Fences and Windows (16 page)

I can’t help thinking the reason that this young man has been treated as a terrorist, repeatedly and with no evidence, might have something to do with his brown skin and the fact that his last name is Singh. No wonder his friends say that this supposed threat to the state doesn’t like to walk alone at night.

After collecting all the witness statements, the small crowd begins to leave the community centre to attend a late-night planning meeting. There is a commotion in the doorway, and in an instant the halls are filled with red-faced people, their eyes streaming with tears, frantically looking for running water.

The tear gas has filled the street outside the centre and
has entered the corridors. “This is no longer a Green Zone!
Les flics
[the police]
s’en viennent!”
So much for making it to my laptop at the hotel.

Denis Belanger, who was kind enough to let me use the community centre’s rickety PC to write this column, notices that the message light is flashing on the phone. It turns out that the police have closed in the entire area— no one is getting out.

“Maybe I’ll spend the night,” Belanger said. Maybe I will too.

April 2001

The protests are over, the scapegoating has begun. Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians, is condemned for not calling off “Maude’s Mob.” Activist Jaggi Singh is in jail for allegedly possessing a weapon that he never owned or used—a theatrical catapult that shot stuffed animals over the infamous fence in Quebec City during last weekend’s Summit of the Americas.

It’s not just that the police didn’t get the joke, it’s that they don’t get the new era of political protest, one adapted to our postmodern times. There was no one person, or group, who could call off “their people,” because the tens of thousands who came out to protest against the Free Trade Area of the Americas are part of a movement that doesn’t have a leader, a centre or even an agreed-on name. Yet it exists, undeniably, nonetheless.

What is difficult to convey in media reports is that there weren’t two protests that took place in Quebec City—one a “peaceful” labour march, the other a “violent” anarchist riot—there were hundreds of protests. One was organized by a mother and daughter from Montreal. Another by a van-load of grad students from Edmonton. Another by three
friends from Toronto who aren’t members of anything but their health clubs. Yet another by a couple of waiters from a local café on their lunch break.

Sure, there were well-organized groups in Quebec City: the unions had buses, matching placards and a parade route; the Black Bloc of anarchists had gas masks and radio links. But for days, the streets were also filled with people who simply said to a friend, “Let’s go to Quebec,” and with Quebec City residents who said, “Let’s go outside.” They didn’t join one big protest, they participated in a moment.

How could it be otherwise? The traditional institutions that once organized citizens into neat, structured groups are all in decline: unions, religions, political parties. Yet something propelled tens of thousands of individuals to the streets anyway, an intuition, a gut instinct—perhaps just the profoundly human desire to be part of something larger than oneself.

Did they have their party line together, a detailed dissection of the ins and outs of the FTAA? Not always. But neither can the Quebec protests be dismissed as vacuous political tourism. George W. Bush’s message at the summit was that the mere acts of buying and selling would do our governing for us. “Trade helps spread freedom,” he said.

It was precisely this impoverished and passive vision of democracy that was being rejected on the streets outside. Whatever else the protesters were seeking, all were certainly looking for a taste of direct political participation. The result of these hundreds of miniature protests converging was chaotic, sometimes awful, but frequently inspiring. One
thing is certain: after finally shaking off the mantle of political spectatorship, these people are not about to hand over the reins to a cabal of would-be leaders.

The protesters will become more organized, however, a fact that has more to do with the actions of the police than the directives of Maude Barlow, Jaggi Singh or, for that matter, me. If people wandered and stumbled to Quebec City, profoundly unsure of what it meant to be part of a political movement, something united us once we arrived: mass arrests, rubber bullets and, most of all, a thick white blanket of gas.

Despite the government line of praising “good” protesters while condemning “bad” ones, treatment of everyone on the streets of Quebec City was crude, cowardly and indiscriminate. The security forces used the actions of a few rock throwers as a camera-friendly justification to do what they had been trying to do from the start: clear the city of thousands of lawful protesters because it was more convenient that way.

Once they got their “provocation,” they filled entire neighbourhoods with tear gas, a substance that by definition does not discriminate, is indifferent to perimeters, protest tactics or politics. The toxic fumes seeped into houses, forcing families to breathe through masks in their living rooms. Frustrated that the wind was against them, the police sprayed some more. People giving the peace sign to the police were gassed. People handing out food were gassed. I met a fifty-year-old woman from Ottawa who told me cheerfully, “I went out to buy a sandwich and was gassed
twice.” People having a party under a bridge were gassed. People protesting against their friends’ arrests were gassed. The first-aid clinic treating people who had been gassed was gassed.

Tear gas was supposed to break down the protesters, but it had the opposite effect: it enraged and radicalized them, enough to cheer for members of the Black Bloc anarchist contingent who dared to throw back the canisters. Gas may be light and atomized enough to ride on air, but I suspect the coming months will show that it also has powerful bonding properties.

[
The Ligue des Droits (Human Rights League) of Quebec eventually issued a report about police violence at the summit. The report documented several incidents that had not been reported, including that police used a laser-guided scope to fire a plastic bullet into the genitals of one protester. A man already lying on the ground was shocked with a police stun gun, and a stilt-walker dressed as the Statue of Liberty was taken out at the knees by a water cannon as she approached the fence. The same report detailed appalling mistreatment of those arrested. Some protesters were kept handcuffed in police buses for eight hours in heavily gassed areas before being taken to jail. Once there, many were strip-searched and hosed down with cold water (“decontamination” for the gas). And despite the fact that authorities cleared the local prison before the protests (at a cost of $5 million), many of the arrested were held four or five to a single-person cell.]

August 2001

On July 20, 2001, at the G8 meeting in Genoa, the Italian police shot a twenty-three-year-old protester, Carlo Giuliani, at close range in the head and backed over his body in a jeep. This is an excerpt from a speech given in Reggio Emilia, Italy, one month later at the Festival dell’Unità
.

I have been covering this wave of protest for five years. And I have watched with horror as the police have moved from pepper spray to mass tear gas; from tear gas to rubber bullets; rubber bullets to live ammunition. Just this summer, we have seen an escalation from severe injuries of protesters in Gothenburg, Sweden, to, in Genoa, a protester shot dead, then backed over by a police jeep. Nearby, activists sleeping in a school were woken and beaten bloody, their teeth scattered on the ground.

How did this happen so quickly? I have to conclude, with much regret, that it happened because we let it happen, and by “we” I mean all the good left liberals in media, academia and the arts who tell themselves they believe in civil liberties. In Canada, when we first started seeing police pepper-spray and strip-search young activists a few years
ago, there was a public outcry. It was front-page news. We asked questions and demanded answers, accountability from the police. People said, those are our kids, idealists, future leaders. But you rarely hear those sorts of sentiments expressed in the face of police violence against protesters these days. The lack of investigation by journalists, the lack of outrage from left parties, from academics, from NGOs that exist to protect freedom of expression, has been scandalous.

Young activists have faced enormous public scrutiny for their actions; their motivations and their tactics have all been questioned. If the police had faced one-tenth of the scrutiny that this movement has, maybe the brutality that we saw last month in Genoa wouldn’t have happened. I say this because the last time I was in Italy was in June, more than a month before the protests. At that time, it was already clear that the police were running out of control, getting their excuses ready for a major civil liberties crackdown and setting the stage for extreme violence. Before a single activist had taken to the streets, a pre-emptive state of emergency had been essentially declared: airports were closed and much of the city was cordoned off. Yet when I was last in Italy, all the public discussions focused not on these violations of civil liberties but on the alleged threat posed by activists.

Police brutality feeds off public indifference, slipping into social crevices that we have long ignored.
Newsweek
described Carlo Giuliani’s death as the movement’s “first blood.” But that conveniently erases the blood that is so often spilled when protests against corporate power take place in
poor countries, or impoverished parts of rich countries, when those resisting are not white.

Two weeks before the G8 came to Genoa, three students were killed in Papua New Guinea protesting a World Bank privatization scheme. It barely made the news, yet it was the very same issue that has brought thousands to the streets during so-called anti-globalization protests.

It is not a coincidence that police violence always thrives in marginalized communities, whether the guns are pointed at Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico, or at indigenous communities in peaceful Canada, when First Nations activists decide to use direct action to defend their land.

The police take their cue from us: when we walk away, they walk in. The real ammunition is not rubber bullets and tear gas. It is our silence.

September 5, 2001

Part of the tourist ritual of traipsing through Italy in August is marvelling at how the locals have mastered the art of living—and then complaining bitterly about how everything is closed.

“So civilized,” you hear North Americans remarking over four-course lunches. “Now somebody open up that store and sell me some Pradas!” This year, August in Italy was a little different. Many of the southern beach towns where Italians hide from tourists were half-empty, and the cities never paused. When I arrived two weeks ago, journalists, politicians and activists all reported that it was the first summer of their lives when they didn’t take a single day off.

How could they? First there was Genoa, then After Genoa.

The fallout from protests against the G8 in July is redrawing the country’s political landscape—and everybody wants a chance to shape the results. Newspapers are breaking circulation records. Meetings—anything having to do with politics—are bursting at the seams. In Naples, I went to an activist planning session about an upcoming NATO summit; more than seven hundred people crammed into a sweltering classroom to argue about “the movement’s strategy
After Genoa.” Two days later, near Bologna, a conference about politics After Genoa drew two thousand; they stayed until 11
P.M
.

The stakes in this period are high. Were the 200,000 (some say 300,000) people on the streets an unstoppable force that will eventually unseat Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi? Or will Genoa be the beginning of a long silence, a time when citizens equate mass gatherings with terrifying violence?

In the first weeks after the summit, attention was focused squarely on the brutality of the Italian police: the killing of young Carlo Giuliani, reports of torture in the prisons, the bloody midnight raid on the school where activists slept.

But Berlusconi, whose training is in advertising, is not about to relinquish the meaning of Genoa that easily. In recent weeks, he has been furiously recasting himself as “a good father,” determined to save his family from imminent danger. Lacking a real threat, he has manufactured one—an obscure United Nations conference on hunger, scheduled for Rome from November 5 to November 9, 2001. To much media fanfare, Berlusconi has announced that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) meeting will not be held in “sacred Rome” because “I don’t want to see our cities smashed and burnt.” Instead, it will be held somewhere remote (much like Canada’s plans to hold the next G8 meeting in secluded Kananaskis, Alberta).

This is shadow boxing at its best. No one had planned to disrupt the FAO meeting. The event would have attracted some minor protest, mostly from critics of genetically
modified crops. Some hoped the meeting would be an opportunity to debate the root causes of hunger, just like the UN Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa, has stepped up the debate about slavery reparations.

Jacques Diouf, director of FAO, seems to be relishing the unexpected attention. After all, despite being saddled with the crushing mandate of cutting world hunger in half, the FAO attracts almost no outside interest—from politicians or protesters. The organization’s biggest problem is that it is so uncontroversial it’s practically invisible.

“For all these arguments about change of venue, I would like to say I am very grateful,” Diouf told reporters last week. “Now people in every country know that there will be a summit to talk about the problems of hunger.”
[In the end, the meeting was delayed until June 2002. It took place in Rome without incident.]