[asia-apec 960] Will there be respect for civil liberties?

[Gatt Watchdog]

Diary, New Zealand Herald, Auckland, December 11 1998 (p.2)

Will there be respect for civil liberties?
by Ted Reynolds

Already the obituarists have written off Apec '99, Auckland $44 million debut
on the international stage.  And the jamboree has not even begun.

Fourteen months ago Vancouver played host to the Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation forum, and still the people of Vancouver are
counting what it cost in civil liberties.

Eighteen heads of Government had 2300 Royal Canadian Mounted
Police and 700 Vancouver city police looking after them.

It was believed to be the biggest security operation ever mounted
in North America.

>From the start the organisation began to unravel.

All through the summer of 1997 Canadian people worked themselves
up over President Suharto of Indonesia.

>From the Maritime provinces in the Pacific coast, cities sprouted
anti-Suharto slogans - so many that Indonesian Foreign Minister
Ali Alatas called on Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy to
ask, "What gives?"

Would protests be so violent that Mr Suharto's dignity would be
offended? If so, Suharto would rather not visit Canada.

Mr Axworthy could have studies his fingernails for a time and
replied that in a democracy protest groups  have the right to
protest peaceably.  As for Mr Suharto, well, he would have to make
up his own mind.

Instead, Mr Axworthy apologised for the anti-Suharto posters,
saying they were "outrageous  and excessive, and not the way
Canadians behaved."

The words signalled Canada's surrender.

It was, though, a signal not noticed in Vancouver, on the campus
of the University of British Columbia, where the Canadian
Government had leased university buildings for Apec and was moving
in with pepper spray.

The first arrests came four days before the first Apec delegates
were due to arrive.

Videotapes obtained by the Mounties' complaints commission show a
blue-wigged student being pepper-sprayed in the face.  From then
on, pepper spray became the chief weapon of the police.

By the end of the Apec meeting hundreds had been pepper-sprayed
and 78 arrested on charges that the police let drop.

Well, that was Vancouver.  Auckland will be different - there will
be no Mr Suharto in Auckland.

But there will be people who want to show their disapproval  of
China's quite appalling record on human rights.  And by next year
the rulers of Malaysia may have turned their country into a
pariah state.

Mahathir Mohamad is moving from comic to dictator, and every
morning when he wakes he knows to expect the newspapers to lead
their front pages with his days doings.

Idolatry of that sort can turn a chap's mind.  It can lead him
into believing he has the right to demand that protest groups be
controlled and that his dignity be unsullied.

During the 1970s and 1980s our police learned that even university
students - even people who show no reverence for the game of rugby
- have rights.

It was a slow and bumpy process.  But in the end there seemed to
be reluctant respect for people's right to protest and for the
right of police to see that protesters keep within the law.

It will be a terrible shame if, in the years of peace since
Vietnam and the Springbok tour, the lessons have been forgotted
and the police believe that only a finger on a pepper spray stands
between Auckland and anarchy.



Letters to the editor - letters at herald.co.nz