BY EVA CHENG
Thousands of progressive and environmental activists from across North America are expected to converge on Quebec City, Canada, from April 16 to declare their rejection of the US-led push to extend the notorious pro-business North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to the whole of South and Central America and the Caribbean.
The Americas' dominant imperialist powers, the United States and Canada, will seek to use the April 20-22 Summit of the Americas (SoA) to rope in 32 other countries — every nation in the region except Cuba.
They hope to get these countries to agree on the basic framework of "NAFTA Mark II" — the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Once the basics are agreed, the details will be filled in later, in time for the new trade regime's scheduled 2005 launch.
Should US and Canadian negotiators succeed in Quebec City, their victims wouldn't just be US and Canadian workers, the SoA's Third World members and the environment, as long a list of victims as that is.
Any progress in pushing the FTAA along will also be a boost to rich countries' ongoing attempts to launch a "Millennium Round" of trade negotiations under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which is seeking to enforce on a global scale a pro-business, pro-First World regime not materially different from NAFTA.
The WTO's November 1999 attempt to launch such a round in Seattle was scuttled by spectacular mass protests and resistance from Third World governments, and now the United States and Europe are desperate to get it up and running at the WTO's planned Qatar conference in November.
Criminalisation of political dissent
Fully appreciating the importance of the Quebec gathering, activists from across the continents have been busting their guts for months planning effective mass actions against the Quebec summit and the whole FTAA process.
Similarly conscious of the stakes involved, Canadian police are threatening to outshine their notorious Seattle counterparts in their brutality towards the protesters.
For months, they've been announcing one outrageous measure after another, with the clear intention of intimidating would-be protesters. First, they announced construction of a 4-metre metal fence around the summit site, covering a 4.5 square kilometre area, in order to keep the protesters well away from their target of protest. Then they revealed they were emptying a local prison to make space for all those they plan to arrest.
More recently, the authorities in Quebec City and the nearby suburb of Sainte-Foy, where the main airport is, have passed a by-law to forbid anyone without a "valid excuse" from having "in his or her possession any object or device likely to be used to disturb or to harm a person or likely to be used to damage property".
Though that law didn't spell out what those objects might be, there is little chance that, say, drums and whistles would be approved, let alone things like placards, banners, loudhailers and sound systems — the basic gear of democratic protest. Even the acceptability of mobile phones is seriously in doubt.
More ridiculously, the by-law banned anyone in a crowd, without a "valid excuse", "wearing or having in his or her possession a mask, hood or any other object of a similar nature which may be used to cover one's face in whole or in part".
This scarf/mask ban provoked a major public outcry, forcing Sainte-Foy to scrap it in March. But the ban on "suspicious" objects remains, while Quebec City has kept the full repressive package intact.
The Canadian state machine isn't going to wait for the SoA summit to use this or other arsenals of repressive laws. On March 31, for example, US civil rights activist George Lakey was detained for four hours at Ottawa airport, had his bags turned inside out and some of his notes photocopied while trying to get into Canada to conduct a teach-in for anti-FTAA protesters. He was refused entry.
An immigration spokesperson had earlier declared that the border will be on high alert, warning that activists from other countries should expect close questioning and criminal background checks. "If we have reason to think you are coming to riot or cause violence, you will be turned away", immigration spokesperson Richard Saint-Louis told Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail on March 11.
The Canadian government began such measures as early as January 27, when it denied entry to 10 US activists on the way to a protest strategy meeting in Quebec City. Their van was searched, all their documents were photocopied and a woman member was threatened with strip search.
Repression hasn't been limited to the borders. On February 4, three activists were arrested while trying to hand out anti-FTAA flyers in downtown Quebec City. Although Quebec City mayor Jean-Paul L'Allier quickly apologised, saying it was a "mistake", other activists have reported similar harassment.
To deprive protesters of even shelter, Canadian police announced in February that they had rented out all vacant apartments and houses within the fenced area as well as having reserved all hotel rooms within 88 kilometres of the summit venue.
Several non-government organisations reported that their hotel reservations, some made as early as last April, were cancelled against their will.
Protest organisers are frantically looking for halls and gymnasiums as a substitute and have launched a mass "Adopt a Protester" appeal in a bid to billet the protesters.
These most direct "security" measures alone will cost the Canadian taxpayers C$70 million. The government also plans to compensate businesses in the "security zone" for their loss of business, and a few schools will be closed during the "war period".
In contrast to the treatment meted out to activists, business top guns have been lured by the Canadian government with offers of access to summit leaders. The price for delivering a welcome address was C$500,000, for example, and there were also offers to sponsor lunches, coffee breaks and the like.
The activists aren't waiting until the summit to swing into action, targetting first the scandalous secrecy of the negotiation process. None of the negotiating countries have released to their citizens the draft documents to which they are about to commit, even though they could devastate jobs, lives and ecologies.
Canadian activists demanded months ago that their government release the draft text for public scrutiny not later than March 30. They promised a protest action if their demands weren't met, which they weren't.
Therefore, on April 2, more than 500 activists protested outside the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in Ottawa. Eighty-seven were arrested but were later released.
The next day in Toronto 350 protesters demonstrated against the SoA finance ministers' meeting there — and were surrounded by at least 700 police, several layers deep. In addition, three masked members of the Emergency Task Force monitored the crowd perched on scaffolding nearby, armed with automatic weapons that fire a 15-centimetre-long plastic round.
Activists debate
In planning the Quebec confrontation, Canadian activists, energised by the worldwide protests against neo-liberal globalisation, have also drawn on their own considerable protest experiences.
These have included the 1996 wave of city-wide general strikes against the government's neo-liberal policies (the largest in Canadian history), the 1997 protest against the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation's summit in Vancouver, demonstrations against the Group of 20 countries gathering in Montreal last year and the anti-poverty protests outside the Ontario legislature last June in which demonstrators were attacked by riot police.
The emergence of a radical, anti-hierarchical youth wing in the anti-FTAA movement is hardly a surprise in this context.
Centred around the Montreal-based Convergence of Anti-Capitalist Struggles (its French acronym is CLAC) and the Quebec City-based Summit of the Americas Welcoming Committee (CASA), this current is dominated by anarchists and is clearly anti-capitalist.
This group is organising an anti-capitalist day of action on April 20, aiming at civil disobedience. Other, more moderate groups have been unwilling to work in coalition with CLAC and CASA, ostensibly because of the two groups' emphasis on "direct action" and their refusal to rule out property destruction.
But according to an analysis in the March-April edition of Canadian magazine New Socialist (NS), that divide isn't based simply on tactics but on fundamental politics as well. The magazine characterised the orientation of the "official" anti-FTAA forces as reformist, based on their pre-occupation with improving the FTAA by adding "social clauses".
These forces include the upper echelons of the labour movement and some large non-government organisations gathered around the Quebec Network on Hemispheric Integration (RQIC). This is part of the Continental Social Alliance, the ASC, which is organising the April 16-22 People's Summit, often reported as the "principal" anti-FTAA event.
Common Frontiers, an alliance of the biggest unions and some community groups in English-speaking Canada, also seeks to reform the FTAA by adding pro-worker and pro-enviromental clauses.
Apart from CLAC and CASA, but also to the left of the reform bloc, says NS, are groups such as the Montreal-based Group Opposed to Market Globalisation (GOMM) and the Quebec City-based Operation Quebec Spring (OQP) 2001, a broad coalition comprising anti-capitalists as well as social democrats. They advocate, says NS, a common front which seeks to avoid division arising from the anti-capitalist debate but refuses to compromise with the reformist orientation.
GOMM, OQP 2001 and another, similar coalition, SalAMI, are members of the Table of Convergence (TAB), a broad coalition for non-violent direct action, which is organising a mass demonstration for April 21. These activists to the left of the RQIC hold to a principal slogan of "No to the FTAA"and are in political solidarity with activists who are organising a demonstration on April 6-7 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, against a pre-summit gathering of the SoA trade ministers.