BY SHUA GARFIELD
One prominent feature of Hobart's October 18 student walkout against Bush's war was the presence of two police officers with a video camera in a carpark 50 metres away from the anti-war rally. Despite the fact that it was an entirely peaceful protest attended by only 20 people, police filmed the entire event.
Hobart's main daily newspaper, the Murdoch-owned Mercury gave the protest and the police surveillance of it a front-page report the next day.
The report of the police spying prompted many to write letters of denunciation of the police's actions to the Mercury. It also prompted responses from the Victorian Council of Civil Liberties (VCCL) and Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre legal manager Michael Mansell, who both issued press releases condemning the police action.
Greg Connellan of the VCCL was quoted in the October 20 Mercury as stating: "In a democracy, you've got to wonder on what possible basis it could be justified. If someone's got a notion that videotaping the demonstrators would be a way of detecting people who are somehow involved with terrorism, well that would be almost too bizarre to be valid." Mansell described the police's actions as an "abuse of authority amounting to political intimidation".
In the same edition, the Mercury's lead editorial also criticised the surveillance, accusing Tasmania Police of being "caught in a time warp", and suffering from an absurd paranoia more typical of the secret police agencies during the Cold War. The editorial stated: "Let us hope the videotaping does not signal the return to the bad old days when files were opened on thousands of ordinary people who just happened to oppose the Vietnam War."
In response to criticisms, Tasmania Police deputy commissioner Luppo Prins responded with the weak excuse that in "the present environment we can not discount the possibility of violence or criminal activity during protest action".
This is not the first time this year that police have carried out surveillance of left-wing activists in Hobart. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Hobart Resistance Centre was visited by a federal police officer seeking information on plans for anti-war activities in Hobart.
In late April, police informers pretending to be interested activists attended meetings of the M1 Alliance and the socialist youth organisation, Resistance. This was despite the M1 Alliance being totally open to everyone, including the police, about plans for a peaceful May Day blockade of the stock exchange. Similarly, Resistance, in preparation for the student walkout on October 18 was completely open with police about plans for the action.
Considering Resistance's record of openness and peaceful political activity, Prins' justification that police believed there was a threat of violence is laughable. It also reflects an attempt to associate the anti-war movement and leftist activists with violent terrorists. As progressive Hobart lawyer Roland Browne stated in a press release condemning the police surveillance: "The implication is that questioning the government's decision to go to war amounts to being a threat to national security."
But if police surveillance is not about catching perpetrators of violent acts, than why did the police film the October 18 action, and infiltrate M1 Alliance and Resistance in April?
In his statement equating the filming to political intimidation, Michael Mansell identifies one possible purpose of surveillance — to make activists feel that they are constantly being watched in the hope that this will lead them to retreat from organising public protest actions.
Another motive is to gather information on those seen to be movement leaders, or whose activism goes against the interests of the government or the corporate ruling class. Countless governments have used files collected this way to harass, frame-up, intimidate, blackmail, imprison and murder progressive activists.
While in the present political climate, the police are not likely to attempt to "disappear" people for holding small demonstrations or an activist collective meeting, history is littered with cases of repressive regimes using intelligence gathered by previous, less repressive regimes to persecute opposition activists.
In their attempts to equate anti-war activism with support for terrorism, the US and Australian governments and their police forces are seeking to justify a generalised increase in surveillance of not only suspected terrorists, but anyone who is opposed to government policy. This is part of a more general drive to restrict civil liberties that accompanies any imperialist war. It is the duty of progressive activists to see that this anti-freedom drive fails.
[Shua Garfield is a member of Resistance.]