The scorched earth of Tamil Eelam

By Richard Seymour from http://leninology.blogspot.com/2009/05/scorched-earth-of-tamil-eelam.html

The leaders of the LTTE have immolated themselves, and it is reported that chief Prabhakaran is dead. The Sri Lankan army has rounded up the last fighters. Thousands have been killed by the Sri Lankan army, and hundreds of thousands of civilians are trapped in internment camps, where they report being raped, abused, and starved by Sri Lankan soldiers. The Tamil Eelam state that LTTE fighters had been building in areas where they controlled has been demolished. A struggle that has lasted for over a generation now looks like it has ended in a decisive victory for the Sri Lankan state against the Tamil separatists. But what manner of struggle is it that is now apparently subsiding into a bloody twilight, and what will replace it? It would be difficult for anyone relying on the mainstream news to tell. In the UK, some awareness has been raised thanks to the efforts of networks of Tamil activists. But these activists have had to operate under scrutiny, because the LTTE was banned in the UK in 2001, and anyone suspected of being a member could end up being arrested.

The main way in which we have come to understand the LTTE and the Tamil secession struggle has been through the prism of counterinsurgency, terrorism, the strategic logic of suicide attacks, funding networks and - so it has darkly been hinted - possible ties with 'Al Qaeda'. History and context are only raised on the rare occasion that someone in the field of 'counterterrorism' thinks it matters. Otherwise we are advised that it is simply an ethnic conflict, between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority. The Sri Lankan state, which blames the entire conflict on the LTTE and purports to be 'liberating' Tamils from their rule, is apparently convinced that a military demolition of its opponents means that they have secured a long term victory. In fact, however, their turn to this brutal military solution is a result of failure. It is the inability of Sri Lanka's rulers to accomodate even partially the interests of the Tamil minority within the terms of its sovereignty, as was made clear by the failure of peace accords earlier this decade, that has led to this state of affairs. This is the hallmark of a weak and fractious ruling class, not a strong and confident one. The LTTE may be broken, but that doesn't mean that the people of the Tamil north will simply give way.

As usual, there is a colonial background here, inasmuch as the ethnic divisions are rooted in the practises of rule and exploitation by British colonial powers in what was Ceylon. British imperialism was hardly loyal to one ethnicity over another - its 'race management' strategy changed over time. On the one hand, the British imported indentured workers from Tamil Nadu in southern India to help extract those rich rubber, tea, cinnamon, indigo and sugar resources. These were subject to tough labour legislation and restrictions forbidding them from leaving the plantation. On the other hand, modest advantages were conferred on some middle class layers of the Tamil minority who had already lived there for hundreds of years, as well as on some upper class Sinhalese and particularly on Burghers (descendants of European colonists). Moreover, British ethnology absurdly maintained that the Sinhalese and Tamils were distinct 'races': the former were 'Aryan', while the latter were 'Dravidian' - this on the basis of a divergence between languages spoken in central and southern India, and the Sanskrit-derived languages of the north.

This was an important aspect of imperial power-knowledge, as the British based their administrative units on such ethnology, while the owners of capital used anti-Tamil feeling to break strikes and disorganise workers. Such 'divide and rule' strategies were reflected in the censuses which, after 1911, placed indentured Tamil plantation workers in a separate category as 'Indian Tamils'. Legislation pushed through by Governor Manning in 1924 was used to undermine the unity of the emerging Lankan nationalist movement by introducing more communal representation systems into the Legislative Council. On this occasion, the British chose to under-represent the Sinhalese majority. Later, the Fabian-led Donoughmore Commission would reject communal representation and propose a 'universal franchise' under British rule. The Tamil nationalists had to decide whether to oppose it in the interests of conserving a communal position, or whether to oppose it because it didn't concede self-government, and ultimately chose the latter, but you begin to see how such divisions had become a terrible disabling factor for the independence movement.

That brings us to another crucial background, which is the rise and eclipse of the Sri Lankan revolutionary Left in the 20th Century, and its ultimate inability to overcome the divisions inherited from the colonial period. For, despite the mass communist and trade union movements that fought for independence, when independence was finally achieved in 1948, it was on terms that maintained powerful British interests in Sri Lanka, with large naval and air facilities based there to help the empire defends its holdings in Malaya. Moreover, it was in a way that deepened the extant ethnic divisions. Tamil plantation workers were excluded from the franchise by the new ruling party, the UNFP, and thus the Tamil minority was stigmatised as being in some sense not properly Sri Lankan. A split from the UNFP produced the Sri Lankan Freedom Party (SLFP) which was even more hostile to the Tamil minority. It claimed that Sri Lanka had a Buddhist identity, despite the fact that a sizeable minority were Hindu. Peaceful protesters, however, were attacked and killed, while the government continued to discriminate against the Tamil minority. They were the target of riots, pogroms, and state repression, and in opposition to this there developed a guerilla movements such as the Tamil New Tigers.

Sri Lanka was unique in developing a mass communist movement based on Trotskyism. The role of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), founded in 1935, was quite extraordinary. Not only was it not a communally based party, but it made a surprising and concrete connection with the British working class with the involvement of its prominent agitator Mark Bracegirdle (the spectacle of a white man rousing Sri Lankan labourers with his speeches against the planters was something that the British administrators absolutely detested). It was instrumental in building the union movement, was one of the few forces that continued to fight the British during World War II, and became the main opposition party after the war. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the party made great strides while resisting the Sinhala nationalism of the ruling SLFP. Moreover, the most powerful trade union movements at that time were aligned to the LSSP. But the party made the mistake of forming a coalition government with the SLFP, first in 1964, then again in 1970. It became part of a ruling administration that actually continued to discriminate against the Tamil minority. And it was also a suicidal move, since the front split in 1975, the LSSP representatives were expelled, and the party later lost all its MPs. It has since been involved in several coalitions with the SFLP, and has never recovered its former standing. But to be absolutely clear about this, the LSSP's early opposition to communalism was, as far as I can discover, most unusual. The majority of left-wing groups - and bear in mind that even the SFLP is nominally a socialist party - had long supported Sinhalese nationalism.

And that brings us to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which was formed in 1976 to replace the Tamil New Tigers, and the Tamil independence struggle which was launched in 1983. The rise of the Tigers did reflect the left's historic failure, even if the LTTE adopted nominally marxist politics. It reflected the fact that a non-communal left had been unable to hegemonise the working class, that even explicit revolutionaries and Guevarists had been party to oppression of the Tamils. It also reflected an enormous increase in state repression, with increasing reliance on mass arrests and torture. The tactics of the LTTE in response have been the focus of a lot of study of late. Kidnappings, bombings and, later on, suicide attacks. These were the tactics of a national struggle, one that necessarily didn't recognise any allies among the Sinhala majority.

But the dirty war was overwhelmingly fought by the Sri Lankan army. For example, when Tamil fighters attacked an army convoy in Jaffna in July 1983, the army retaliated by attacking and killing sixty civilians in the city - university lecturers, housewives, engineers, students, all shot dead in their homes. The Colombo-based press, however, focused overwhelmingly on the dead soldiers (does this sound familiar?) and whipped up an atmosphere of hostility to the Tamils. The government then proceeded with an extraordinarily vicious series of pogroms, which began with the burning of huts in Trincomalee and the expulsion of their residents. In Colombo, Sinhalese nationalists organised and attacked Tamil homes, shops, and vehicles, murdering dozens in one evening. Tamil prisoners were systematically murdered in cold blood. For weeks and weeks, similar episodes raged. The streets, empty apart from armed men on the prowl and their victims, were scenes of devastation. One town, the Tamil town of Kandapola, was utterly destroyed. The government began to round Tamils up, ostensibly to protect, and drove them into wretched 'refugee camps'. 90,000 refugees were created in Colombo alone by the first week of August. That wave of violence is known as 'Black July'. It lent awful credence to the argument that the Tamils didn't have Sinhalese allies they could look to. It sparked the war that thundered for more than twenty five years.

I have emphasised that the LTTE struggle can't be reduced to its tactics, but its tactics did flow from its nationalist premises. That is why it chose to pursue a guerilla struggle when it didn't have mass support, and why it eventually sought the help of the Indian government who at first armed the Tigers, then negotiated a peace deal, then sent in a 'peacekeeping' force which ended up attempting to disarm them - thus producing another horrendous bout of conflict, this time with the Indian army who were forced to withdraw in 1990. The Tigers, to make up for their lack of firepower, pioneered suicide bombings and invented the suicide belt. They repeatedly targeted civilians, seeing them as complicit in their oppression. They killed Muslims where they didn't simply extort them for funding. They also engaged in the recruitment of child soldiers. Such callousness was mandated by the argument that the Tamils could never live at peace within Sri Lanka, that they would always be oppressed, and could never look to Sinhalese or anyone else to defend them - but could in Tamil Eelam, they would be free.

Even despite their relative weakness, the Tigers could be a devastatingly effective force, and were very efficient at raising funds through the diaspora. It wasn't beyond them to rout the Sri Lankan army, such as when they took the strategically essential Elephant Pass from the Sri Lankan army in 2000, and then destroyed half the Air Lanka fleet at Colombo airport when the army tried to take it back. They successfully assassinated the Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, partially as a response to India's role in northern Sri Lanka. At the same time, because of their inherent military disadvantage, they repeatedly engaged in diplomatic attempts to end the war. Throughout the conflict, there were five separate peace agreements, and several unilateral ceasefires on the part of the LTTE. The Sri Lankan state consistently refused to reciprocate on unilateral ceasefires and generally didn't hold up its end of the bargain in negotiated ceasefires. This isn't to say that the Tigers were angelic in their conduct of negotiations. One doesn't expect that. And nor does it mean that peace held no advantages for the Sri Lankan ruling class. To secure the territory would certainly open new avenues for growth and allow the further penetration of the economic liberalisation programme throughout the country. The question was always whether they preferred a peace with autonomy for the Tamil north or a peace achieved by a comprehensive defeat for the Tigers. Given the choice, and given the prevailing constituencies, they tended to choose the latter.

The last ceasefire started in 2002 and ended in 2004, and it is instructive to see just how it ended. The Sri Lankan army had, since the fall of the Elephant Pass, been actively seeking arms and counterinsurgency training from any source it could. It forged a new alliance with Israel to this end, and raised its defence budget to $1bn. The army engaged in an energetic recruitment drive. The LTTE, evidently not trusting the government and unwilling to reduce its fighting capacity until a political settlement had been reached, sought to mirror the army's build up. The ceasefire was looking fairly shaky by late 2004. A new coalition had come to power involving leading Sinhalese nationalist forces, the SFLP and JVP, with the support of he LSSP. They did not support the federalist idea that both the LTTE and the previous government had been negotiating around. They declared that the negotiations process was tainted at source, and that the ceasefire no longer held. And then the tsunami struck. The army took the advantage of the devastation to restore its position in the Tamil north, just as the Indonesian army was doing in Aceh. It deliberately withheld aid from Tamil areas and started to penetrate refugee camp. Soon after, the war resumed. It resumed with the Sri Lankan army in a far more commanding position than it had been in before. And it ended with the military devastating its opponents and slaughtering civilians as it had always done. It ended the dream of Tamil Eelam.

But what would Tamil Eelam have looked like? The structures of an incipient state were being constructed in the Tiger-run territories, partly out of sheer necessity. Unwilling to be ruled under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, they had to elaborate their own legal system and civil codes. The structures they developed were highly effective. There is a rather simplistic argument over whether the peace and low crime rates that obtained in the Tiger controlled areas were the result of authoritarian policing or social justice. The state structures were indeed highly authoritarian in some ways, which is perhaps unsurprising in the context of war. On the other hand, they were based on welfare and development, codifying womens' rights, criminalised all forms of caste discrimination, and so on. The welfare functions were paid for by a form of taxation that in other circumstances would just be called 'rent'. The Tigers also pioneered the creation of an NGO, the Tamils Rehabilitation Organisation which, for example organised tsunami relief aid. As brutal as the Tigers could be in their tactics, they evidently tried to prefigure a more socially just society. And this made sense as a political strategy, since their ability to wield effective force had to be embedded in their political hegemony. Nonetheless, it's important to see the limits of this. The LTTE had traditionally been in favour of a heavily state-run developmentalist economy, but in negotiations in 2004 made it clear that while the LTTE had to urgently mount a humanitarian and development programme, it favoured a long-term strategy based on "an open market economy", and it voiced no opposition to the state's liberalisation measures. The glorious Tamil Eelam would have been a neoliberal state, perhaps no more than an autonomous zone within a federal structure, implementing the same IMF-driven policies that have been pushed from Colombo for some years.

That this, ultimately, is what so many young men and women were prepared to kill an die for, is not the least of the Tamils' tragedies.

ps: see Socialist Worker's archive of articles on Sri Lanka for some useful background.

Freedom of Expression and Palestine Advocacy

By Rafeef Ziadah

Enormous resources have been marshaled by conservative and Zionist organizations in an attempt to silence criticism of the Canadian government’s unwavering support for Israel. The first few months of 2009 have seen a concerted campaign to shut down Palestine advocacy in Canada. Such examples include:

cutting funding to the Canadian Arab Federation (CAF) due to the organization’s outspoken criticism of the government during the war in Gaza;
banning posters for the annual Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) in several Ontario university campuses; and

a smear campaign against the Ontario branch of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) for daring to discuss the issue of an academic boycott of Israel.

This is not an exhaustive list. The Canadian government also banned George Galloway, who was scheduled to speak about his trip to Gaza, in the same period. Artist Reena Katz was recently “disassociated” from the Koffler Centre of the Arts in Toronto, which was exhibiting her artistic work. Koffler “disassociated” with Katz for her activities with Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW): her exhibit was on the Toronto Jewish Community, not related to Palestine at all.

Palestine advocates have always had to live with harassment, false accusations, and smears. All these vastly intensified after the latest Israeli assault against the captive people of Gaza that left over 1400 people dead, including 430 children, and thousands of homes and public infrastructure destroyed in an already devastated and besieged area. This direct response to a growing international solidarity movement in support of Palestinian human rights is an attempt to demonize the movement and curtail its ability to do public organizing and campaigning.

This article answers the false accusations made against Palestine advocates, documents three cases of harassment and violation of free expression (CAF, IAW, and CUPE), and argues that free expression for Palestine advocates is an issue that should be taken up by all who are concerned about free expression.

Defending Israeli War Crimes

Israeli state arguments in defense of war crimes against the Palestinian people are becoming less convincing by the day, as open racism becomes acceptable in Israeli politics (demonstrated by the electoral victories of Lieberman and Netanyahu) and as Israel's treatment of Palestinians becomes more brutal. Supporters of Israel increasingly resort to the argument that attacking Israel is ‘anti-Semitic.’ They have coined the term “the new anti-Semitism” – defined as any criticism of Israeli policies (see, for examples, Phyllis Chesler, The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About it (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003) and Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2003). Accusations of anti-Semitism against those critical of Israeli policies aims at either silencing them or forcing them to spend their time and energy defending themselves against allegations rather than writing or organizing. The accusation of anti-Semitism leveled against all who criticize Israel contradicts claims that Israel is a state like any other. If both of these claims are true, criticizing Israel should not be different from criticizing any other state, and should be protected by free expression, as should discussion of Palestinian human rights. If even discussing the Palestinian situation is a form of anti-Semitism, then Palestinians cannot have full human rights.

Israel's supporters claim that Israel and Canada are western societies that embody ‘freedom.’ While exalting these societies for their freedom, these same supporters shut down freedom for those who speak out against Israel's crimes.

Another offered reason for silencing Palestine advocacy is that calling Israel an Apartheid state is offensive. It certainly is offensive, to Zionists as it would also offend white South Africans who believed in the apartheid system to be challenged, but would this mean that all events that challenge supporters of apartheid should be shut down? Do we shut down pro-choice events because they offend anti-choicers? Since when is the measure for allowing events who they offend? There are many pro-Israel events that take place every day on Canadian campuses – even at times soldiers who participated in war crimes are paraded like heroes, sometimes in front of students whose homes have been bombed by these same soldiers. This is offensive, but nothing has ever been banned because Palestinians find it offensive.

The campaign of repression against pro-Palestine groups is not simply an attack on Arab-Canadians, or even just their allies. They are attacks on the progressive movement as a whole.

They are aimed at limiting our collective ability to criticize government policies, whether on supporting Israel, the war in Afghanistan, or the case of Omar Khadr. They are also aimed at creating migrant communities that are silenced into obedience, using the threat of cuts to government funding. The examples below point to an increasing trend that is clearly coordinated across sectors to silence those speaking for Palestinian human rights.

Community Organizations Penalized for Palestine Solidarity

On 17 February 2009, several media outlets announced that Immigration Minister Jason Kenney was poised to slash federal funding to Canada's largest Arab community organization, the Canadian Arab Federation (CAF). A month later, Kenney followed through on his threats by formally cutting funding for CAF programs that help newcomers (these programs help all newcomers – not only Arabs). Two programs were cut, one that teaches English to newcomers and the second helps them search for jobs once they come to Canada.

The media has portrayed the cuts to CAF funding as a response to its president calling Kenney a ‘professional whore’ for supporting Israel in its war on Gaza (the President of CAF was actually quoting Professor Norman Finkelstein, a well-known critic of Israel). But Kenney himself has clarified on several occasions that funding cuts had nothing to do with the comments made about him. On 7 March 2009, Kenney admitted there was no connection between the insult and the decision to cut funding to CAF and stated:

“When I first became Minister over 2 years ago, one of the very first things I said to my bureaucrats on the very first day in my Department of Multiculturalism was that we would not be funding groups that promote extremism, defend or apologize for terrorism or terrorist organizations and promote hatred, and as I mentioned specifically two groups: the Canadian Arab Federation and the Canadian Islamic Congress” (Jason Kenney interview from AM 770 – Alberta).

Here we have a government minister clearly and openly declaring that he is targeting groups because he perceives them as being ‘extremist.’ Beyond cutting funding, Kenney explained that a ‘change in leadership’ would restore the funding, as reported in the National Post on 14 March 2009:

“Immigration Minister Jason Kenney says the Canadian Arab Federation will have to change its leadership and adopt a more moderate stance or risk losing federal funding…Mr. Kenney said taxpayers should not be footing the bill for an organization whose leader ‘promotes hateful and extremist views.’ Mr. Kenney said there are many moderate organizations that could do the job… He suggested the decision could be reversed if more moderate leaders were in place.”

The irony to Canadian-Arabs is startling, especially when you consider that many of them have ended up in Canada fleeing repressive governments that stifle criticism. Here you have a government minister interfering in a community's choice of leaders, telling the community to change its leadership to restore funding because this leadership is not to his liking. After such extreme action, the Minister tells the community he is doing this because they are not ‘moderate.’

In explaining his case for the cuts, Kenney said on February 26th 2009:

“But my point [in weighing whether to continue funding the CAF], is whether an organization … that distributes videos produced by Hamas and Islamic Jihad that glorifies terrorism [and] indoctrinates children into the cult of anti-Semitic hatred… is not an organization, in my opinion, that should be receiving taxpayer subsidies…I’m simply saying, when we make funding decisions we should take into account the character of the organization and its leadership. And if they’re promoting extremism, or [in the case of the CAF], implicitly promoting anti-Semitism, I think that should be a consideration”
(Minister Jason Kenney in an interview with Canadian Jewish News).

The Canadian Arab Federation has been a vocal critic of the Harper government’s uncritical support for Israel. This began in July 2006 when CAF criticized Prime Minister Harper and the Conservative government for calling Israel’s invasion and devastation of Lebanon a “measured response.”

Because CAF has helped to organize demonstrations against Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon, Kenney is falsely accusing the organization of being “anti-Semitic” and cutting funding on that basis. There has been no formal investigation on any front, no due process to accuse CAF or its leadership of anti-Semitism. Yet based on Kenney’s personal opinions and political biases he can declare what he wants to the media, including statements smearing people and decisions harming entire communities of newcomers, without substantiation or accountability.

While present at a conference against the “new anti-Semitism” in London England on February 18, 2009, Minister Kenney said:

“These [Canadian Islamic Congress (CIC) and CAF] and other organizations are free within the confines of our law and consistent with our traditions of freedom of expression, to speak their mind, but they should not expect to receive resources from the state, support from taxpayers or any other form of official respect from the government or the organs of our State (bold added). And I would encourage all other governments to take a similar approach to organizations that either excuse violence against Jews or express essentially anti-Semitic sentiments.”

Minister Kenney's use of the phrase “our state” suggests he is speaking of a state that Arabs and Muslims do not belong to. This in turn suggests a political test for belonging to what Kenney calls “our state.” The message seems to be that Arab-Canadians and anyone else who dares to criticize Israel can do so, but that makes them anti-Semitic, ‘immoderate,’ and unworthy of state funding.

CAF has decided to challenge Minister Kenney’s decision to cut the funding in the courts. On Monday March 30, 2009 CAF asked Justice Kelen of the Federal Court for an interim order so that it could continue to receive the funds it needs to operate its English language training program until its challenge to the cancellation of this funding is heard by the Court. The Court did not issue this order because it concluded that the harm caused by the immediate loss of funding could be recovered later in damages if the CAF ultimately wins its case in court. Interestingly, Minister Kenney chose not to present evidence through government counsel to counter CAF's allegations that the cut in funding was inappropriate and motivated by Kenney's political beliefs. Government counsel did not try in court to defend Minister Kenney's strong allegations that CAF is anti-Semitic and promotes terror.

The courts did find that the evidence reveals that Minister Kenney probably breached his legal duty to act fairly to the Canadian Arab Federation. Justice Kelen made it clear that it would be inappropriate for the Minister to cut CAF's funding because its President had called the Minister a name (as noted above this was never the issue). Justice Kelen said:

“Being a target of public criticism is part of holding public office. If the Minister decided to cancel English as a Second Language funding contract for the Canadian Arab community simply because he was called a name… his decision should not stand. It was not unexpected that the Arab community would be repulsed by Israel’s invasion of Gaza … the Arab community was upset that the Canadian government did not strongly protest this attack. Many reputable Canadian Jews were similarly opposed to… [the] attack.”

Mohamed Boudjenane, CAF’s Executive Director said: “Cleary this was a political decision in an attempt to silence CAF, however, we will continue our court case to clear our name and repair the damage done to the Canadian Arab Federation and the Arab Canadian community at large.” CAF is also leading a broad-based campaign to defend freedom of expression in various sectors.

University Campuses and Palestine Solidarity

There is a similar pattern of unsubstantiated accusations against Palestine advocacy groups on campuses. University campuses have long been seen as a space for critical debate and the building of solidarity with international struggles. Despite the fact that the production of knowledge in North American universities is increasingly linked to the interests of the state and the corporate sector, campuses provide an important space to organize in support of marginalized and oppressed groups. Indeed, it has become increasingly difficult to find such views off-campus within the corporate-controlled media or a political system dominated by various shades of conservatism.

The university has consequently become a contested ground. After a long hiatus during the Oslo ‘peace’ process years (1993-2000), a vibrant student-movement in support of Palestinian self-determination was re-ignited on university campuses across North America with the beginning of the second Palestinian Intifada in 2000. The movement grew as Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights intensified, particularly following the re-invasion of the Occupied Territories by Israeli troops in March-April 2002. Much of the solidarity movement modeled itself on the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa; in a short time petitions were circulating calling for divestment from Israel. By the time the anti-war in Iraq movement began in 2003, many students were equipped with a variety of skills – from organizing large scale demonstrations, public meetings, street-theater to more confrontational direct action tactics – acquired in their Palestine organizing.

This new anti-apartheid movement is extremely troubling for supporters of Israel, due especially to the comparisons that began to be openly made with apartheid South Africa. The memory of the struggle against apartheid South Africa is very much alive in the public consciousness. Broader layers of the population are beginning to understand the mass expulsion of three-quarters of the Palestinian people in 1948 that lay at the heart of the ‘Palestine Question.’ These comparisons damaged the progressive veneer that for many years had built the illusion of a ‘left-Zionism.’

As the Intifada continued the analysis of Israel as an apartheid state was developed further on campuses and was finally cemented with an action plan when the call for Boycotts, Divestments, Sanctions came from Palestine signed by over 170 civil society organizations in 2005.

In order to quash this movement, university administrations began to target student activist groups through repressive and bureaucratic means (establishing codes of conduct is just one example of these measures). Student activists were harassed and public spaces for student demonstrations and teach-ins were labeled “private property” (even though this is the property of a public university) making it “illegal” (in some cases overnight) to hold events. Student organizers have also noticed a pattern of harassment when it comes to room bookings. The same organization will put in a booking for multiple events on campaigns around Venezuela, Bolivia, Indigenous solidarity, among others. Yet, the only room bookings that will be delayed and speakers biographies questioned are those related to Palestine. The students' ability to organize, and indeed their freedom of assembly, is dependent upon access to space. When university administrations are colluding with off-campus pro-Israel organizations to deny space, it is not only the freedom of expression of students doing Palestine solidarity work that is being curtailed, but that of all students and progressives on campuses. This was surely the case at the University of Toronto (see Liisa Schofield’s Bullet #188). These actions by university administrators resonate with a view of students as customers paying for a service, rather than as active participants in the politics that shape the world around them.

Another administrative measure is the charging of security fees. The rule seems to be the more critical of Canadian foreign policy the speaker, the higher the security fees. The procedures for assessing security fees is not transparent. Though Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA) activists have asked repeatedly from both administrative and security bodies on campuses to let them know what the procedures and guidelines are for assessing ‘security risks’ there is never a straight answer, no guidelines, no written documents. It could simply be based on racial profiling – for example a speaking event for Tariq Ali, a UK-based author of about a dozen books, organized by OPIRG Toronto and the CUPE 3903 International Solidarity Committee was charged fees for the University of Toronto security personnel to be there. The organizers didn’t request security yet received a bill following the event. This also took place when Students Against Israeli Apartheid organized a talk with long-time South African anti-apartheid and Palestine activist, Salim Vally, in which Vally compared South African Apartheid policies to Israeli policies. These charges are a de facto suppression of free expression since they represent prohibitive costs for activist groups operating without any resources.

Politicians Attack IAW

Since its inception at the University of Toronto in 2005, Israeli Apartheid Week has garnered wide-spread media attention and smear campaigns from various Zionist organizations. This year however, the attack was much more extreme. Beyond the usual B’nai Brith fear-mongering and full page ads urging universities to shut the week down, the novel element was the intensity of attacks by political figures.

Minister Kenney for example, on the March 6, 2009 stated:

“Like many Canadians, I am deeply concerned about the activities associated with 'Israeli Apartheid Week'… It is disconcerting that university student groups would promote these gatherings in a manner that demonstrates a complete disregard for the safety and security of Jewish students and professors and the general well-being of campus life… I call on all Canadians to reject anti-Semitism.”

Minister Kenney again seems to stop short of directly calling IAW anti-Semitic, but as he does against CAF, he makes the case by innuendo. Kenney's “concern” is not accompanied by knowledge: he did not attend a single lecture of IAW and refers to the week without any reference to anything organizers have said or done.

On March 3, 2009, Conservative MP Paul Calandra (Oak Ridge – Markham) declared:

“Mr. Speaker, Jewish students across the country are under siege as anti-Semites unveil their plans for Israel Apartheid Week. Liberal MPs have been quoted in the media and even today in the immigration committee saying that anti-Semitic organizations like the Canadian Arab Federation should receive taxpayer support. Will the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism explain why the government believes that Israel Apartheid Week is anti-Semitic?”

Calandra makes more direct, but no more informed, accusations in this little declaration. Beyond the smears, the disrespect for free expression is striking.

But the surprise of the week was when the head of the Liberal Party, Michael Ignatieff issued a public statement about Israeli Apartheid Week (an annotated version of his statement is available here). One has to look at the situation from some distance to view it with some humour, as Canada plunges into a recession and workers across the country are losing jobs – politicians are busy speaking against a week of lectures on university campuses because this week happens to call Israel an apartheid state. Ignatieff wrote in his public statement that: “Labelling Israel as an ‘apartheid’ state is a deliberate attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the Jewish state itself” because international law defines apartheid as a crime against humanity. But Israeli Apartheid Week is not the only place in the world where Israel has been called an apartheid state: South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu has been saying it for several years now and Ronnie Kasrils of the African National Congress has participated in Israeli Apartheid Week as a keynote speaker.

These two South Africans certainly know more about apartheid being a crime against humanity than Ignatieff does. But the issue isn’t really if Israel is an apartheid state or not – it's that university students have every right to organize lectures, film screenings and debates about the issue!

Ignatieff, fearing not to appear liberal enough, contends in the same statement that “criticism of Israel is legitimate” but that “attempting to describe its very existence as a crime against humanity is not.” Yet, there are very specific political, legal and moral arguments about whether Israel is an apartheid state or not. There are academic books on the matter such as Uri Davis's Apartheid Israel, as but one exapmple. Will those books that describe Israel as an apartheid state be banned? This is all still unclear. What is clear is that Israeli Apartheid week has hit a nerve among supporters of Israel. But if the analysis of Israel as an Apartheid state is wrong, why such fear? Why all the effort to shut the week down? If the facts are on Israel’s side, then Israel's supporters should be able to win the debate on the merits, on the facts and arguments. No one is stopping Zionist organizations from organizing ‘Israel is great’ weeks. Why spend such effort trying to stop pro-Palestinian voices from putting forth arguments?

One of the most objectionable accusations against IAW was the allegation that calling Israel an apartheid state makes Jewish students unsafe. But many Jewish students helped to organize IAW: are they less Jewish because they are not Zionist? Will Ignatieff and Kenney enter the business of deciding who is Jewish now, as well as deciding what is legitimate and illegitimate to say?

Banning Posters

On February 9, 2009 Carleton University became the first to ban the IAW poster. The posters were taken down at the request of Carleton's Equity Services, under the rationale that the posters “could be seen to incite others to infringe rights protected in the Ontario Human Rights code” and are “insensitive to the norms of civil discourse in a free and democratic society.”

The poster was created by noted cartoonist Carlos Latuff and depicts a child being killed by aerial bombardment. This occurred over 430 times in Israel's latest attack on Gaza according to United Nations reports. How this image that portrays a factual situation “incites others to infringe on rights” is unclear and left unexplained by the university administration. One wonders if the poster was a photograph of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli bombardment if that too would be banned.

The troubling aspect of the poster banning is the use by the Carleton administration of ‘human rights’ as an excuse to violate freedom of expression. The process by which the poster was banned is completely unilateral and doesn’t allow for appeal: there is an unsubstantiated accusation and students cannot even defend their work. Are these the norms of “civil discourse in a free and democratic society” that the Carleton administration is referring to?

Ironically, this same administration that banned the poster could not summon enough concern for human rights or the right to education to speak against the bombing of a Gazan university. When 56 Carleton professors asked President Roseanne Runte to condemn Israel's bombardment of the Islamic University of Gaza, the President refused. Neither the direct killing of hundreds of children nor the direct bombing of a campus are enough to elicit condemnation: a poster depicting the bombing is.

Following Carleton’s lead, on February 20, 2009, the University of Ottawa became the second Ottawa university administration to ban the posters of IAW 2009. Like Carleton University’s administration, the University of Ottawa’s Communications Office used spurious “human rights” claims to ban the poster. The Communications Office’s short communiqué to Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights read:

“A poster from the campus group Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights has recently come to the attention of the Communications Office. All posters approved by the Communications Office must promote a campus culture where all members of the community can play a part in a declaration of human rights recognizing the inherent dignity and equal rights of all students. Consequently, we will not place this particular poster on our campus billboards.”

Other universities (Wilfrid Laurier, Trent) also stopped the poster from being circulated using the same type of justification.

Again how this poster does not recognize the “inherent dignity and equal rights of all students” is unclear and unexplained. There is no mechanism for an appeal. In fact, the banning of the poster is a failure to recognize the dignity and equal rights of Palestinian students and those who seek to expose the violations of human rights of Palestinians. This is another innovation: the use of the language of human rights and equity, won through progressive struggle, to justify administrative fiat against students who are trying to practice the politics of human rights and equity.

As this article was being written, the Koffler Centre of the Arts announced it is dissociating itself from an exhibit presented by Reena Katz solely on the basis of her political affiliations, specifically with Israeli Apartheid Week. On May 12th, Koffler and its parent organization United Jewish Appeal of Greater Toronto (UJA) issued separate public statements of dissociation from Katz. Koffler made the artist a verbal offer to honor the full funding of the project while removing the Koffler's name, logo and URL from any related material. The ironic part about this move to disassociate from the artist is that the off-site exhibit, entitled each hand as they are called, consists of sonic and visual performances, bringing elders from Toronto’s Jewish community into conversation and play with students from Ryerson Public School. The exhibit has nothing to do with Palestine, Palestinians or Israeli Apartheid. The Koffler’s behaviour, besides being an outrageous for an arts institution, sets a dangerous precedent, suppressing art and choosing to support artistic endeavors based on an artists’ political beliefs and affiliations (see Katz’s website: http://www.eachhand.org/).

We are starting to see that the silencing of Israeli Apartheid week spread beyond campuses. Repression, once released, is not easily contained: it inevitably trickles outside to other aspects of everyday life. Why harm an exhibit about Jewish history on the basis of the artist’s affiliation with IAW?

Organizers of IAW are interested in opening up debate and discussion on Israel. As a matter of fact they have been calling for debates on the academic boycott of Israel to take place across Canadian universities. On one side, you have organizers clearly seeking mature debate on a subject of great importance to the public. On the other, politicians, university administrations, and now cultural institutions are trying to shut the debate down.

Labour Unions

If campuses are spaces where the possibility for a wider debate are possible, making them contested ground, labour unions are organizations that press for progressive change, and are often punished for it. Most are familiar with the media smear campaigns against CUPE Ontario, and its President Syd Ryan, when Resolution 50 supporting BDS was adopted by the membership. This resolution was adopted overwhelmingly by the CUPE membership, yet outside organizations, contemptuous of the democratic processes of the union, initiated campaigns of harassment against the leadership. Ryan received death threats, the chair of the international solidarity committee at the time had to change her phone number and email address due to the barrage of hate mail she was receiving. Luckily, CUPE did not back down due to these campaigns and continued to do rank and file education around Palestinian rights. As Ryan explained it: “criticize the State of Israel and face individually targeted and unprecedented criticism, threats and personal attacks – tantamount to a new form of McCarthyism.”

Shortly after the attack on Gaza, the university sector conference of CUPE Ontario adopted a motion calling for research on Canadian University connections with Israeli Universities specifically in the area of military research. It passed a second motion supporting free expression on the issue of Palestine on campuses. As those motions were being discussed inside the conference, the Jewish Defense League (JDL) gathered outside waving Israeli flags, one sign was of Ryan’s picture superimposed on Hitler’s body. The objective is to tell trade unionists solidarity with Palestinian workers will come at the price of fear, harassment, filthy accusations, and physical aggression.

Other unions, such as OPSEU and OSSTF, have active grievances in process because their members have been disciplined for putting up IAW posters or other Palestine-related materials in their workplaces.

Conclusion

A targeted campaign against Arab community organizations, academics that support Palestinian human rights and student activists that organize events such as IAW has been launched to keep the solidarity movement occupied with defending itself. This campaign employs a vast array of methods including threats by donors to stop grants to universities; calls for the dismissal of academics based on media smear campaigns, and the intervention of members of Parliament.

The success of Palestine solidarity activists and other progressive movements led to the launch of these campaigns of intimidation and repression. The level of retaliation an oppositional movement receives is a good gauge of its success and its ability to affect change in the public consciousness. This success is also reflected in the growing confluence of the political right, conservatism and the Zionist movement. Zionism is increasingly losing its ability to divide progressive movements and becoming associated with right-wing politics.

These developments indicate the importance of building cross-linkages and networks of solidarity between various progressive movements. This new round of attacks represents a threat to many of the gains won during previous rounds of struggle, most notably the free speech campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s across North America. It is on all of us to take responsibility to beat back this new McCarthyism. •

Rafeef Ziadah is an organizer with the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid.

The War in Sri Lanka and the Left in Toronto

By Noaman Ali and Fathima Cader

The recent burst of mass mobilizations by sections of the Canadian-Tamil community in Toronto has brought to the fore several contradictions concerning the conflict in Sri Lanka and its presence in and connection to Canada. Mainstream media’s responses to the protests have been overwhelmingly racialist, exposing many of the limits of Canadian multiculturalism. In order for Canadian multiculturalism to accept any given group of people as a cultural community, it must define that group by differentiating it from a supposedly mainstream Canadian identity. This focalising Canadian identity—in effect a non-identity—is white and middle-class. Thus, when the Toronto Star publishes an editorial entitled “Protesters vs. the public”1 it effectively notes that the protesters are not part of the public by pitting (Tamil) protesters against the (Canadian) public. Rather than focusing on the war, media outlets have focused on the inconvenience posed to commuters, thereby shifting attention away from deaths in Sri Lanka to traffic regulations in Canada. Consequently, responses to the protests have largely demonstrated pernicious xenophobia. For instance, in the Toronto Sun, Peter Worthington argues that not using excessive force (e.g., water cannons) against Tamil protesters who block streets is tantamount to “reverse racism” against white Canadians.2

But if the coverage of the protests has made certain contradictions about the performance of cultural politics in public spaces in Canada apparent, other contradictions about the negotiation of those politics within cultural communities have also been rendered largely invisible. The impetus comes, once again, from a multiculturalism that defines ethnic, immigrant identities against a supposedly mainstream, local one. The act of defining a cultural community necessarily ignores the cultural, economic, and political differences that exist within that community. When these differences are ignored, political representation to mainstream political actors (i.e. those in the government, political parties, and state apparatuses) is mediated by non-elected, self-appointed community “leaders” who may not, and often do not, capture all cultural and political differences. In fact, the very articulation of those differences is precluded: a-cultural white English-speaking Canadians may lean left or right as individuals, or as voting blocs based on class and region, but the articulation of such political differences is absent in the representations of the politics of minority communities. The responses of politicians, activists, journalists, police and vocal sections of the public to the rallies protesting the war provide key examples of this.

The responses of politicians and police officials who addressed themselves to “the Tamil community” falsely suggest that all the protesters were Tamil and that all of Toronto’s Tamils supported the protests. The paternalism of Mayor David Miller’s deciding to tell “the Tamil community” what it “needs to hear from us”3 (whoever “us” is) feeds into the blatant racism expressed by other elements of the public. Thus, for instance, in The Globe & Mail Christie Blatchford uses the demonstrations to question not just protest tactics, but also the immigration policies that, according to her, have led to the presence of a worryingly large number of Tamils in Toronto.4

Parallel to Miller’s homogenization, though coming from the opposite direction, veteran dissident leftist Judy Rebick notes on her blog that, “in a brilliant action, the Tamil community [...] climbed the on ramp on to the Gardiner Expressway [...] and sat down blockading traffic for several hours.”5 While the action, as an object lesson in activist tactics, was brilliant, one can say with certainty that “the Tamil community” neither climbed onto nor sat down on the Gardiner. Rather, a more correct terminology would be what Rebick subsequently calls “a group of Tamil activists.” The tenor of her blog post, however, confirms that she views the Tamil community in homogenous terms. She goes so far as to end her post with the note that “we are all Tamils,” a statement that is problematic on two grounds. First, working in solidarity with others requires acknowledging the lived differences that separate us so that we might use those differences for the purposes of justice, rather than discounting them out of an unhelpfully over-forced empathy. Second, that kind of statement presupposes that there is only one kind of Tamil identity, which everyone else can access. Yet if Tamilness is an identity constructed solely on the basis of one’s presence at or support for the protests, not even all Tamils can be called such.

If Toronto’s Tamil population is being flattened into one homogenized entity by politicians and many leftist activists, that process is certainly not being opposed by some sections of Toronto’s Tamil community. The Canadian Tamil Congress, one of Toronto’s more prominent Tamil political groups, notes that it is “the unified voice of Canada’s 300,000 Tamils.”6 Its FAQ page shows that it ascribes to all Sri Lankan Tamils the desire for a separate homeland (Tamil Eelam).7 The history and current reality of a diversity of non-communal and Tamil organizations and individuals within and without Sri Lanka, with varying goals and political objectives—and varying definitions of self-determination for Tamil people—is elided by this construction of Tamil identity. It is impossible for the CTC to be the unified voice of Tamils when Tamils don’t have a unified voice. In other words, to return to Rebick’s rallying cry, we are not all Tamil, if only because there is no one Tamil identity we can be.

At many of the protests, the LTTE-designed national flag of Tamil Eelam (which shares the Tiger emblem) has been a prominent fixture, LTTE soldiers have been venerated as freedom fighters, the prospect of Eelam has been seen as a necessary solution to the war, and LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran has been venerated as a national leader. While this set of views may be influential and even hegemonic within Toronto’s Tamil diaspora, it is not universal. Just as the actions of many of the Tamil demonstrators are not and cannot be the actions of “the Tamil community,” so too are the opinions expressed at these demonstrations not those of “the Tamil community.” In fact, those are not even necessarily the views of all of the protesters present at the rallies, but dissenting, non-LTTE views are not being heard.

To signal toward complexity and difference within Tamil communities is not to deny the Sinhala ethnic chauvinism of the government of Sri Lanka; its use of undemocratic and authoritarian practices to crush dissent; or its use of mass murder, ethnic cleansing and internal colonization against Sri Lankan Tamils. Nor is it to deny that militant Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka has largely been a response to the systematized and legislated discrimination of the Sri Lankan state. The LTTE is, in fact, a legitimate national resistance movement and was—until recently— the de facto governing entity in several parts of Sri Lanka. However, in its progress towards and current operation of that position, it too has often represented an ideology of ethno-religious chauvinism; has used undemocratic and authoritarian practices to crush resistant views and movements–including against dissident Tamils; and has used mass murder, ethnic cleansing and internal colonization against Muslims. The point here is not that the LTTE is just as bad as the government of Sri Lanka—which many Sri Lankans, Tamils and otherwise, think it is—but that a critical left view cannot support the LTTE, except tactically in opposition to the oppression of the Sri Lankan state. Nor can it support the LTTE’s ideology or practice. Thus, the assumption should not be made that support for Tamils in opposition to Sri Lankan state oppression is consonant with support for the LTTE.

It is important that critical leftists in Canada take concrete steps, working with members of the Tamil population and the Sri Lankan population more broadly, to bring to an end the oppression being perpetrated by the Sri Lankan state, but without steamrolling the complexities of the conflict and those affected by it. We must stand for an end to Sri Lankan state aggression, but also for an end to the LTTE’s aggression toward dissident and minority groups. Toward these ends, some concrete steps we should seek to take include:

1. Demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire.

Critical leftists must stand up for the thousands being massacred in Sri Lanka. To this end, we should engage with supporters of the LTTE and others in demanding an immediate, permanent, and confirmable bilateral ceasefire. Protests calling on the Canadian government to take an active role in bringing about such a ceasefire are important and should be supported, though not uncritically.

2. Oppose the complacency and racism of the Canadian state, media and vocal sections of the general public; and oppose police violence.

The Canadian government continues to turn a blind eye to the conflict, tacitly supporting the Sri Lankan state’s actions. Politicians at all levels have spoken to “the Tamil community” in condescending ways. The media has focused more on the plight of commuters inconvenienced by the rallies than on the thousands of dying civilians. Many Canadian citizens have expressed their xenophobia calling upon Tamils to “go back home”.

Meanwhile, at the rallies, protestors have on several occasions been literally caged into tight areas and police officers have often used excessive force on them. Protestors have been arrested merely for speaking out,8 and, at times, have been brutalized with no provocation.9,10

Police violence and the complacence and racism of Canadian foreign politics, the media and vocal sections of the general public must be opposed loudly and forcefully.

3. Push for a political solution.

This conflict has no military solution. Critical leftists must not stop at the call for a ceasefire, but also push for a comprehensive political settlement that involves more than just the Sinhala-dominant Sri Lankan state and the LTTE. There are many more legitimate representatives of Tamil (including Tamil-speaking Muslim) aspirations and political views than the LTTE, whom the LTTE has repressed. Support must be given to them. However, there can also be no political settlement without the involvement of the LTTE.

The Canadian government does not label organizations as terrorist on the basis of objective criteria, but politically opportunistic ones. Moreover, designating certain groups as terrorist does little to clarify conflict situations, but more often obscures issues. Canada’s banning the Tigers as terrorists suggests that the problem of Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism is not one of discrimination and disenfranchisement, but of immeasurable violence and terrorism, and that therefore the solution to this conflict must inevitably and solely come through the military elimination of said terrorist group. Critical leftists, however, must remain firm that any long-term and viable solution to the Sri Lankan conflict cannot be military; it must involve a political settlement.

4. Work toward cross-ethnic solidarity.

Following from the support for repressed and marginalized voices, critical leftists must promote cross-ethnic solidarities in Sri Lanka and in the Sri Lankan diaspora. The fictions of ethnic homogeneity constructed by Sinhala nationalism and by Tamil nationalism must be punctured and repudiated. This does not mean an opposition to the principle of self-determination. Yet however the majority of Tamils in Sri Lanka choose to define self-determination, a lasting peace has to be based on the recognition of the vast complexity, intermingling, and transcendence of ethnic boundaries that constantly occurs in Sri Lanka – both in Sinhalese-dominated and in Tamil-dominated areas. Non-communal political formations must be supported.

To that end, critical leftists in Canada should work towards facilitating the kinds of cross-ethnic solidarity movements and conversations that have been mostly foreclosed by the terroristic strategies employed in Sri Lanka by the armed forces and by the LTTE. While acknowledging and addressing the limitations of Canadian multicultural policies here, we need to capitalise on our distance from the conflict, and the relative peace afforded by that distance (however racialised and restricted it is), to facilitate dialogue.

5. Oppose the Sri Lankan state; criticize the LTTE.

Successive Sinhala ethnic chauvinist governments have precipitated the crisis in Sri Lanka. They continue to do so with impunity. Critical leftists must be absolute in their opposition to the ethnic chauvinism and practical depredations of the parties controlling the Sri Lankan state. The Sri Lankan state has been one of the most significant obstacles toward the achievement of a lasting peace.

At the same time, the LTTE has used civilians as human shields and has engaged in forced conscription. It must be therefore also be criticized and its particular human rights violations not excused or glossed over.

6. Oppose the role of international imperialism in the conflict.

The ideology of twenty-first century imperialism is manifest worldwide. In particular, in South Asia, the discourses of “wars on terror” in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India are smokescreens for governments and imperial actors like NATO and the United States to obscure real, legitimate and popular grievances by focusing instead on military campaigns. This is precisely the strategy currently being used by the state in Sri Lanka against its local Tamil grievances. Furthermore, the Sri Lankan state receives military aid from, among others, Pakistan and Israel—lackeys of American empire. China, too, in increasing its international political reach, has steadily provided arms and funding to Sri Lanka for several years. India has also played a major role through its intervention or absence of intervention, in line with its hegemonic designs in South Asia.

The international dimensions of the conflict are too complex to be examined in detail here. However, we should engage in further study of the international dimension of the conflict as well, for in resisting the violence of the Sri Lankan state, as critical leftists, we are also taking a stance against certain operations of international imperialism. We must recognize, however, that ultimately the problem is one of Sinhala ethnic chauvinism and the lack of meaningful political representation of national minorities in Sri Lanka.

In conclusion, it is important to note that these six items should be regarded as points of departure for critical leftists. By no means is this a conclusive programme on how activists in Canada, whatever their ethnicity or personal connection to the war, should approach the conflict. That sort of conversation is much more difficult, and must be had in conjunction with all the members of Canada’s Sri Lankan diaspora, including its Sinhalese, Tamil, and Muslim communities.
—-
Noaman Ali is a teaching assistant at York University and a member of CUPE 3903. Fathima Cader is a Colombo-born Tamil Muslim who spent five weeks in April and May 2009 in Sri Lanka. She is a law student at the University of British Columbia.

The Tamil Protests: Resistance in the Face of Genocide

By S.K. Hussan

On Friday, 15 May 2009, the Sri Lankan army began a sea, air and tri-directional land assault on a single mile of island still believed to be held by the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) and considered a “no-fire” zone. Over 80,000 civilians are unaccounted for and believed to be trapped in the sandy region. The army has stated that it attempts to ‘wipe out’ all inhabitants in the “no-fire” zone. This assault, called the “climax” by the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lankan government is at the end of a seven month campaign to occupy the autonomous Tamil Eelam region that has been under Tamil control since 2002.

Independent accounts report deaths upwards of 10,000 in the fighting with at least a quarter of a million displaced in camps with no health services. There have been numerous reports of rape and slaughter in these camps by the Sri Lankan army, the most recent by Channel 4 UK.

Global Political Mobilization

Over the last few months, a growing movement against war and genocide in Tamil Eelam has taken to the streets of Toronto, London, Paris, Brisbane and many other cities. In Toronto, these protests have been organized in community centers and by students of all ages. A new generation of organizers has emerged that have been forced to learn the skills of mass political mobilization on the streets with thousands coming out day after day after day.

Eating, drinking, chanting, standing, shouting and screaming, tens of thousands of people of all ages, mostly with family in the affected region, have blockaded roads, and surrounded government buildings and embassies. They have organized mass sit-ins and die-ins, carried out candle light vigils and participated in hunger strikes in Toronto and elsewhere. Though initially without a clear mandate and borne out of frustration, the demonstrations are now unified in their call: “What do we want? Permanent Ceasefire! When do we want it? Right Now!”

Organizers have attempted to meet with Conservative MPs to ask for the recall of the Canadian ambassador to Sri Lanka and have urged that journalists and humanitarian workers be allowed in the quarantined war zone. Ottawa has rejected the demand that Canada call for a ceasefire and condemn the attacks that have caused so many civilian causalities.

The ‘Canadian’ Response

Many radio stations and mainstream media outlets have spewed vitriol, as callers to radio programmes speaking as ‘everyday Canadians’ (read white) have been derisive in their criticisms of the ‘Tamils.’ Canadian media accounts have questioned the logic of using the Tamil Secessionist flag (which is not the LTTE flag), the use of women and the elderly in the protest (as if the women and elderly have no free will to organize) and the role of street demonstrations in ‘holding city residents hostage.’ Little has been said about the demands of the 200,000 Tamil city residents and thousands of their supporters. Nothing has been said to pressure Harper to take an anti-war stance.

On the 4th of May, after the mass demonstration in Ottawa, after the non-stop protest outside the U.S. embassy and the public beatings of solidarity activists by Toronto police, the Canadian Minister of International Cooperation Beverley J. Oda visited Colombo and gave $3-million in untied aid to Sri Lanka. Instead of insisting that Sri Lanka adopt an immediate and permanent cessation of hostilities against a trapped civilian population in return for the aid, Minister Oda (in her own words to the Canadian media) simply ‘asked’ her hosts to do so. When ignored she passed over the money.

Two things come to mind on this point. First, Canada does not give out untied aid – a policy which has been used to attack working people in many countries and to limit democratic control over resources. In one of the rare instances when conditional aid could have been used as leverage to prevent a massacre, Canada shied away. Second, contrary to Minister Oda’s statements to the Canadian media, this is what the Sri Lanka Ministry of Defence website had to say:

“She [Beverley Oda] welcomed the Government moves to reunify families stranded by terrorist atrocities and resettlement of civilians in their original places of residence. She said Canadian assistance to Sri Lanka will continue uninterrupted.”

The original places of residence in this case are the by now infamous “no-fire” zones that the Sri Lankan army confessed to have bombed two days before this visit (on May 2nd). Canadian reassurance of 'uninterrupted assistance' to Sri Lanka was something Minister Oda forgot to mention in her interview with Canadian media and of course something that the mainstream media managed to avoid questioning.

Beverley Oda and Stephen Harper must come clean. They need to explain why Canada is supporting what the UN has called a blood-bath. They need to explain why Canada is supporting the displacement of hundred of thousands of people creating a humanitarian disaster of tragic proportions. They need to explain to Canadians why it is in ‘Canada’s interest’ to let this genocide continue. Until that time, any public resistance or mobilization to create awareness and pressure Canada is the right one.

Now, more than ever before, the pressure campaign needs to be maintained. There are 80,000 people being bombed, shelled and massacred. There is a call to take to the streets, to call, email and fax parliamentarians to stop the genocide. I intend to respond to this call. Do you? •

S.K. Hussan is an organizer with No One Is Illegal – Toronto and in defense of indigenous sovereignty.

Sources

• "Sri Lanka expects the visit of Canadian Minister would strengthen bilateral ties", Asian Tribune, May 5, 2009.
• "Sri Lanka admits bombing safe zone", Al Jazeera, English, May 02, 2009.
• "Policy Statement on Strengthening Aid Effectiveness", CIDA, September 2002.
• "Canada gives $3 million in aid to Sri Lanka", The Canadian Press, May 4, 2009.

Israel's not so subtle plan for Palestine

The poster has been produced by the Israeli Ministry of Tourism as part of an advertising campaign to attract visitors to Israel.

The map on the advertisement portrays Israel as an area which incorporates the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights.However, none of these areas are part of Israel, but instead have been subject to military occupation or blockade by Israel since 1967.

UN Resolution 242 calls on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, which are Palestinian territories, but Israel remains in violation of this resolution, and also maintains its illegal occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights.

Israel has sealed off the Gaza Strip since 2005, making access virtually impossible, resulting in severe shortages of food, medicine and clean water, which has left the Strip’s 1.4 million Palestinians facing a humanitarian crisis. Any ‘tourists’ would be unable to visit the Gaza Strip, as Israel prevents even humanitarian aid workers and lawyers from entering.

In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel continues to build settlements in direct contravention of international law, taking land from the Palestinians to do so and demolishing their homes and farms in the process.

In addition, Israel is in the process of building the Apartheid Wall through the West Bank, which, when completed, will expropriate 50% of Palestinian land in the West Bank, depriving farmers and families of their livelihoods and water supply, and making movement for Palestinians almost impossible.

The Wall breaches numerous international agreements, including the Fourth Geneva Convention’s articles on the destruction of land and/or property (article 53) and on collective punishment (article 33).

The Winnipeg General Strike

By Jim Naylor

The Winnipeg General Strike is a landmark in North America by any measure. From mid-May to late June 1919 – for six weeks – about 35,000 workers – the bulk of Winnipeg’s labour force – walked off the job and risked hunger, blacklisting, and potential police and military repression. The event has often been commemorated by the labour movement in the city as it is this week; and sometimes more widely. There was, for instance, a tremendous exhibit in 1994 at the Manitoba Museum to mark the 75th anniversary, and a long-standing bus tour that many of you will have taken.

My favourite, though, was a small event – the unveiling of a plaque at City Hall in 1986 (not the Steelworkers’ plaque, but one placed there by Parks Canada to mark the event). It was a wonderful example of what the strike means, or doesn’t mean to different people. The speakers were, if I remember correctly, Judy Wasylycia-Leis (now an NDP MP), who spoke about the Gainers meat packing strike that was going on at the same time in Edmonton and suggesting that they were, in essence, part of the same struggle for workers’ rights. This is generically true, I suppose (and raising the banner of solidarity was of course a good thing) but doesn’t really say anything specific about the events of 1919. Next up was Jake Epp, the Manitoba Tory MP and minister of health in the Mulroney government. He suggested that there was a time, long ago, when workers and bosses fought (although he managed to use none of those words), but we live in a more civilized society now. Then was Mayor Bill Norrie, who used the occasion to talk mainly about the rebuilding the Nairn Avenue overpass. Clearly, for these two, the faster the strike was forgotten, the better. The other thing I remember about the event was that they had dressed someone up in a period Mountie costume who stood around looking a bit self-conscious (although I may have been projecting that). Anyhow, I felt this was in considerable bad taste, considering that the RCMP was formed from the NWMP and the Dominion Police in the aftermath of the Winnipeg strike specifically and overtly to fight such uprisings for workers’ rights.

Anyhow, the 1986 event was a clear example of the way the general strike lived on in Winnipeg as a touchstone of class conflict (or the kind of liberal denial of social classes and class struggle), but also without very much clear discussion of what really happened in 1919, and what specifically we might learn.

First of all, 90 years is a long time. As we try to draw lessons, we have to be careful not to take events out of context. The general strike took place at a specific and extraordinary moment in world history, in the aftermath of World War I, at that time the most destructive war in history and by almost any measure, among the most pointless. A combination of factors – rapid industrialization before and during the war, full employment during the war that had given workers bargaining power that they had never had before, and of course the war itself, in which workers were promised democracy but received only greater and greater restrictions on workers’ freedoms, along with mass death on the front lines — were an explosive combination pretty much everywhere.

This was an era of revolutions in Russia, Germany and Hungary, In US, there was a general strike in Seattle, a strike of over 300,000 steel workers (most notably immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who had been largely shunned by the official trade union movement), 400,000 coal miners struck, 120,000 textile workers, 50,000 men’s clothing workers. One in five of all American wage workers struck in 1919.

In Canada, a similar wave of strikes took place in every region of the country. Without wanting to diminish the centrality or the drama of the Winnipeg strike, Winnipeg was hardly alone. At least 20 cities in Canada from Victoria to Amherst, Nova Scotia, experienced general or near general strikes in 1919. And, it is worth noting, these were not simply strikes in sympathy with Winnipeg, but generally were locally rooted struggles parallel to the one taking place here. To the extent that strikes did not develop successfully, it was because demands were often won, or electoral breakthroughs made in municipal elections (or in the case of Ontario, provincially, with the defeat of the Tories and the election of a farmer-labour government) and workers were willing to wait and see what might be achieved on that front. It is worth noting that industrial action and electoral action was not necessarily seen as opposed to each other.

This context is important for many reasons, but it is crucial to understanding the strike itself. The mainstream understanding of the strike is that it was about collective bargaining and helped secure it for Manitoba workers. This is what it says on the Steelworkers’ plaque at City Hall. Well, it was sort of about collective bargaining. What prompted the strike was the refusal of employers to negotiate with federations of metal trades workers and of building trades workers. Interestingly, they had dealt before with individual craft unions, but were balking at the emergence of incipient industrial or general workers’ unions.

I should point out that collective bargaining meant something different then, or at least had a different flavour than it does now. The collective bargaining system that we now have prohibits things like the Winnipeg General Strike. Sympathy strikes and strikes during collective agreements are banned. In 1919, that would have been seen as a restraint on workers’ power that prohibited true collective bargaining.

By the spring of 1919, in fact, Winnipeg had come close to a general strike on three previous occasions over the preceding couple of years. Most importantly, in 1918, about 15,000 Winnipeggers had joined an escalating strike movement in support of the newly organized civic workers. The 1919 strike started after the local Trades and Labour Council (as it was called at the time) organized a referendum in which members of affiliates voted 11,000 to 500 in favour of a sympathetic strike.
What is notable, though, is that well over twice that many, and probably three times, walked out. Most of the strikers were not even members of unions; certainly the possibility of forming a stable union, let alone achieving recognition from employers, was remote for many of them. At the very least, any direct (or even very indirect) benefits for huge numbers of the strikers are hard to glean.

For this reason, I would argue that the event was in many ways more of a local (and potentially regional and national) revolt than a strike. It was both the product of pent up anger, but also of a broad and vaguely defined hope for a better world. This was, in part, rooted in the war itself. As the war progressed, governments and ideologues made increasing reference to the war having some greater purpose. Given the level of sacrifice and suffering, there was a sense that something new and better had to emerge from it. There was a sense, as one worker told a royal commission struck to study the 1919 labour uprising, that Canadian workers “were under the impression that something was promised them but they did not know what.” In part, workers began to take claims that the war was being fought for democracy seriously, but in their own way. To them, democracy meant not just formal processes, but a real (if in many cases vague) reorganization of social relations in the workplace and in communities. And they knew their bosses and war-time profiteering politicians well enough to understand that if democracy was going to come, they had to grab it themselves.

So collective bargaining was an issue, but as much as anything else, it was the catalyst for a much broader struggle. This can be seen by looking at two key groups who stood outside of the officially defined trade union movement for the most part: immigrant workers and returned soldiers. Both, in their own ways, were wildcards in this struggle. They were workers, no doubt, but as we know working-class unity is potentially a fragile thing and could easily have fractured. Indeed, what is astounding about 1919 was the way in which it came together since both immigrant workers and returned soldiers had reasons to be resentful of the trade union movement in the months before the strike. How class identity was able to overcome these fractures might be something we can discuss, since 1919 is an important case.

There is a tendency to think of the Winnipeg Strike as a battle between the working-class North End and the bourgeois south part of the city. This is not particularly accurate. Certainly the leaders of the strike committee, and most members of unions, did not live in the North End. They lived in the British working-class neighbourhoods of Fort Rouge, the West End, and Weston, among others. These neighbourhoods were where many of the incidents of the strike — conflicts over milk and bread deliveries, and so on — took place. There were, of course, organized workers in the North End but, significantly, a huge proportion of those unorganized workers who downed their tools were the largely Eastern European workers from the North End. And they did so in spite of the various exclusions they had faced. The last months of the war, in particular, had seen vicious attacks on immigrants and attempts to exclude them from the better jobs that many of them had moved into during the wartime labour shortage. Many such immigrants, politicized by the long struggle against Tsarism and against anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, and inspired by developments there in the previous two years, were able to look past this and recognize at least a common enemy in the bosses.

This was the case despite the difficulty the strike leadership had in addressing the specific interests and identities of Eastern Europeans immigrants. The strike leaders responded strongly to the overt bigotry of the anti-strike Citizens’ Committee of 1000 and the city’s newspapers although, frankly, they rarely articulated demands that specifically addressed the plight of Winnipeg’s non-British immigrant workers, beyond the somewhat dubious (given the history of the British empire) call for “British justice” for all. Still, in the context of the strike opponents’ attempts to paint anything such immigrants said or did as treasonous, it was a way of saying, in 1919, that “no one is illegal.” As well, we have to note that the fact that few non-Anglo workers were in the official strike leadership was the product of both prejudice and the fact that their official presence would have ensured their deportation (there is some evidence that “ethnic” leaders like Jake Penner were de facto participants in leading the strike). And the rough inclusion of immigrant workers (immigrants from Britain were not considered immigrants at the time) was important since the strike, I think, did help restructure relations between workers of different ethnicities in important and lasting ways. I should add that the role of socialists affiliated, for the most part, to the various “language” organizations attached to the Social Democratic Party of Canada, as well as other leftists, was probably central to the success of the strike in the North End.

The returned soldiers were an even greater unknown. In January 1919 a full scale anti-immigrant, anti-“Bolshevik” riot had broken out in Winnipeg made up largely of returned soldiers. They marched to the Swift meatpacking plant to get them to fire immigrant workers (“enemy aliens”) and they attacked a socialist memorial meeting for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, and then spent two days roaming the streets of the North End, attacking immigrants, smashing windows, breaking into homes and stores, demanding to see naturalization papers, and making people kiss the Union Jack. The local daily papers supported them. Certainly returned soldiers were generally anxious about their jobs and futures and could be potentially set against those who hadn’t fought in Europe and particularly immigrants. However, in the strike, veterans split largely along class lines.

Through the strike there were parades of pro-and anti-strike veterans. A major concern of the strike committee, which was concerned about avoiding excuses for military intervention, was to prevent these parades from ever meeting. It was a silent march organized by returned soldiers that was attacked by the mounted police and irregular “specials” on Bloody Saturday.

The point I want to make is about the significance of class. Despite deep divisions, the common interests of workers were identified and allowed for a degree of unity that surprised, probably, everybody. I think that this is significant now, in an era when many sometimes think of class as simply another social identity, and a focus on class is sometimes seen as avoiding, denigrating, or marginalizing other struggles. But there is no reason to think of this as a zero-sum game. Common participation in a movement for working-class ends demonstrated in practice how diverse and complex class was. While not pretending for a minute that prejudice was adequately addressed, or that deep gender divisions and expectations were undone, the labour movement that came out of the strike was less narrowly Anglo and male that it was going in. An essentially class event enhanced, rather than undermined, the struggles of those who faced other forms of oppression.

This is an interesting and important point because earlier generations of socialists, and particularly Marxists, have been tarred with the brush of working-class essentialism, of seeing only working-class struggles as important and ignoring others. The charge is not entirely unjustified, and is probably true the Anglo male socialists who led the strike. My point here is that real events tend to break out of that narrow box, by putting other issues on the agenda. And, indeed they were downplayed in many ways in 1919.

Speaking of how we remember the strike, this is interesting and important, because in the labour movement our understanding of the strike is shaped, largely, by intervening organizations who, in a sense, remembered it for us. The strike lives today largely because every working-class current in Winnipeg claimed the strike as its own. The plaque I spoke of earlier, at least according to the website, points to the strike as leading to the CCF (and, by extension, I suppose, the NDP). Certainly the Communist Party, along with the picture of the North End as the home of the strike, similarly drew such connections. And, although it died out in the decades after the strike, the One Big Union – a significant union at least in Winnipeg, where it was led by R.B. Russell – has a strong claim for a connection since it, too, was a product of “1919.”

Well, they are all right, and wrong. A clear genealogy can be found in each case, which is hardly surprising in that the Winnipeg General Strike was general, and no working-class political current could exist without a deep relationship to it. And, of course, the period was one of a deep radicalization, reflected in all sorts of ways. Attention is often drawn to several events. In Winnipeg, there were a series of meetings – the most famous was the Walker theatre meeting that took place the December before the strike. It was cosponsored by the Socialist Party of Canada (SPC) and the Winnipeg Trades and Labour Council, and one after another leaders of each, and of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) as well, denounced the federal government’s suppression of civil liberties during the strike and expressed their solidarity with the Russian revolution. The 1700 people present (made up of both Anglos and Eastern European immigrants) passed a series of revolutions and cheered the Russian Soviet Republic, declared their solidarity with the German Revolution, and spoke of a working-class future.

The other key event was the Western Labour Conference, held in Calgary just two months before the general strike. The Winnipeg Trades and Labour Council had sent two prominent SPCers, R.B. Russell and R.J. Johns, as its delegates (they played central roles at the Calgary Conference). This was a meeting, essentially, of the entire Western Canadian labour movement, which decided to organize general strikes against the imperialist attack on the Russian Revolution and in favour of the 6 hour day, and decided to begin the process of forming a separate revolutionary union movement, the One Big Union.

What is interesting, though, is the connection between all of this and the Winnipeg strike. The strike leadership (including many SPCers) repeatedly played down the connection with radicalism, repeatedly stressing that the aims were quite limited in terms of collective bargaining. The strike’s opponents, the Citizens’ Committee of 1000, on the other hand, termed it a revolution, worse: a revolution led by foreigners. This has led to a rather odd dichotomy in its aftermath: a debate about whether the event was a strike or a revolution. The bulk of an earlier generation of historians of the strike (from the 1950s to the 1970s) came from the CCF-NDP tradition and argued that it was simply a strike for limited social goals. Indeed, the notion that it was an attempt at a revolutionary seizure of power soon disappeared from the agenda.

As I’ve suggested, though, it was neither. During the strike, the strike leadership played down any broader socialist claims. In part this was a defensive reaction to the unrestrained red baiting of the opponents of the strike who attempted to use the foreign Bolshevik claim to delegitimize the claims of the original strikers, and to turn the returned soldiers against the strike. The extreme volatility of the returned soldiers added to the strike leadership’s defensiveness, as did the very real fear of martial law and military action against the strikers. The War Measures Act was still in effect; constructing the event as an uprising led by enemy alien revolutionaries was clearly a means of creating the conditions for repression. Consequently, strikers were told to do nothing.

This, though, is only part of the explanation. The strike was led by socialists of various stripes. Prominent members of the SPC and SDPC played central roles. These parties were revolutionary parties in the sense that they saw capitalism as unreformable and that it was necessary to replace it with socialist society run by workers. It was unclear to them, though, how the general strike fitted into this process. For socialists of this era, the development of socialism was an organic process that required both the development of appropriate social conditions as well as the working-class education. Their goal was “making socialists” through education. The strike was, for them, potentially as much of a hindrance as an opportunity. In any case, there was little evidence to them that Winnipeg workers were ready for socialism. The general strike was perceived as a more narrowly economic struggle, as an ordinary strike writ large.

It is easy to overstate this, though, since this perception was already changing. The SDPC, which surpassed the SPC in size in Winnipeg, rejected the refusal of the SPC to address issues of strategy. The Calgary Convention in March had raised the issue of striking for explicitly political ends, and the Winnipeg Strike was, in itself, a massive event in political education. Whether in Victoria Park, or around the city, an estimated 171 mass meetings took place. It was an exercise, in itself, of a kind of democracy that far outstripped the restrained, drop-a-piece-of-paper-into-the-ballot-box-once-every-few-years kind of democracy. But there seems to have been little thinking about how, strategically, the strike could be built and broadened to provide a real kind of political defeat for Canadian capitalism. The opportunity did, in fact, present itself. With broad strike movements across much of the country, and the possibility that the railway running trades could strike and carry the strike to even the smallest centres, an even broader challenge was quite possible. At times, it was even likely. But it was never clearly posed or discussed by the socialist leadership at the time (to be fair, the political parties, the SPC and SDPC were hardly national organizations). The SPC had never had a national convention and the SDPC was more or less a coalition of groups.

This relates to the political legacy. Although all claimed it, the political organizations that formed in its wake were often formed in an attempt to provide a more effective political strategy. Ian Angus, in the May-June 2009 issue of Canadian Dimension argues, correctly as far as it goes, that the Communist Party was an attempt to provide that leadership. He is incorrect in suggesting that “most of the leaders” of the strike joined the CP, but the connection he suggests is quite real; the CP represented a new socialist strategy developed by those who had, in many cases, been socialist militants before the strike and, no doubt, many who had been radicalized by it.

In fact the left in Winnipeg in the aftermath of the general strike was large, diverse, and fascinating; they drew many different conclusions about the strike. The socialist leadership of the strike ended up, in the short term at least, in the One Big Union and in the Independent Labour Party. It was the latter that made important electoral breakthrough as several of them were elected, from jail, to the Manitoba Legislature. The fact that the ILP was an electoral party and that it eventually joined the CCF when it emerged in the 1930s, does not mean that they should simply be dismissed as social democrats. They still talked about revolutionary change. They ran in elections, but, for a time in the 1930s, disaffiliated from the CCF because of what they considered its non-working-class composition and sentiments. The OBU played an important role politically and culturally. They brought in a speaker – Marshall Gauvin – who gave anti-religious speeches (among other topics) at the Metropolitan Theatre every Sunday night for decades. A Women’s Labour organization formed and debated the role of women and women’s activism in many fields. The CP, of course, had its whole range of activities. All of this was not simply the product of the general strike — Winnipeg had a healthy labour and socialist culture going into it — but this culture was stronger, and more pluralistic, coming out of it.

So the strike didn’t, in some way, create either the CP (the Russian Revolution did that), or the CCF or NDP (contrary to Angus’s comments, current historians of the strike do not argue that it gave birth to the CCF). General strikes and NDP, of course, do not fit easily in the same sentence. And, the radicalism and spirit of revolt present in the strike were directed not just against capital, but frankly against the trade union officialdom of the day. This is not to say there are not connections. The strike lead to many things and its significance was hotly debated in the 1920s and 1930s just as we are doing now.

In the aftermath of the strike, there were show trials that are worth commenting on. Those who were arrested and tried (some immigrants were simply arrested and deported under the new and rapidly passed immigration act), were not in fact tried for any activities during the strike. They were tried for their ideas. The Canadian state put socialism on trial. They were charged for possessing the Communist Manifesto, for having attended the Walker Theatre meeting, etc. The state tried to criminalize their ideas. And it blew up in their faces. Some of the parallels to today – of labeling ideas and organizations as “terrorist” and criminalizing them – are apparent. But the defendants used the occasion of the trial (and their imprisonment) to publicize their ideas. Pritchard’s address to the jury is a wonderful case in point. It was published and very widely distributed. Ironically, despite the socialist strike’s leadership difficulty in connecting the strike to the broader struggle for socialism, the strike was a breakthrough for Marxist ideas in Winnipeg and beyond. And the very example of the strike demonstrated that there was a political subject – labour – capable of taking over a city and perhaps much more.

Jim Naylor teaches History at Brandon University. This is a slightly edited version of a talk presented on May 8, 2009 in Winnipeg at the “Rekindling the Spirit of 1919” event organized by MayWorks.