[asia-apec 826] Van Sun: Chretien interference parallels Suharto actions

[David Webster]

Source: Vancouver Sun, Oct 23, 1998

Excerpt:      Before the pepper spray and the headlines, the students
                  and many others were protesting something very real --
                  the terror and repression of the Suharto regime in
                  Indonesia. The 200,000 killed in East Timor. The 500,000
                  massacred in 1965 when Suharto took power. Leftists,
                  activists, communists and thousands upon thousands of
                  Chinese Indonesians killed.... All of us who have
                  spent our lives in the media can only feel a sense of
                  shame.

----------
Guest Column:
Our window on the world is nailed shut

                  The PMO must be gloating at how easily it was to silence
                  Terry Milewski, the CBC's leading APEC reporter. It's
                  strange how parallels to Suharto keep popping up.

Daryl Duke, Filmmaker and broadcaster
Vancouver Sun

                  Terry Milewski was off
                  the APEC story. When I
                  heard the news I was
                  without television,
                  miles up the coast
                  closing my summer place
                  before the first frost
                  and the end of daylight
                  savings time.

                  It was a Friday
                  afternoon. I listened to CBC AM. Reporter Ian Gunn was
                  giving an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit
                  inquiry update. He sounded as if he was detailing the
                  Agassiz city council's new estimate for street lighting.
                  Then came the CBC's Afternoon Show. Katherine Gretsinger
                  interviewed Alissa Westergarde-Thorpe, one of the APEC
                  student protesters. In the rush to disassociate herself
                  from Westergarde-Thorpe's remarks, Gretsinger
                  back-pedalled so energetically I thought she would fall
                  off her swivel chair.

                  I felt alarmed, slightly sickened. Is this what a whiff
                  of gunpowder from the prime minister's office can do?
                  Turn everyone at the CBC into sheep? How satisfied Jean
                  Chretien must have been.

                  A good week's work, he must have thought.
                  Solicitor-General Andy Scott had silenced the students
                  by denying their legal funding. Peter Donolo,
                  communications director at the PMO, had successfully
                  removed the CBC's best reporter from the story with a
                  letter full of innuendos and unproved charges and a
                  request to refer the matter to the CBC ombudsman (what a
                  ploy!). Now the RCMP Public Complaints Commission
                  hearings could settle upon the harbour bottom of our
                  lives and be soon forgotten.

                  "Mes amis," I can hear the PM saying to his staff as he
                  headed home at day's end, "We can win this one!"

                  A week later, I realize just how much I miss Terry
                  Milewski. I was used to him. He was my eyes and ears on
                  the events of APEC. I miss his sardonic take. His
                  energy. His passion.

                  Even as he brought forth new documents and talked about
                  pepper spray his every sentence evoked images of the
                  whole sorry saga of the summit. The cost to Vancouver
                  and to Canada.

                  For what? The blocked traffic. The rushing around in
                  self-important motorcades. The dictators wearing their
                  matching brown leather jackets. Chretien rejecting
                  B.C.'s Seaforth Highlanders Regiment and flying the Van
                  Doos out from Quebec at a cost of $210,000 to be an
                  honour guard at Vancouver International Airport. (Le
                  Petit Gars evidently wanted soldiers who looked more
                  Canadian than the men of our old and most honoured west
                  coast regiment.)

                  The sham of those APEC politicians, PR men and
                  economists pretending Asia's financial collapse was, in
                  U.S. President Bill Clinton's words, "just a glitch."
                  Tell that today to Premier Glen Clark with B.C.'s
                  economy in a tailspin.

                  The APEC hearings were our story. They are in disarray.
                  Without focus, without point. A contract with our heart
                  has been broken. Milewski was our reporter.

                  The students are our sons and daughters. They took the
                  pepper spray on our behalf. The truth was theirs to
                  reach.

                  Now the story's been taken away from them and from us.
                  Moved to Ottawa and the lockstep voting of a Liberal
                  party whose leader brooks no dissent. No wonder the
                  young take to the streets as a forum of last resort.

                  As I complete my fifth decade in television I come to a
                  chilling conclusion. In Canada today the name of the TV
                  game is censorship. The suppression of knowledge. A
                  skillful and centralized control of our information,
                  entertainment and culture.

                  Never have we had so much put before us. A river of
                  television channels flowing past our eyeballs every hour
                  of the day. New broadcast stations, networks galore,
                  specialty channels, satellites in the sky. Yet never
                  have we had so little say in what we wish to watch or
                  what we need to see. Like orphaned children we are on
                  the outside looking in, facing a media edifice which is
                  almost impenetrable. Vancouverites end the century
                  exiles in their own city, their own province, their own
                  country.

                  If this is the banquet we were asked to join, why do we
                  leave the table feeling so hungry? If this is the time
                  of plenty Izzy Asper, Perrin Beatty, Ivan Fecan and all
                  those eastern media heavyweights promised us, why do we
                  have that emptiness in the heart as we turn off the TV
                  and climb the stairs wearily to our beds? The hype
                  doesn't match the reality. TV may be our window on the
                  world but the window has been nailed shut.

                  We know what we see each day on the screen. We just
                  don't know what we don't see.

                  Like Carl Sandburg's fog, censorship in our country
                  creeps upon us on little cat's feet. The APEC
                  controversy makes us aware just how fragile our access
                  to information is in Canada. Terry Milewski was removed
                  by the CBC brass not only because of the PMO's attack
                  but is off the air because he has become "part of the
                  story." How ridiculous. Livingston can be front and
                  centre, but the intrepid Stanley who went to find him in
                  the depths of Africa must remain in the shadows?

                  Even The Vancouver Sun, to my surprise, admonished
                  Milewski not to cross "even fuzzy lines" in its Oct. 15
                  editorial. I wonder how far Bernstein and Woodward would
                  have got with the Watergate story if they had worried
                  about crossing "fuzzy lines?"

                  Before the pepper spray and the headlines, the students
                  and many others were protesting something very real --
                  the terror and repression of the Suharto regime in
                  Indonesia. The 200,000 killed in East Timor. The 500,000
                  massacred in 1965 when Suharto took power. Leftists,
                  activists, communists and thousands upon thousands of
                  Chinese Indonesians killed. The New York Times called
                  the massacres "one of the most savage mass slaughters of
                  modern political history." Time told of "small rivers
                  and streams that have been literally clogged with
                  bodies. River transportation has at places been
                  seriously impeded."

                  The killing, the torture and imprisonment went on until
                  last May when the Suharto regime was toppled. Despite
                  some 60 or more TV channels, the corporate giants of
                  Toronto that now own and run our media never found the
                  time to brief us on the history of the man Jean Chretien
                  was inviting to Vancouver.

                  Strange how parallels to the Suharto regime keep popping
                  up. As the RCMP subjected Canadians to arbitrary arrest
                  so, too, in Jakarta before the 1994 APEC summit the
                  Indonesian army cleared the streets of labour activists,
                  free speech advocates and those opposing the slaughter
                  in East Timor. In Indonesia Suharto tightly controlled
                  all media. He closed down three magazines, Tempo, Detik
                  and Sinar Harapam [sic], by terminating their business
                  licences. When the journalists and editors protested on
                  the streets they were beaten and arrested.

                  Political interference with the police is an attack upon
                  our person. Political interference with the media is an
                  attack upon our mind. How easily Peter Donolo of the PMO
                  was able to silence Terry Milewski. All of us who have
                  spent our lives in the media can only feel a sense of
                  shame.

----------

Daryl Duke has worked for three U.S. TV networks adn both Canadian networks,
as well as having founded and chaired Vancouver's CKVU-TV.

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 \   /    "Long words Bother me."
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