The Coming Storm

What we are seeing already from police and the Integrated Security Unit (ISU) as the G20 meetings in Toronto draw closer, is the widespread manipulation of public sentiment to the effect that protesters are ‘dangerous’, ‘criminal’, and hell-bent on violence and destruction -- the fabrication of a pre-justification for the deployment of future violence by the state.

Effectively using terror to trounce our right to democratic protest and free speech, members of the ISU, in connection with CSIS agents, have repeatedly harassed non-violent activists in a manner more commonly seen in countries with a secret police, public denunciations, and disappearances. The police have publicly advertised the purchase of new weapons to use against protesters, including an LRAD system, new riot gear, and hundreds of new cameras; they have paraded in front of the media in a massively-aggressive show of force; and they have leaked internal communications requesting the services of area doctors and the existence of a converted factory lot that will serve as a makeshift concentration camp for arrested demonstrators. For the police, the summits represent a massive public windfall of both financial and social capital with which to purchase new toys and to openly bend the law.

The police are effectively trying to deter less-committed, less-radical, and first-time activists from ever showing up while simultaneously antagonizing more radical elements by picking a fight they already know they can win. The police and the media are happy to go out of their way to stress how a majority of the 1.2 billion dollars being spent on security for the summits is clearly not to protect a bunch of VIPs from terrorists (who may crash their fancy dinner parties), but rather simply to protect those VIPs from having their precious schmoozing interrupted by informed and angry citizens wishing to express themselves freely outside of the meetings.

Even 9 years ago, when the G8 met in Genoa, Italy, in 2001, putting large fences around international gatherings to create "red zones" was all the rage. It was the height of the anti-globalization movement, pre-9/11, and over 300,000 demonstrators turned out to democratically voice their grievances.

Predictably, the police also turned out in force, viciously attacking and injuring more than 400 unarmed civilians (caught in the wrong place at the wrong time), journalists, and activists with a combination of chemical weapons and less-lethal projectiles. Mass arrests were not yet common police practice, but those 300 or so arrested were subject to verbal intimidation, beatings, and the threat of rape. Genoa also marked the first recorded death of a protestor at a demonstration in the Western world (since the movement gained momentum in Seattle in 1999), when Carlo Giuliani was shot in the head and run-over, twice, by a member of Italy’s military police, the Carabinieri.

Heartbreak in Haiti

Let there be no mistake -- the earthquake which struck Haiti this week is only partially responsible for Port-au-Prince’s massive devastation and the sickening loss of life.

The over-crowded, dangerously-constructed capital, lacking in infrastructure even before the quake, and illustrated poorly by sterile poverty statistics, meant that this natural disaster, like countless hurricanes before it, killed far more than it would have elsewhere.

Haiti has suffered under colonialism and continued to suffer under American occupation early last century. As recently as 2004, it witnessed a US-backed coup which killed thousands and disposed of a democratically-elected and popular president. Since then, the de facto UN-run administration which has governed the country has promoted a murderous neoliberal agenda that has simultaneously ruined the Haitian economy while ensuring, effectively at gunpoint, cheap sweatshop labour for Canadian and American multinationals.

And even more of those guns are on the way. Although the US, Canada, and other world powers have been quick to promise aid and have mobilized their military forces in front of the world’s cameras, the ugly truth is that our politicians, and by extension, all of us, are also responsible for a majority of the deaths in Haiti. It has been our bullets and our policies that have driven poor farmers into cities without infrastructure, building code regulations, security, or jobs. We have made Haitians some of the most vulnerable people on the planet, and they have paid a dramatic price.

The only thing Haiti needs more than disaster relief and more foreign soldiers is the autonomy, democracy, and self-determination long denied to it, and massive reparations for the grievous wrongs inflicted upon it in order to truly begin to rebuild.