By Dennis Gruending

I spent two days in Toronto on June 26-27 during the G20 summit of world political leaders. I was doing communications-related work for a peaceful rally and march organized by labour and citizens’ groups (including some churches) on Saturday. It was a day that was to turn nasty late in the afternoon when a small group of people began to commit acts of vandalism. I took the photo shown here on Queen Street while upwards of 30 thousand people were marching peacefully in the rain. In the left corner of the frame, a young girl walks carrying an umbrella and behind her a man holds the hand of his female companion. In the centre is a banner that says people should come before profits and that public services essential to citizens must be protected. There are also people carrying flags identifying their unions – the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the Service Employees International Union and others.

The People First rally began in the pouring rain at Queen’s Park, Ontario’s parliament building. A group of dark-clad police officers were ranged in front of the entrance. They treated any demonstrators who came near to them in a friendly but non-committal manner. The event’s sponsoring organizations included the Canadian Labour Congress, the Ontario Federation of Labour, the Council of Canadians, Greenpeace and the Canadian Federation of Students. The march began after about 30 minutes of introductions and speeches. The route was to take about 90 minutes, although it was awhile before the crowd of thousands could file its way into the street. (Read on …)

By Dennis Gruending

Although I have attended Remembrance Day ceremonies at the National War Memorial in Ottawa in the past, I decided this year to support a smaller event whose theme was peace and reconciliation rather than war. On November 10th, I was one of about 300 people who heard an agonizingly sad but ultimately hopeful speech by Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish. He is a Palestinian paediatric physician and peace advocate whose house in Gaza was struck by Israeli tank shell on January 16, 2009.

Abuelaish, a widower, was home on that day with his eight children and other family members and was scheduled to give an interview on Israeli television via cell phone. A shell fired from a tank killed three of his daughters, aged 14, 15 and 21, along with a 17-year-old niece. Shada, another daughter, and a second niece were injured. The journalist who called moments after the attack found the doctor sobbing inconsolably. “My girls, O God, They are dead,” he said and pleaded for help. The video clip was broadcast around the world. Abuelaish and his family became the face of the human suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. A ceasefire was declared two days later.

The New York Times describes Abuelaish as “a rarity, a Gazan at home among Israelis.” He told his Ottawa audience that he practiced medicine in both Gaza and Israel and that he has delivered as many Jewish babies as Palestinian ones. His tragedy has not deflected him from the path of peace and reconciliation. “I am Muslim but we have to go beyond that to think about humanity and what brings us, Muslims and Jews, together,” he told his Ottawa audience. “I believe that God is good and even tragedy is good. I assure you I am looking forward. I believe that everything is possible other than having my daughters back.”

Ed Broadbent, former leader of the New Democratic Party and a human rights campaigner, was the evening’s moderator. “As a Canadian, a father and grandfather,” Broadbent said to Abuelaish, “it is almost impossible for me to conceive of losing these children as you have lost your daughters.” Broadbent then said to the audience: “It would be easier to understand if Dr. Abuelaish came through that with dreams of vengeance. He continues to reach out to those who might be considered his enemies but he does not see them as such.” Abuelaish was nominated for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

He was in Ottawa as the guest of Potlucks for Peace, a group of about 30 Jewish and Arab people who gather monthly to share food and talk about peace in the Middle East. The group’s members do not always agree on solutions – whether, for example, there should be one state or two states in the region, or whether Israeli settlements pushed into the Palestinian West Bank are justified in the name of security. I have, at previous of their events, sensed tensions over the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands on the one hand, and anxiety about Israeli security on the other. The potluck group appears to hold it all together through mutual respect and discipline. “We believe that out of the willingness to engage in dialogue, solutions can arise,” the group says on its website. “We hope that our very existence sends a positive message.”

Abuelaish’s story has a Canadian twist. He had been invited to the University of Toronto for a three-year medical residency and was making plans to move his eight children to Canada when his home in Gaza was shelled and his three daughters killed. Abuelaish did come to Toronto in March 2009. His 17-year-old daughter, who was injured in the attack, spent four months in hospital and is now studying computer engineering in Canada.

Abuelaish draws many of his peace analogies from his practice of medicine. “As a physician, I am not allowed ever to give up hope on a patient. We must act and we must forgive each other,” he said. “No one is perfect. We make mistakes. Forgiveness allows us to move forward.” He also said: “As a doctor, I know that hatred is a toxin. The path of light in the long run is the more efficient choice than to live with hate and be consumed with revenge”

He is an inspirational speaker in the best sense, but his response to questions indicates that he is not a politician or diplomat and is unlikely to be one those negotiating land for peace or the future of Israeli settlements. When asked during the question period if he is in favour of an economic boycott of Israel similar to that against South Africa in years past, he did not answer that question but spoke about his high hopes for peace initiatives driven by the Obama administration. Asked whether he favours a one state or a two-state solution for the region, he said the question was theoretical and fell back on a medical metaphor. “Survival is most important at the moment. The first action is to stabilize the patient. One state or two states is theoretical. There is a Palestinian nation and an Israeli nation and they must live together in peace.”

I did not attend the Remembrance Day ceremony at the National War Memorial but I watched it on television. It is always moving to see the veterans but less so the fly bys, march bys and the firing of canons. As I watched and heard the television commentary, it was all about us: our freedom, our sacrifice, our families and our heroes. Even the armed forces chaplain who spoke could invoke God’s caring and sympathy only for us. In this ceremony, there was no compassion for the other – the bride and groom and their guests in an Afghan wedding procession, for example, who were bombed to bits in 2008 by an air strike called in by NATO soldiers. No one on Remembrance Day recalls the deadly mess of war that remains for others to clean up after the troops have withdrawn – the unexploded land mines, the buildings and fields in ruins, the shrapnel embedded in flesh and the body burns from white phosphorous.

Potlucks for Peace and Dr. Abuelaish attempt to reach across a divide of fear and hatred to acknowledge and embrace the other. Our officially planned and sanctioned Remembrance Day ceremonies do not.

By Dennis Gruending

Canada’s eight-year war in Afghanistan is losing support no matter how much money and effort our government and military invest in trying to convince us that it is noble and worthwhile. A growing number of people believe either that the war is a tragic waste of lives and money or that it is simply not one that intruders to Afghanistan can win. Let’s start with the family of Private Jonathan Couturier, 23, the 131st Canadian soldier killed in the Afghan war — about 500 more have been wounded, not to mention the deaths of hundreds of Afghan civilians. His family has said publicly that Couturier told his brother that the Canadian mission was “a bit useless” and that young soldiers were simply “wasting their time over there.”

Robert Fowler, much in the news lately, is another person who believes that Canada is wasting lives and coin in Afghanistan. Fowler, a highly respected career diplomat, now retired, was Canada’s former ambassador to the United Nations. He was on a UN mission to Niger in December 2008 when he was kidnapped by operatives of Al-Qaeda and held for 130 days. Thankfully he was released. CBC Television host Peter Mansbridge has interviewed Fowler at length about his ordeal. Mansbridge asked him if being kidnapped and held by Al-Qaeda changed the way in which he sees Canada’s role. Here is some of the exchange:

Fowler:  I cannot object to the objectives in Afghanistan, but I just don’t think in the West that we are prepared to invest the blood or the treasure to get this done.

Mansbridge: Did this reinforce that view?

Fowler: Yes, it did. It’s more than blood and treasure because it’s also…it’s not just commitment and the wasting of our youth and the enormous, enormous cost in difficult financial times, it’s to get it done, we will have to do some unpleasant things, I mean, some deeply hard… This is not a nice war.

Mansbridge: But is it worth doing?

Fowler: That’s the issue. . . I can show you a lot of places in this world where you can put girls in schools without killing people. It’s a noble objective, Afghanistan, but a lot of people have tried it before. I mean, if you, in the abstract, Peter, asked me to define a more complex, challenging mission, I couldn’t do it. Afghanistan is about as far as Canada’s ken as anything I can think of. The culture is as foreign to us as anything you can imagine . . . it strikes me as rather extreme that one goes out and looks for particularly complex misery to fix. There’s lots of things to fix that can be done more efficiently and probably more effectively.

Why are Canadians in Kandahar?

The esteemed journalist Robert Fisk is even more blunt. He was in Ottawa last winter promoting a new book and he spoke to a packed house. Fisk has lived and worked in the Middle East for decades and is as much an historian as he is a journalist. “Why are Canadians in Kandahar? You will say, to build bridges and roads but your soldiers are coming home dead.”

Fisk chastised Canadian politicians and journalists who promote the war as a romantic adventure. “This is lethal. None of your leaders has been in a war. You have got to leave Afghanistan. It does not belong to you. As long as you fight in Muslim countries you are no longer safe at home. If we send more troops anywhere in the Middle East we are mad.”  Fisk added that he has never been an “embedded” journalist – one who lives and travels with the military and submits to censorship. All of the mainstream Canadian journalists in Afghanistan are embedded, a practice that many of them used to criticize.

A grim assessment

While the Canadian military and politicians continue in their attempts to sell the war as a success, General Stanley McChrystal, the top American military commander in Afghanistan, provided a grim assessment to his superiors in August and it was leaked to the media in September. “The situation in Afghanistan is serious; neither success nor failure can be taken for granted,” the general wrote. “Although considerable effort and sacrifice have resulted in some progress, many indicators suggest the overall situation is deteriorating.” His solution? He wants more troops (generals always do) to add to the 68,000 soldiers on the ground now.

“Murderers and scumbags”

The war began in October 2001 when a U.S. and British military operation was launched in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks in the U.S. The stated purpose was to capture Osama bin Laden, destroy Al-Qaeda, and remove the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Bin Laden remains free and is almost certain no longer in Afghanistan. Canada’s combat role began early in 2002 with 140 soldiers sent by the Liberal government and it escalated after General Rick Hillier became chief of defence staff in February 2004. Hillier used Afghanistan as his lever to win an increase in military spending and to shift the culture and reality of Canada’s armed forces from peacekeeping to an army bent on killing. He described the Taliban as “detestable murderers and scumbags.” A new military recruiting campaign featured another Hillier quote: “We are the Canadian forces and our job is to kill people.”

Stephen Harper was elected with a minority government early in 2006 and was keen, as he saw it, to enhance Canada’s clout in the world by projecting hard power. Our involvement in Afghanistan, he said, was “raising Canada’s leadership role, once again, in the United Nations and in the world community where we used to have an important leadership role.” That assertion is debatable to begin with and even less appealing with each Canadian roadside death in Afghanistan, but nonetheless Parliament voted in 2008 to extend our fighting presence there from 2009 to 2011. There will now be increasing pressure from the Americans and from some within Canada for us to extend again, but the war has become increasingly unpopular with citizens.
Overwhelming opposition

The polling company EKOS reported on July 16, 2009 that 54% of Canadians oppose participation in the military mission in Afghanistan, while 34% support and 12% have no opinion.  “We have been polling on this question since the mission began,” said EKOS president Frank Graves. “The public outlook on Afghanistan has undergone a steady and radical transformation. From overwhelming public support at the outset of the mission we have seen an inexorable reversal to overwhelming public opposition. Opposition has grown from a trivial mid-teen level to nearly well over 50 percent.”

This opposition by ordinary Canadians is remarkable given the elite and media consensus that supports, and even celebrates the war. The Conservative and Liberal parties, and even the NDP have voted in favour of having soldiers fight in Afghanistan until 2011. Newspaper and broadcast pundits are mainly in favour. Hockey Night in Canada has featured the continuing spectacle of commentator Don Cherry shilling for the war. On one Grey Cup Sunday, the trophy was ferried from Hamilton to Toronto aboard a military boat then taken to the stadium riding on an army tank. The Stanley Cup was sent to Afghanistan. Hockey star Sidney Crosby toured a battleship in Halifax harbour when he took the Cup back to his home province of Nova Scotia this past summer. Recently, CBC Television featured Peter MacKay, the defence minister, participating for two days in a military boot camp — but it wasn’t for real. As Robert Fisk reminds us, “None of your leaders has ever been in a war.”

The frame that has been created by the political and military elite with the complicity of most media is that Canada’s war is heroic and necessary to make the world safer and help eliminate terrorism. News anchors report on red shirt days and in Ottawa city buses carry decals that say: “Support our troops.” The inference, indeed the frequent allegation, is that if one does not support the war as our political leaders have conceived it and our commanders are fighting it, one is against the men and women in the military. This is a false and crude frame but it has been used with some success. Instinctively, however, a growing majority of Canadians understand that it is a hoax, despite the best efforts of slick people to convince us otherwise.

By Dennis Gruending

Richard Sanders described it as a “David and Goliath” contest. On one side, Canada’s military and weapons contractors (they prefer to call themselves the defence and security industry), along with Ottawa’s mayor, the bureaucracy and most city councillors. On the other side, a small and loosely organized group of citizens drawn from perennially under-funded church and peace groups, including one called the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT), to which Mr. Sanders belongs. The trip wire was the City of Ottawa’s decision to turn its back on a 20-year-old ban against allowing war-related trade shows to occur on municipal property. The recent debate has pulled back a curtain on Canada’s military-industrial complex – it exports weapons and components that are ultimately used to kill people in foreign wars and other conflicts.

The ban regarding military trade shows on city property was passed by a previous and arguably more enlightened city council in 1989 by a vote of 11 to one. But this year in a neat bit of sophistry, staff advised that the ban no longer applied because the city had undergone various amalgamations and boundary changes. The city was no longer the city, as it were. So it was that a military exhibit called CANSEC 2009 was held on May 27 and 28 at Lansdowne Park, a location that normally hosts home shows, hockey games and a farmers’ market. Security was tight during CANSEC and members of the public were not allowed to attend the event. An ad hoc citizens’ group did demonstrate in the rain at the entrance to Lansdowne and held an evening vigil in a nearby United Church, but to no avail.

CADSI receives government money

CANSEC is the organizational child of the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries (CADSI), is a lobby group representing hundreds the country’s largest weapons producers and exporters of military equipment. CADSI describes itself much more benignly on its website as “a not-for-profit business association that represents 800 domestically-based, world-leading, technology-oriented companies…” The organization receives money from the federal government for its activities and about 200 CADSI exhibitors were on hand in to display their wares for potential buyers at the CANSEC event.

An Ottawa Citizen article about the show was accompanied by a photo of a Danish soldier perched in the turret of a CV90 armoured troop carrier built by a Canadian-based company called BAE Systems. The photo’s cutline said that BAE hoped its product “would interest buyers.” Another article in a publication called Flightglobal.com reported that an Ottawa-based company called Gastops held a signing ceremony at CANSEC to celebrate its agreement to sell components to Pratt & Whitney for a plane called the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Debate at city council

On June 2, after CANSEC had ended, the action shifted to city council where Councillor Alex Cullen introduced a motion at the economic affairs committee that would have re-established the ban against arms shows on city property. More than 60 people came out to speak, most of them in favour of restablishing the ban. The committee voted against re-instating the ban and then voted in favour of another explicit motion that will allow CANSEC to use Lansdowne Park again in 2010. The question will now move onto the full council.

Ottawa’s mayor Larry O’Brien normally chairs the economic affairs committee but he was absent. He has had to step down temporarily while he defends himself in court against allegations that he is guilty of attempted bribery and influence peddling in convincing a competitor to drop out of the mayoralty race in 2006. The mayor, however, publicly endorsed CANSEC 2009 and was immediately accused of being in a conflict of interest. O’Brien is the founder of Calian Technologies, a company that belongs to CANSI and also has contracts with the U.S. military. O’Brien has continued to hold shares in Calian and chose to remain on the company’s board of directors after winning the mayoralty. A Calian subsidiary, SED Systems, exhibited at CANSEC 2009.

Pesky questions

CANSEC’s promoters were assiduous in attempting to cast their event as a mere trade and technology show, but the pesky citizens’ group and others are asking some blunt questions. Do Canadian-based companies build weapons and\or components for fighter jets, bombers, attack helicopters and tanks? The answer is yes but it is difficult to get anyone at CADSI to admit it. The second question is whether those weapons or components are provided solely to the Canadian military, or exported to other countries.

The answer is that companies belonging to CADSI sell billions of dollars worth of military equipment to both the Canadian military and to foreign customers. The final, and obvious, conclusion to be drawn is that the weapons are used to kill people — those considered to be enemy combatants, but civilians as well.

Industry spokespersons are adept at avoiding just those kinds of questions. A CADSI news release issued on May 27 (during the CANSEC exhibit) quoted Tim Page, CADSI’s president, as saying: “The technologies on display here today provide leading edge equipment and services to allow our paramedics, firefighters, police officers and military personnel to carry out their responsibilities more effectively and safely – helping them do their jobs and save lives.” Page sent on to say that many of the innovations unveiled at CANSEC over the years such as alarm systems, can be found in homes across Canada. No doubt many of the CANSEC exhibitors do produce products for civilian use – but they also produce weapons and components and they export them.

Pointy end of the stick

The words weapons or war are not mentioned in CADSI promotional material either, but CADSI’s Mr. Page was somewhat more explicit when he appeared before city councillors, urging them to defeat the motion requesting a ban on military related shows. The Ottawa Citizen quoted him as saying: “[CANSEC] is a very technology-oriented show with lots of software applications, simulation and training presentations … but the pointy-end of the stick is part of the arsenal required to protect, defend and promote Canadian values and interests.”

The arms show occurred against a backdrop of Canada’s military presence in Afghanistan and CADSI attempts to exploit that reality. Page was quoted as saying, “It is essential that when we ask men and women in uniform to put themselves in harm’s way that we do so by ensuring they have the best possible equipment and training available to them.” Canadians, of course, do want to protect their soldiers, 120 of whom have lost their lives in Afghanistan – although it is, at the same time, perfectly legitimate to challenge the decisions of our government to send and keep them there. The citizen’s group opposing CANSEC’s exhibition at Lansdowne Park introduced another perspective by providing a message from Malalai Joya, a female member of Afghanistan’s parliament. She sent, via email, a deeply disturbing set of pictures of Afghan children, most of them from her region, who have been killed and horribly maimed in NATO bombing raids. She asked if any of these weapons had their origin in Canada.

Canada as arms exporter

Resarch provided by the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade indicates that Canada is the world’s seventh largest arms exporter. Canada military exports totaled more than $5.6 billion  between 2003 and 2005. Of the 73 countries that received these exports, 39 had troops that were engaged in major military conflicts, either at home or abroad. The Canadian arms industry is closely integrated with that of the United States. Canadian-based companies supply weapons and components to the Americans, who either use them or provide them to other countries. The U.S. was the recipient of 70 per cent of Canadian military exports between 2003 and 2005, at a value of approximately $4 billion.

Richard Sanders says, “Ninety percent of the CANSEC 2009 military trade show exhibitors — the data is available from Industry Canada — report that they do export their products.”  He says that by researching the websites of Canadian-based companies exhibiting at CANSEC he was able to produce detailed information about Canadian military hardware that is embedded in approximately 40 U.S. weapons systems being used in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. These weapons include the lethal A-10 Thunderbolt airplane, the AC 130 Spectre gunship, the AH 64 Apache attack gunship, a light armoured vehicle made by General Dynamics in London Ontario, and missiles and warheads made by Bristol Aerospace in Winnipeg.

Conversion

Sanders says that in recent years CADSI has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT).  The grants are part of the government’s Program for Export Marketing Development and were specifically designed to assist CADSI in its efforts to promote international trade, and the international business development activities of its member corporations. CANSEC is the major annual event organized by CADSI. Sanders says that export data obtained online from Industry Canada also indicates that most of CANSEC 2009’s approximately 200 exhibitors report that they do indeed export their products.

CADSI’s trump argument revolves around money and jobs. The organization’s website claims that its member companies provide 70,000 Canadian jobs and $10 billion in economic activity. It’s a strategic and probably effective argument, particularly during a recession that has thrown more than 400,000 Canadians out of work since October 2008. It is a point that has been emphasized in letters to the editor and columns in Ottawa newspapers. But the same argument could be made (and has been) to support the tobacco and asbestos industries, not to mention gambling, prostitution, and even the cultivation of drug bound poppy crops. The solution proposed for those industries is conversion. It’s a good word.