Comment by Julia Perkins
The protests to stop Aidex, held from November 23-28, achieved a lot of publicity and some important successes. Media coverage of the protests and preparations helped to persuade a number of large companies not to participate and to educate Australians on issues such as the link between the arms trade and Third World repression.
However, the media coverage was not always useful or accurate. At times, reports missed the point completely and ended up being very misleading. The clashes between police and protesters became more of a focus than the opposition to Aidex.
Outraged claims of demonstrator-invoked violence and demonstrator brutality screamed out from the pages of more than one newspaper. "Peaceful protesters?", the press sarcastically asked, while the police were praised for their "efficient" and "successful" handling of "professional protesters".
It is important that the alternative media respond to such blatant misrepresentation, and also provide discussion of tactics and why some are more effective than others.
In Australia, everyone has the right to demonstrate and the right to express opinions challenging the status quo. So the most important and immediate political questions are: how do we use this right in the most effective way, and to what purpose?
A very small number of demonstrators involved in the Aidex protest wanted to employ, for want of a better term, confrontationist tactics. These proved fruitless. Directly antagonising the police, verbally and/or physically, simply because of who they are, only gives them licence to fight back, and the police were eager to grab such licence. What's more, their fight-back usually hurts a lot more than anything the confrontationists can do to them.
At the other extreme, a number of demonstrators wished to practise "non-violent" action which, played by their rules, would be better termed "pacifism". These rules included total non-provocation to the point of banning language such as "march" and "fight".
The irony here is that we wanted to be provocative. Being present at the Aidex site was in itself provocative. The very aims of the demonstration were to provoke the media into publicising the Aidex fiasco and our arguments against it. We wanted to be publicly provocative, without violence.
The Aidex protests seemed to alternate between these two extremes, with the confrontationists at times blocking democratic decision-making processes by relentlessly interrupting other speakers, speaking unnecessarily loudly to make a point, and even behaving like a group of pied pipers straight out of military school, attempting to lead the group off to "action" before decisions had been voted on.
At times also, democracy did rule and the views of the majority were y determined mass action should characterise protests such as those at Aidex. The key was not to be so peaceful that we couldn't even attempt to blockade the road on the one hand, and at the same time not to direct all our anger at the police presence, at the risk of forgetting the major issue at hand, Aidex itself.
Mass actions, in which large numbers of demonstrators blockade a road, refuse to move and have to be literally carried away, and may even be arrested, are an effective, non-violent means of protest. This is how the successful protests of 1989 in the NSW south-east forests operated in the main.
However, these are not the only possible types of actions. At Aidex the trouble was, of course, the police. They stopped mass arrests after November 25 because these were clogging up the courts and the magistrates weren't giving the judgments they wanted. The police had to change their tactics dramatically if they were going to stop the protests, so they resorted to blatant violence.
I was threatened with a broken wrist if I did not remove myself from one blockade, and there were many more such incidents. In such situations, when the context changes and continually attempting to stage one type of action becomes an immediate cause for police violence, tactics must change. Effective publicity can be gained through a variety of means: eye-catching and vocal pickets along the sidelines, rallies both at the Aidex site and in busy centres in town, street theatre, song, chants: the possibilities are limited only by the imaginations of those involved.
The police brutality at Aidex '91 was the worst I have ever experienced. The claims of protester-provoked violence are untrue. We wished to stop Aidex '91 and draw attention to links between first world arms sales and violent repression in Third World countries. We wished to express our belief in peaceful negotiation, justice, equality, freedom of speech and the right to self-determination. These are not naive ideals but legitimate aspirations which all peoples must have the right to fight for in all appropriate ways.