Any guess how anti-capitalism protests planned for Ottawa this week are going to end?
A small group of trouble-prone protesters will provoke police into a ludicrous, and frightening, overreaction --perhaps by breaking windows, or spray-painting buildings; definitely by swearing. This will (once again) depress and shock mainstream liberal opinion. Fewer ordinary citizens will involve themselves in subsequent protests. Right-wing newspaper columnists (are there any other kind these days?) will scold protesters in witheringly abusive terms, letter writers will denounce them for scaring the tourists and positions will harden all round.
And Africa? What about it? Globalization? What does that have to do with anything happening in Ottawa this week --or, for that matter, at the meeting among G8 leaders at Kananaskis? Increasingly little, it seems, as the promise and purpose of the anti-globalization, or social justice, protests are lost in increasingly sterile confrontations and in an agenda too broad and changeable.
This one is particularly surreal: eight leaders of the world's wealthiest countries meeting in a small Rocky Mountain resort, protected from the outside world by 7,000 police and many kilometres of wilderness, deciding how to eradicate poverty in Africa. This ambitious work is expected to take only a few hours, perhaps because the leaders didn't waste time talking to ordinary Africans.
All leaders will sign on to the new plan for Africa -- which involves increasing trade and shunning corrupt, patronage-prone (ahem) African regimes -- and then focus on the more important business of the war on terrorism. In Africa, poverty will, surprisingly, continue (and may even get worse) --this despite Canada's $500-million contribution to a new Africa Fund, which is somewhat more than the $300 million being spent on security at Kananaskis.
As for the protesters, because they can't get within several kilometres of the meeting site -- and have been refused permission to use a city park in nearby Calgary -- some are expected to target certain corporate headquarters, and even private residences, in Ottawa and Calgary. This is hardly a crowd-pleasing tactic; in fact, it will only give police justification for even more draconian measures next time. (Although you would have thought the surface-to-air missiles, rocket launchers and armed soldiers strategically poised in trees in the Alberta forest would be enough.)
No point pursuing tepid arguments about who is to blame for the violence. My experience at last April's Quebec City Summit of the Americas, and covering G20 protests here last fall, suggests that while a minority of protesters are doctrinaire, destructive and caught up in the drama of their own daring, it is the police who are armed and dangerous. It is official intolerance for even peaceful protest, the targeting of articulate activists like Jaggi Singh and Pam Foster (a policy wonk recently denied media credentials to Kananaskis on unspecified security reasons), the readiness of municipal authorities to bar peaceful protesters from public places that is most alarming.
The important question now: what happens next? Do protests get more desperate and violent as police reaction becomes more ruthless? Do the world's leaders buy a time-share in Bermuda, or agree to meet on some easily secured South Pacific atoll and e-mail their communiqués? Many activists are uncomfortably aware that their movement is fracturing, that internal debates over the use of violence -- over what constitutes violence -- are hurting. That is why protests now offer options: Saturday's family friendly march through the Byward Market for one crowd; two snake marches onWednesday for the stone-throwers. It is a tenuous compromise; protesters are no longer one, big, happy, global family.
They risk losing the rest of us in the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist rhetoric, too. Organizers of the local protest, for instance, say they are trying to make links between western capitalism's global crimes and local concerns. Good strategy. Yet two organizers I interviewed were unfamiliar with the name Liban Hussein, a local Somali caught up in the war on terrorism when his innocent money-lending operation was labelled a terrorist funding front by U.S. authorities. He was arrested, without a scrap of evidence, and subsequently released, but is still shaken.
Many protesters, even organizers, don't sound bellicose in casual conversation. They sound concerned, idealistic. We'll see whether this mood survives mounting police repression and provocation from within their own ranks .
Susan Riley writes here Monday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail sriley@thecitizen.southam.ca.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. NoNonsense English offers this material non-commercially for research and educational purposes. I believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, i.e. the media service or newspaper which first published the article online and which is indicated at the top of the article unless otherwise specified.