Meander

A few of the news stories that have caught my interest in recent days involve violence by uniformed representatives of our society.  There are some people who will beat others given the chance, and some of these people manage to get a job where they wear a uniform. That’s inevitable, but what shouldn’t be inevitable is that the people who lead uniformed service accept and protect these people.

In East Vancouver, police beat a man after being called to a domestic dispute. After they’d broken fractured bones around his eyes and handcuffed him, they realized that they were at the wrong residence. Not only is that very bad luck for the guy with the fractured bones, but really, if they had been at the right address and beaten up someone there would that have been any better?

“They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” That’s what Rear Admiral Harris, in charge at Guantanamo Bay, after three prisoners supposedly hung themselves. Well, it appears that the warfare was indeed asymmetrical, but not against the U.S. Four American soldiers have come forward to say that they were on guard duty in Guantanamo Bay the night that three prisoners supposedly committed suicide, and contrary to the official report, they saw no one, alive or dead, pass between the prisoner’s cellblock and the camp infirmary where the bodies ended up. What they did see earlier in the evening was a government van usually used for transporting prisoners move between the cell block and a separate installation widely believed to be used for torture. The van returned several hours later and stopped at the infirmary. Since the Obama government has taken office, these guards have been cooperating with federal authorities in investigating what really happened that night, but federal investigators have declined to continue the investigation.

And ABC is reporting that the scopes on U.S. military sniper rifles are being stamped with New Testament references by the manufacturer.  That’s not strictly a beating, but it sure breaks the rules.

NATO, including Canada, has been in Afghanistan for seven years. What have the results been?

• 133 Canadian soldiers killed. 1513 NATO troops killed. People killed 20,119. Two UK soldiers were killed on Saturday.
• Afghanistan’s army is not becoming the guardian of safety and freedom that it has been trumpeted as.
• Afghanistan’s election scamming president is pointing out, correctly, that military force is not going to bring peace to Afghanistan.
• And commentators are still pretending that we should waste the lives of our soldiers because we’ve already wasted the lives of so many soldiers and we can’t admit that it was wrong.

This summer saw at least two occupations in southern Ontario, one at proposed site of the Hanlon Creek Business Park in Guelph. The other at a proposed garbage dump in Simcoe County called site 41. Both sites have won a temporary development reprieve. I’ve been surprised at how little media coverage has happened about the two occupations, so I hope you’ll take a moment to read a bit more about what’s been happening.

The occupations have both been lead by First Nations groups, and have evolved into partnerships with other community members. In Guelph, citizens opposing community sprawl joined the occupation. In Simcoe County, farmers from surrounding farms supported the native people.

The lands are environmentally sensitive. In Simcoe County, the site contains a tributary of the Speed and then Grand rivers. Leaching chemicals from the dumpsite would flow down into these rivers. In Guelph, the land is home to endangered Jefferson salamanders and a tree that is estimated to be over 500 years old. The tree is probably older than European knowledge of the Americas.

Reading about these lands has got me wondering, what would cause you to occupy land slated for development? Are you categorically against this type of action? Would you do it to protect your drinking water? What about an old growth forest? Or maybe for some other reason?

When Canadian Tamils recently occupied the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto, I held my breath. Not because I was worried about what they might do, but because I was worried about what the police might do. Canadian police have occasionally used more force than necessary to deal with protestors. In the end, the situation on the Gardiner was handled well by the police. In Britain, however, there is reason for pessimism about how police plan to treat future protests of an environmental nature, as George Monbiot discusses in this op-ed.

With so much focus on what’s happening in Ottawa, it’s easy to miss out on the beautiful story that has happened in Thailand.

Protesters there had been occupying Bangkok’s two main airports for several weeks, demanding the ouster of the government on the basis of electoral fraud. Yesterday a court ruled against the government officials, including the Prime Minister, and banned them from political office for five years. As soon as the Prime Minister assented to the judgement, the protesters turned the airport over to its management and left.

This case is a great example for students of non-violent action. The protesters began six months ago with street protest, then escalated the conflict in August by occupying the Prime Minister’s office. Last week they occupied the airports. The fine line that the leaders of people-power movements must walk is between engaging as many people as possible in escalating the conflict so that it becomes a problem for the opponent and avoiding unsustainable levels of violence against supporters. It involves a careful pushing back of the limits of acceptable dissent. The leadership of the Thai movement has done an excellent job of walking this line, first denying popular legitimacy, then political office and then economic functioning to their opponents, while at the same time maintaining a peaceful situation.

Knowing when to back down is key. The airport occupation has been ended despite the MPs of the outlawed governing party in Thailand forming a new party that will likely maintain their majority in parliament. This cements the good will that the people’s movement has created with the public while demonstrating to their opponents that there is room for a change in behaviour. This stands in contrast to the August 2007 non-violent movement in Burma. The protests there were largely successful for several days, following which the government began signaling that a violent crack-down would begin if protests were not curtailed. Rather than de-escalating the protests or shifting to forms of protest more difficult to attack, the movement continued street demonstrations. The brutal crack-down that followed destroyed the movement and led to the imprisonment and torture of many of its leaders. If the movement had ended street protests and instead moved to a home based protest, such as the banging of pots and pans during the night or extinguishing all lights, they could have continued their momentum without putting the movement at risk, and returned to street protests later.

Like the Civil Rights movement in the U.S., Solidarity in Poland, Otpor! in Serbia and many others, the Thai movement was able to negotiate the slim trail between escalation and violence. It is unfortunate that the media is not recognizing it with the “non-violent” label, as that recognition often sows the seeds for people in other countries to understand and organize non-violent people’s movements of their own.