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What could be more noteworthy than Wyclef?
Posted Wed 25 August 2010, 4:08pm

Over the past few weeks the media have been closely following the ups and (mostly) downs of Wyclef Jean's bid for candidacy as the next president of Haiti. Maybe they think fluffy stories about the hip-hop singer help make the Haitian election more interesting to the Canadian public, who'd otherwise see it as largely irrelevant.

In fact, all the media have shown is that even with ample opportunity, they've still managed to erase that this election is quite relevant to Canadians; Fanmi Lavalas, by far the most popular political party in Haiti, have once again been banned from participating, as they have in every other election since Canada helped carry out the 2004 coup d'état against then-Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

They've also chosen to largely ignore the question of what exactly, if anything, Canadian aid is doing in Haiti.

Instead they've chosen to give space to other pop culture icons to spread ignorance and perpetuate myths about the country. Arcade Fire were on the CBC last week criticizing Wyclef for not speaking French. In fact, only the most wealthy Haitians tend to speak French. Haitian Kreyol is the language spoken by almost all Haitians.

The man pictured in this post is Yvon Neptune, who was Haitian Prime Minister at the time of the 2004 coup. The photograph is taken post-coup, when he became a political prisoner. He's been approved as a presidential candidate with the "Haitians for Haiti" party and will be interesting to watch. Haitians are not easily fooled. If they choose to elect him, hopefully he's less of a disappointment than the current Prime Minister Réné Préval, who Haitians initially had been excited about.

The one spot in the media the debate around Lavalas has turned up is right here in the Winnipeg Free Press. The article, simply titled Keep Aristide's party out, is an exercise in wilful amnesia and ideological contortions. That they even let the topic surface shows they're feeling confident enough to try to see if it'll fly. Luckily, the commenters have no illusions about what's going on, tearing the pundit apart, so it's likely they'll crawl under a rock again for some time, hoping to quietly maneuver an election victory for any of a number of business-friendly candidates.

Canadian mining in the Congo
Posted Wed 11 August 2010, 7:38am

I wrote an article that appears in the new issue of the Dominion, a project of the Canadian Media Co-op. It's on Canada vengefully blocking debt forgiveness to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on behalf of a big mining outfit called First Quantum Minerals, based out of Vancouver. They're very well-connected; former Prime Minister Joe Clark worked for them in the late 1990s and went to the DRC around the time a lot of their mining deals there were signed. The Dominion even included a cartoon with a beaver in it.

It's important we keep on top of Canada's imperialist ambitions abroad. The effects Canada is having on people in Haiti, in Afghanistan, and in countries around the world where its mining corporations are found (Honduras, Chile, the Philippines, Mexico, the DRC, Guatemala, among others) have been devastating, and those of us in Canada are the ones best positioned to change Canada's policies.

For the article, I interviewed Maurice Carney of Friends of the Congo, and aired the interview on Black Mask. You can listen to that interview at the Media Co-op.

All apologies
Posted Wed 4 August 2010, 1:26pm

The Manitoba government has apologized for relocating a Dene community in northern Manitoba to Churchill in the late 1950s, offering them 20 square miles of land in compensation. They were told they were being moved because the caribou in their region were dissapearing, which the government later admitted it had been wrong about. Their new home was a shanty town on the outskirts of Churchill, living off of rations from Indian Agents. One third of their community died within a single generation.

This is another example, along with Stephen Harper's 2008 "Official Apologiy" to residential school survivors, accompanied by the ongoing Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), of how public confession and penance is becoming a common response by elected officials to past crimes.

For people to live peacefully together after crimes of colonialism and occupation have been committed, truth and reconciliation are key. When France was liberated at the end of the second World War, for example, focus on a public process to find out exactly what happened under the occupation and to decide how the country should move forward, instead of carrying out violent reprisals against suspected Nazi collaborators, would likely have spared a good deal of collective retraumatization.

The TRC processes in the 1990s in South Africa after the apartheid era, and in Guatemala and El Salvador after years of right-wing US-backed government terror all seem to have been positive first steps toward healing longstanding wounds.

In the 2000s, the game seems to have changed in an unsettling way. TRCs and public apologies are now being used not after periods of conflict or oppression, but while the oppression is still happening.

The most dramatic example right now is probably in Honduras. Last year, after then-president Manuel Zelaya had raised the minimum wage and begun a long overdue process to review the constitution to better reflect the interests of ordinary people, he was ousted by a military coup. Since that time killings of journalists, activists, and others have been common. The coup government held elections to legitimize itself in November, and the new "president", Porfirio Lobo, has initiated a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to look at what happened. What's notable here is that the killings are ongoing, that the coup government has refused to investigate them, and that the TRC is a requirement for Honduras to be readmitted into the Organization of American States, from which it was suspended when the coup took place. It's not hard figure out who their Commission is serving.

Canada's TRC and apologies have been extremely meaningful to many survivors of residential schooling, relocation, and other polices designed to "kill the Indian, save the man." Many, if not most, have never been granted the slightest acknowledgement for the crimes and trauma they still endure. At the same time, the role of Canada's TRC is reminiscent of the one in Honduras, designed to maintain the status quo rather than to transform society.

"Our" TRC wasn't, in fact, initiated by a government who had decided it was time to make amends for past crimes, but through a court settlement the government accepted to avoid a class action lawsuit by residential school survivors. Even the seemingly heartfelt apology from the Prime Minister was just part of the terms of the settlement, which helps to explain how he was able to tell the world that Canada has "no history of colonialism" a little more than a year later.

More importantly, you can't have peace and reconciliation while the crimes are ongoing. Canada still exists on stolen native land. Manitoba, though apologizing at the moment, is still shutting out native elders who want answers about the province's devastating dam projects in the 1970s. From what I hear there are more indigenous children in care of Child & Family Services today than were in Residential Schools at any point. First Nations across the country are still battling resource extraction mega projects poisoning their communities, and still own next to none of "Canada" under its legal system.

At this point, the main thing the apologies and commissions are accomplishing is to allow people to ask "What more do those natives want? We've already apologized and offered a settlement."

Since TRCs can't yet help us under these circumstances, it might be more useful, as Ward Churchill has suggested, to take a closer look at Article 2 of the UN's Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, with special attention to (e):

Article 2

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

  • (a) Killing members of the group;
  • (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
  • (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
  • (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
  • (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Crowd-sourcing analysis of the Afghan War Diary
Posted Sun 1 August 2010, 4:55pm

Justin Podur was blogging all day yesterday about the start of his computer-aided analysis of the War Diary. He managed to overlay maps of Afghanistan with references in the leak to locations of incidents involving various keywords or acronyms like "Canadian Forces", "Drug War", etc., then overlaying more maps to try to find underlying patterns, all with freely available data and free software. Tim Groves from the Toronto Media Co-op called for groups of people to come together to take a collaborative approach to analysing the references to Canada in the ginormous leak, which could be a really interesting new way to do analysis, especially given all of the free on-line collaboration tools like wikis now in existence. I'm excited to see where this goes!

Here's a brief update on how the whole leak has been unfolding over the past few days: the White House is now begging Wikileaks not to release any more documents. US border guards detained a Wikileaks volunteer (mostly known for his work on the fabulous on-line anonymizer Tor) and questioned him for three hours. They demanded he decode the files on his laptop, and he refused, so they just gave it back to him and let him go, though they kept his three cellphones, and FBI agents followed him around. Bradley Manning, the US sodier accused of giving the documents to Wikileaks, was transferred on Thursday from the military prison in Kuwait where he was held since May to a military prison in Virginia. It's expected he'll be kept there a long time in solitary confinement before being ever being put on trial.

What will be missing from Canadian coverage of the "Afghan War Diary"?
Posted Wed 28 July 2010, 3:14pm

It's been interesting to watch the discourse around the Afghan War Diary in the Canadian corporate press, and to see what they're talking about, and what they're not.

On Sunday, Wikileaks released 91,731 documents about the war in Afghanistan. This is the biggest leak in US history. It'll take some time for analysts to comb through it all, but some reporting trends are already emerging.

Former Canadian top soldier Rick Hillier got space in the CBC yesterday to criticize information in the leak that suggests four Canadian soldiers killed in 2006 were in fact victims of a "friendly fire" attack. Unfortunately, he's shooting the messenger. The tone throughout the article implies that his criticism is an indictment of Wikileaks, who released the documents, rather than of the US military, who almost certainly authored them.

Christie Blatchford moans that she's already bored to death with the whole thing, since we already knew that the war was going badly and that Pakistan has been supporting the Taliban, asking "Are you freaking kidding me? This is news?"

She says "Pakistan" here to cleverly exchange the idea of "some people in Pakistan" for "the government of Pakistan". The media have told us for years that the occupying forces have had to extend the war across the border, aerially bombing with drones, for example, to deal with people in the area propping up Taliban insurgents. Pakistan's government has not been part of the discussion. The leak, on the other hand, is reported to show that the ISI, Pakistan's spy agency, are providing the Taliban arms and intelligence, even though Pakistan are ostensibly US allies. Blatchford points to one Globe article from a few years ago that supposedly makes links Pakistan to the insurgency, but I can't see it behind their paywall.

If this were really as widely known as Blatchford says, why no uproar last year when Canada announced it would like to start selling arms to Pakistan? At the time Pakistan was carrying out a brutal offensive in the north of the country that internally displaced 1.5 million people, but if that weren't enough to raise red flags, you'd think common knowledge that they would end up in Taliban hands would make it noteworthy.

On top of this, it's only the corporate media, led by the New York Times, who have made a big deal of the ISI connection in the first place; the Guardian is saying that there's no real evidence for this in the documents. Centering coverage around this red herring provides a smokescreen for the real issues the leak introduces: war crimes committed by the occupying forces, concealment of information on civilian casualties, and the US dumping money into Afghan media to flood it with material created by the US, among others.

What does Blatchford think about those parts of the leak? Maybe she considers them common knowledge and hence not newsworthy. We'll never know, because she and the rest of the big media outfits will never consider those questions, only touching on whether the leak endangered Canadian troops, whether Pakistanis are trustworthy, and whether the war is going well for the occupying armies.

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