sherene Razack's study of the official response to the "Somalia Affair." The result was her 2004 book Dark Threats and White Nights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism. Razack writes that with the exposure of torture by Canadian soldiers, "modern peacekeeping revealed its sordid colonial origins. Soldiers had acted more like conquerors than humanitarians."

In response, Canadian officials instituted a Commission of Inquiry. The Canadian government, however, shut down the Commission, before it could fully investigate the murders or the potential complicity of military leaders in these acts. What the Commission did have time to convey was closer in form to an acquittal. In the opening lines of its report, the Commission said that "The soldiers, with some notable exceptions, did their best. But ill-prepared and rudderless, they fell invariably into the mire that became the Somalia debacle. As a result, a proud legacy was dishonoured...the leadership errors in the Somalia mission were manifold and fundamental." Despite this acknowledgement, the Commission stopped short of holding specific leaders accountable, while maintaining that the troops were not to blame for the torture and murder they committed.

Media reports, says Razack, were "reporting with sympathy the animosity Canadian soldiers were feeling towards rock-throwing Somalis" long after Arone's murder.

"Many soldiers say privately they wish they could shoot more often," Paul Watson reported in the Toronto Star in a story describing the "rough life" of the soldiers in Belet Huen. But it wasn't as though the media were not interested in the "Somalia Affair" as a scandal. Razack asks us to look at the particular kind of attention that it was paid, however; the violence against Somalis didn't interest the media, but the "cover-up of that violence by the military did."

Canadians "believe we were duped by our own, and that it was our very niceness and national naivete that led to the debacle in Somalia." Even though Canada was clearly responsible for the killings, what the media and the government chose to focus most on was a "nice" Canadian character that had been tainted by a few rogue soldiers. On Razack's account, Canada has integrated the "Somalia Affair" into its national understanding in a narcissistic fashion.

To recap, violent acts of an inarguably and fundamentally racist character were committed and six human beings were killed and several more were tortured. But to the Commission--as was the dominant public interpretation--it was Canada that had been betrayed. This betrayal, however, was committed by an anonymous institution, conspiring with the "mire" of Somalia, which was never held accountable, either for its murder and torture or for its betrayal of Canadian self-perception.

Racism slid out the back door of Canada's collective interpretation. Heroism took its place.

"The hold that mythologies have should not be underestimated," writes Razack. "They have the power to make a nation replace tortured and dead bodies with traumatized soldiers." The prevailing account stressed that "our mythological virtues as a nation that is somehow too gentle, too bureaucratic, and too given to navel-gazing," Razack argues, "enabled us to look at racism in the Somalia Affair and still not really see it."

It is the mythology itself, Canadian identity, which acted to enable the conclusion that the racist torture and murder committed by members of the airborne division was exceptional. In fact, several witnesses suggested to the Inquiry that if there were racists in the military, it was unlikely to be a number higher than existed in "Canadian society as a whole."

What, Razack asks, does Canadian identity mean in terms of self? "A Canadian knows herself or himself as... a modest, self-deprecating individual who is able to gently teach Third World Others about civility." At bottom, she argues, this is a fundamentally colonial mindset that renders "any sort of personhood" of those being taught "inconceivable." At home, Canada's mythology covers over 200 years of remarkably frank attempts to eliminate the existence of the country's original inhabitants, a fact that in part explains the sophistication and deep-rootedness of the mythology in the relatively new context of "peacekeeping."

Dark Threats and White Knights offers an in-depth and subtle analysis of the mentality of a nation that wants to "weep and to collectively remember, but...not to probe too deeply into the difference between looking on and direct suffering." In essence, Razack provides an extensive inventory of the colonial mindset that the Canadian public has not yet recognized or begun to address.

The book's concluding sentence enjoins us to "look critically at who we are." To bring Razack's injunction to bear on ongoing Canadian interventions abroad means to insist, first of all, that Canada's identity--as a peacekeeper, as well-meaning, or as nice-- not be allowed to supersede what Canada is in fact doing abroad. Only by holding mythology at bay can we begin to form a critical understanding of ourselves.

Maya Rolbin-Ghanie explores the place of the "Somalia Affair" in Canadian mythology.

EU Force Takes Over Bosnian Peacekeeping

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 04:40:15 +0000

On December 2nd, the European Union's 7,000-strong force in Bosnia-Herzegovina assumed command of NATO's peacekeeping mission in the area. The situation in the region has stabilized significantly over the past few years despite claims in the mid-1990s that the mission had failed completely.

Consequently, allied forces on the ground have been scaled back from their peak of 60,000 to the 7,000 EU troops in the region today. Canada currently has 85 soldiers in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which contrasts the 1,800 that were deployed as part of the UN implementation force in support of the Dayton accord. Over 40,000 Canadians have contributed to NATO peacekeeping forces in Bosnia since 1992.

The assumption of command marks a major step forward in the European Union's development as a more-than-economic federation. It is the first time the union has deployed an EU-directed military force. An ad hoc attempt in 1995 to bring EU forces together to end violence in the region met with failure and prompted calls for the development of a permanent EU military arm.

» CBC: European Union takes over Bosnia peacekeeping from NATO with 7,000 troops

» Al Jazeera: Patrolling Peace in Bosnia

» Rocky Mountain News: A military test for European Union

Daunting Task for New Somalia Government

Sun, 07 Nov 2004 03:51:54 +0000

Following his own appointment in October as president, former warlord Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed has named Ali Mohamed Ghedi as prime minister and has given him a month to name a cabinet.

A member of the Darol clan, Yusuf's decision to appoint a Hawiye to the position is the first step in attempting to reconcile the clan-based divisions that have plagued the Somali peace process. Since the downfall of Siad Barre in 1991, the country has been without an effective central government, having been ruled by competing regional warlords backed by armed militias. Up to 300 000 people have been killed, and over two million displaced.

Thirteen previous peace initiatives and two attempts to establish a new government have failed to bring lasting peace. With virtually no infrastructure and no established revenue, no civil service, nor any buildings for officials to meet in, the new government faces overwhelming logistical obstacles to establishing itself in Mogadishu. The security situation in the country remains volatile to the extent that the new government must currently operate out of Nairobi in neighboring Kenya - host of the peace process over the last two years. Estimates suggest that over 55 000 militia remain throughout the country, carrying more than two million small arms.

Yusuf has called for significant help in both resources and peacekeeping forces so as to speed up the process of pacifying the country. While regional leaders and foreign observers agree that military help from African countries would be politically preferable, it is questionable whether the continent could provide the 20 000 peacekeepers Yusuf has requested. With growing crises in Darfur, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and other countries on the continent, resources are already stretched thin. And with the memories of the last UN peacekeeping effort in Somalia still lingering, the international community will likely be cautious about mandating the deployment of troops from outside Africa.

» IOL (South Africa): New PM to spearhead reconciliation process

» IRIN News: Hundreds of thousands killed in years of war, says new president

» Reuters AlertNet: Crisis Profile: Is peace possible in Somalia?

Haitians Ask Canada: What Security?

Wed, 21 Jul 2004 18:25:18 +0000

Under Canadian and US supervision, thousands of civil servants have been jailed on vague or nonexistent charges. Former police chief Jean Michel Gaspard, shown here, was released by US Marines after he demanded basic information about why he was being held.

Prime Minister Paul Martin and Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham announced that 100 RCMP officers will be sent to Haiti, as part of a plan to "ensure security and stability." The officers, according to Martin, will help to "reform the Haitian National Police."

The announcement has left many Haitians puzzled as to what the Canadian government means by "security and stability." Since the democratically elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide and his Lavalas party were removed from power, all 5,000 members of the Haitian National Police have been dismissed from their positions and replaced by members of the former military. The Haitian military, often supplied and trained by the US, was integral to several coups and attempted coups until it was disbanded by Aristide in 1994.

Since Canadian and American troops landed in Haiti in February, between 2,000 and 3,000 Haitians, mostly Lavalas activists who support the return of Aristide, have been murdered. Demonstrations in favour of Aristide's return have been met with gunfire, and dozens have been killed. Many members of the former government are in hiding. In at least one case, US forces were involved in a massacre in the Bel Aire district of Port-au-Prince. The role of Canadian troops is less clear, but a report in the Truro Daily News confirmed that Canadian snipers are working in the Haitian countryside. Master Cpl. Scott Richardson, a Canadian sniper who worked in Haiti, was quoted as saying "we're the ones who fly around in the helicopters, drop into the mountains looking for the baddies ... it's a cool job."

When Aristide was removed, Haiti's prisons were emptied of convicted murderers, war criminals, and drug dealers, and have now been filled with Lavalas party activists. Many have not been charged; some, fearing assassination, have turned themselves in.

--Anthony Fenton

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