Is Australia becoming a more overtly repressive society? There are a number of serious developments, writes VAL PLUMWOOD, which indicate that this is happening.
Recent figures show a shocking 80% rise in Aboriginal prisoners in custody in NSW plus 24 more deaths since the release of the Black Deaths in Custody Report two years ago.
In the last few months there have been violent and punitive attacks on demonstrators by police at the Bush and Aidex demonstrations. At Aidex there were a number of serious human rights violations, including a case of torture by police, follow-
up police harassment and the use of police and Social Security computer matching to cut politically active unemployed off benefits.
In Sydney there have been major incidents of censorship.
Events over the last few years include the Gundy and Brennan shootings, police killings in Victoria, the Tim Anderson frame-up and the trial of the Brewarrina 17, as well as numerous incidents of violence by police against marginalised groups such as homeless youth and Aboriginal communities.
What motivates such an increase in repressiveness and what can we do about it?
Some of the blame lies with a rising and politically unchecked culture of police violence and routine brutality, which has always been directed against powerless groups such as Aboriginal people and young people. But there is reason to think this may now be focussing also against new targets selected to accord with national and international political changes.
Relative newcomers among the targets are the political demonstrators from the radical green and peace movements who came into conflict with the Australian Federal Police at the Stop Aidex demonstrations in Canberra in late November.
The repression of the radical parts of these movements in the US has been a priority of the FBI, which has spent some $2 million to collect evidence against the radical green group Earth First!. Recent articles in the Humanist by Chip Berlet and in Z magazine by Sara Diamond give details of police, legal and extra-legal harassment of environmentalists across the US. As the New World Order realigns its priorities and redefines its enemies, the radical parts of the green and peace movements find themselves defined as the new subversives.
The Stop Aidex Campaign, like the Gulf War debut of the post-Cold War peace movement, exposed the connections between the direction of resources into export arms production and growing domestic and international repression, inequality and environmental destruction.
The new peace movement perceives different strategies and different points of intervention, and, in contrast to the Cold War peace movement, has a strong base among the marginalised and the young. It critiques the character of market society more thoroughly than the old movement, which often focussed on the nuclear menace in a way which failed to challenge other aspects of society.
Police behaviour at the Aidex demonstrations, plus follow-up Federal Police statements attempting to criminalise protesters and the targeting of people for various kinds of harassment, certainly make it plausible that the same agenda of repression as in the US has arrived on our shores.
Affidavits forwarded to the Human Rights Commission reveal a systematic pattern of unnecessary and extreme violence towards demonstrators which left more than 100 demonstrators injured, many seriously enough to require hospital attention. People were punched, kicked, jumped upon, thrown with force or dropped onto concrete and barbed wire. Their wrists, arms and necks were twisted, resulting in sprains, broken bones and spinal injuries. They were assaulted and ridden into at speed by Aidex workers and others in cars and trucks and by police on motorbikes, and attacked by police dogs. One paraplegic man was deliberately tipped out of a wheelchair by police and injured. People who tried to assist him were arrested.
In nearly all cases, police did not ask demonstrators to move; they were simply set upon. So extreme was the violence of some police that more moderate police were seen trying to restrain them.
On November 24 Sean Kenan, an active Canberra peace protester, child-care worker and street musician, noticed police watching him at Aidex. On November 27 he was grabbed by a group of six police while other protesters were busy elsewhere, taken to the central police station and tortured over a period of five hours.
The Age reports that, according to Sean, "an officer came from behind and punched him in the jaw". While he was being held down, "one officer put one hand over his mouth while another pinched his nostrils so that he could not breathe". While he was in spasms, another officer put his boot into his stomach and pushed down, causing great pain. As they let Sean draw breath, they poured a bucket of water over him and down his throat so that he choked.
This treatment was repeated, while police threatened to kill him. He was stripped, humiliated, violently abused, threatened with rape and kept wet and naked in a cold cell. In later torture, three different men came into the cell and one of them pressed Sean's eyeballs into his head while others held him down, and a sharp object was pressed into the soles of his feet. These operations caused "excruciating pain", according to Sean. Finally he was taken to hospital and eventually released. The case is being investigated by Amnesty and the Human Rights Commission.
There is evidence that Sean Kenan was targeted prior to Aidex for his street politics and organising activities among street people.
* The police body in charge of coordinating the police violence at Aidex and the release of police intelligence information to the DSS, and the group involved in the torture of Sean Kenan, were the Australian Federal Police.
In an article published in the Canberra Times, AFP national secretary Jeff Brown describes demonstrators in abusive terminology reminiscent of that of the Chinese leaders about the victims of Tienanmen Square: "criminals", "marauding gangs", "the lunatic fringe", "ratbags", "professional demonstrators", "Trotskyists", "anarchists", "infiltrators", "hooligans, "hardliners", "hoons", "stirrers", "rabble" and "terrorists". Their political activity is described in terms of military-style conspiracy, and much is made of the "sinister" reappearance of some peace demonstrators at related demonstrations.
Police felt able to make strong judgments about who was a useful member of society. Brown felt that those present lacked a "substantial occupation", and included many doubtful characters, people such as "artists", "musicians", "dropouts", people with "alternative lifestyles" and — God forbid — people on pension benefits!
The AFP went to some lengths to paint demonstrators' civil disobedience as violence, attempting discredit them by identifying the leading organisation as the International Socialists (who were actually about 0.2% of the demonstrators and were not part of the main organising group), and inventing tales of demonstrators smearing themselves with faeces to prevent arrest (actually it was organic sunburn cream).
Although experienced activists have pointed to problems in the verbal abuse of police by some demonstrators and lack of prior non-violent training, there is no evidence of demonstrator violence.
The abusiveness may have reflected inexperience (many demonstrators were very young) and reaction to police mistreatment of other protesters. It also perhaps reflected the experiences of the marginalised people who attended the action, and their anger at the inhuman priorities of market society. In some cases it may have been the work of people, including infiltrators, who wanted to disrupt the civil disobedience approach.
Whatever the reasons, it certainly played into the hands of the AFP. According to Sara Diamond, the strategy being used to try to destroy the radical greens in the US is to cast the radical elements as "violent" so that they can be repressed, then push the more conservative parts to the right (which is where the more bureaucratic and image-obsessed parts of the movement are headed anyway). In these circumstances, it seems crucial that similar actions in the future thoroughly discuss and try to agree in advance on well-publicised anti-violent strategies, and have at least a solid core of people who are well trained and in affinity groups.
"Non-violence" does not have a simple and fixed meaning, but has to be seen as a shifting boundary, a site of contest which requires permanent contextual renegotiation. It represents means which are to be ruled out of consideration in a particular context as inappropriate to the chosen ends, where ends constrain means and vice versa. Clearly we must recognise diversity of opinion, but it is quite valid for alliances for actions to be negotiated on the basis of broad agreements about appropriate means, and for the peace movement to refuse to act with groups which advocate violent or unacceptable means. The place to form such alliances is in advance of an action, not in the middle of it.
There appear to be converging reasons for the AFP attempt to "get" the Aidex protesters. Police violence at Aidex expressed the widespread and worsening police culture of violence: the torture of Sean Kenan was a more extended and elaborate version of the treatment of other marginalised groups such as Aboriginal people and homeless youth.
How far will such a culture go if it is allowed to grow unchecked? Perhaps all the way to death squads. The contempt the police openly expressed for "aliens", "tribals" and "dropouts" (a specialty was tearing out their ear and nose rings during arrests) was tied to their disdain for the rapidly growing underclass in Australia. As society becomes more unequal, mobilisation of police against this underclass is likely to appear more frequently.
But there is clearly also a larger AFP agenda of criminalisation of radicals and activists. The Federal Police are
heavily engaged in surveillance (especially of politicals) and other Big Brother activities, and are the obvious body to absorb the international agenda of the New World Order and the new definition of subversion and translate them into action at the local level.
As well, repression may be implicit in Australia's economic course, through both growing inequality and internationalisation of the economy. Malaysia and Indonesia have stressed that they will not trade with us if there is continued media and citizen criticism of them. The Australian government has ceded key aspects of independence as part of its economic strategy, and by acceding to Indonesian and Malaysian demands to stop human rights criticism. Is repression of internal dissent to be our price for entry to the new Asian co-prosperity sphere?
The attempted criminalisation of the new peace movement is also a tribute to the importance of its cause and the courage and effectiveness with which it has problematised the New World Order and the priorities of economic rationalism, which insists that any market activity, no matter how anti-social, is acceptable.
The Stop Aidex Campaign revealed efforts to stop the international arms trade as an exciting and potentially unifying focus for a number of movements, including a movement of the underclass of market society, as well as an international focus for oppressed peoples. It is hard to doubt the importance of this cause in the framework of the New World Order. As historian Benedict Anderson points out, there is an ominous convergence of nationalist-inspired militarisation, the growth of the international arms market and the destructive power of weapons systems.
The Cold War, despite its risks and the horrors of war at the margins of the great power empires, kept the lid on actual fighting to an extent.
We may be about to enter a period of war- and market-driven disorder unprecedented in human history, coinciding with a growing environmental crisis. Given the immense destructive power of modern weapons, and their use to prop up inequality, the struggle for the earth must also be a struggle against the war machine. If we are somehow to find a way towards a livable world, we must hear the voices of the Aidex peace protesters as the voices of the future.
[Val Plumwood, crocodile lady, is a greenie peacenik stirrer who dresses like Jimi Hendrix, lives in the bush and sleeps with a wombat. She teaches environmental philosophy and feminist philosophy at Sydney University Department of General Philosophy.]
*. Sean was arrested during a Gulf War protest held outside the Lodge for saying "fucking pathetic", and
later acquitted of a charge of offensive behaviour. His case involved challenging police accounts of his remarks, and his acquittal clearly did not please the police, whose demeanour in court was threatening. Sean also formed the Canberra Samba Band which was continually active at demonstrations and rallies, and which provided a political voice for marginalised people. Police were overheard targeting him at a rally prior to Aidex.