[asia-apec 902] SprayPEC - Article

[Gatt Watchdog]

SprayPEC 1997 - APEC's True Colours on Display
by Aziz Choudry

Canadians are calling it "SprayPEC". East Timorese Nobel Laureate Jose Ramos-
Horta has described it as "totally abominable". Headlines have
screamed: "PM dodges grilling over APEC spraying"; "Opposition parties join
forces to attack PM over APEC violence; pepper-spraying of summit protesters
called offensive to Canada", "RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] over-reacts
to students to protect Suharto feelings", "PM's aides talked to police just
before APEC incident", "Legal experts say PM may have to resign
over APEC", and "RCMP spied on protesters before APEC".

Its handling of security at last year's APEC Summit in Vancouver has turned
into a political nightmare for Jean Chretien's government.  Opposition MPs
from across the political spectrum have hammered him in Parliament over the
issue.  Although nearly a year has passed since the event, the media has gone
on a feeding frenzy.  Official documents which have steadily made their way
into the public domain implicate the Prime Minister's Office in a heavyhanded
crackdown which resulted in dozens of arrests, scores of people peppersprayed,
and a wave of public outrage over the incident.  Chretien, while at times
struggling uncomfortably to dodge the barrage of questions, has only made
matters worse by saying that the use of pepperspray was preferable to hitting
the protesters with baseball bats.

The security operation for APEC was the largest in Canada's history. And it is
the images of police pepperspraying and violently arresting non-violent
protesters - mostly students - as well as journalists who were in
a crowd of some 2000 people, outside the APEC Economic Leaders Summit last
November 25th on the University of British Columbia (UBC) campus that have
lingered in most people's minds much longer than memories of what the APEC
meetings were actually about.

As Toronto Star columnist Naomi Klein wrote, "[f]or its opponents, APEC was
always about being shut up and shut out.  The protesters were relegated to
having to scrawl their concerns on signs from the wrong side of a security
zone precisely because those concerns had no place on the side of the fence
that actually mattered" ("Remember what APEC protests were all
about", 17/09/98)

Many Canadians were shocked and outraged by what they saw. For many of us
international observers who had also been present in other cities that had
hosted the annual APEC media circus, Vancouver carried on the APEC tradition
of Leaders Summits serving as a potent symbol of the human rights abuses
which the free market model of development promotes throughout the region. And
the message about the police actions from local Indigenous Peoples who had
been as marginalised in most of the "alternative" NGO meetings held at the
time as they were from the official events was: "This - and worse - has been
happening to us for years - and no-one has really been interested.  Canada is
a colonial state. Why should we expect anything different from the government
and the RCMP?"

Every city where APEC Leaders meetings have occurred has suffered from
restrictions on the freedom of local citizens.  Alternative press conferences
were broken up by the military in Indonesia.  Homeless people were forcibly
removed from around the meeting venue and the entire Osaka CBD was shut down
for days in Japan in 1995. An estimated 33,000 squatter familes in Manila
were relocated and their homes destroyed to create an "eyesore-free" zone
before the APEC VIPs arrived in 1996.

What is clear is that the 1997 security operation was, in the words of APEC
Summit organiser, Robert Vanderloo, carried out "not so much from a security
point of view but to avoid embarrassment to APEC leaders."

Not unlike the Ramos government in the Philippines the year before, the
Canadian government pursued a dual strategy in dealing to criticism of APEC,
and the human rights records of many of its members.  It stepped up the
rhetoric about the need to involve "civil society" and pursue environmentally
sustainable goals within  APEC. The federal and BC provincial governments
attempted to blunt domestic opposition to APEC by funding and
supporting a "People's Summit" of NGOs and unions.  But what happened away
from the plush venue for this meeting on the streets of Vancouver showed the
true face, the true price of the neoliberal agenda.

The police have tried to justify their actions by saying that they were
protecting protesters from a heavily armed contingent of Indonesian security
personnel, who were themselves under close watch by local security forces
after they had repeatedly refused to obey security protocols set by the RCMP.
And while 5 Indonesian agents were ultimately arrested, 3 of them at gunpoint,
the claims made to supposedly back up the argument that the RCMP
had to be "cruel to be kind" at APEC don't seem to stack up.  Sure, Indonesian
officials had put pressure on Canada to guarantee that it would shield Suharto
from any visible protests.  But Canada is after all the great
"democracy" which sent more armed military personnel to besiege and intimidate
a small group of Mohawk Indians and their supporters defending their sacred
land near Oka, Quebec in 1990 than it sent to the Gulf War.  It is
the great "democracy" that cuts deals with transnational corporations to strip
the resources and destroy the lives of Indigenous Peoples on lands that have
never been ceded to the Canadian state.  So what happened in November 1997 in
Vancouver, while outrageous and abhorrent, is hardly an isolated incident in
Canadian history.

Some of the more critical voices against the APEC Summit, like the APEC Alert
network, made up largely of students and community activists, were the target
of police surveillance operations months prior to the actual Leaders Summit
even though police files state "some of these individuals may engage in civil
disobedience however,...none are considered violent".  A number of them were
arrested in the weeks leading up to the Summit for creative protests against
APEC and the presence of leaders like Suharto on their campus.

The day before police hosed down a crowd of protesters at UBC with
fire-extinguisher sized canisters of pepperspray, plainclothes police nabbed
APEC Alert spokesperson Jaggi Singh as he walked between buildings on the UBC
campus during a teach-in on globalisation. It was clearly a politically
motivated move to get him out of the way.  Or as RCMP
communications put it - "with a view to eliminating some of the high profile
members of Apec Alert from the UBC area" charges should be laid against
specific perceived leaders.

Peaceful protesters had their signs forcibly removed. Some were arrested for
holding up bits of card reading "free speech".  Several complain that their
conditions of release violated their rights to peaceful assembly and free
speech, in that those arrested were asked to sign guarantees that they would
not return to campus until APEC was over, and would not associate with other
anti-APEC activists.

RCMP Public Complaints Commission hearings started in September to look into
the numerous complaints of police using excessive force, and the violations of
protesters' civil liberties.  Many pointed out that the Commission process was
fundamentally flawed from the outset.  It is not an independent inquiry but
an internal police mechanism.  Calls for a truly independent hearing have
fallen on deaf ears. And in late October, after allegations that the
Commission's chairman had been overheard prejudging the hearings long before
they had begun, the Commission was adjourned indefinitely with lawyers for the
police crying "bias".  Meanwhile, a number of civil legal suits have
been filed against both the Police and the Prime Minister's Office.

Rather ironic then is the fact that around the time of the Vancouver Summit,
both official and some avowedly anti-APEC voices talked of opportunities to
export Canada's values with its goods and services, and of using
Canada's reputation for "integrity and fairness" to pressure those APEC
(read "Asian") economies with "poor human rights records" to change.  Asian
leaders, some said, just need exposure to Western style-democracy.  Yet in a
recent interview on CBC Radio News, Jose Ramos-Horta pointed out that Canada
was giving a poor example to the world when it comes to democracy and human
rights.  Referring to the Malaysian police's recent use of pepperspray against
demonstrators he said: "I thought, God, did they learn it from the Canadians,
or what? Because the first time I heard was in connection with
Vancouver."
 
However, as APEC Alert activist Jonathan Oppenheim put it: "As in the Rodney
King beating, the explicit images shown on TV are markers of an underlying
problem.  It's not the overt, obvious suppression that we should worry about,
but the constant, grinding silencing of dissent that occurs every day.  If we
look through the haze of pepper spray, we will see that what counts is not the
narrow legal definition of freedom of speech but freedom itself."

>From Jakarta to Ottawa, from Manila to Wellington, APEC host governments have
strived to showcase their countries on the international stage as prosperous
market "economies", dissent-free and pursuing an economic agenda consistent
with the narrow vision of private sector freemarketeers and their fellow
travellers in government ministries.  This job is getting harder and harder
as a crisis of legitimacy overtakes the free market model and the institutions
and processes which promote it.  And it's getting harder as the voices raised
against it are more insistent and draw on an increasingly wider section of the
population. 

It is not even as if the Leaders Summits are where the real work of APEC takes
place. That happens throughout the year, behind closed doors, in
"embarrassment-free enclaves" in lower-profile gatherings of senior officials,
ministers, and working groups.  But the Leaders Summit is APEC's showpiece,
made for the media and domestic consumption.

For years many of us have said that APEC, and the other vehicles which serve
the interests of global capital, can only survive if their processes and
deliberations, and the assumptions on which they are based are kept in the
dark.  Like Dracula, once exposed to the cold light of day they struggle to
survive scrutiny. The claims made by the freemarket cheerleaders about
globalisation are becoming more and more fragile, especially as the global
economic crisis continues to cause untold human havoc across the planet.
Desperation is setting in among those who have sacrificed their souls to the
altar of trade and investment liberalisation.

If governments are prepared to go to such lengths to ensure that they project
a sanitised image of economic success to APEC Leaders and "the
markets" for a short meeting - how far will they go to attract foreign
investors and create an attractive free trade and investment
regime?