NEWS opnewseditor@gmail.com French Students March Against Anti-Youth Labour Laws Nicole Burton, News Editor For workers under the age of 26 in France, a new two-year job contract now allows employers to fire them at any time without explanation. This has put youth and students in an uproar across the country, and as many as 300,000 joined rallies and protests in Paris, Marseille, Grenoble, Rennes, and Bordeaux by the end of last week. From March 10-20, nearly half a million students participated in the protests, including marches in the streets, holding protests in their univetsities, and occupying local city halls and government buildings. The new law was proposed in the fall 2005 by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, after a 4-week blaze of " youth protests erupted across France, mainly among the suburbs of major cities where youth from immigrant fami- lies face Frances greatest levels of poverty, unemployment, racism, and police brutality. Villepin insisted this would be a useful way to encourage employers to hire young work- ers and to get more young people out of the streets—and out of trouble. What Villepin doesn’t say in his press statements is more important, French protestors said. Last Thursday, students marched on Place d’Italie in Paris, chanting, “Villepin, you’re toast—the students are in the streets!” As many as 100,000 were counted in Thursday’s Paris demonstration, where students wore black garbage bags over their bodies to symbolize how the new labour law makes youth “disposable.” BBC news is currently managing an open blog for stu- dents participating in the rallies to speak their minds. From Paris, Kaya Burgess writes, “In Paris as an Oxford Uni languages student, I was on the front line in the protests today. The majority [were] concerned about a law which ridicules the very idea of a ‘contract’... [there was an] unnecessary use of tear gas and armoured vehicles against a predominantly young, peaceful majority. Using my university card and camera, I posed as a journalist behind police lines, witnessing the French descend into a police state.” Also from Paris, an anonymous source wrote, “I am an American living and studying in France. From what I have observed, except for graduates from the elite ‘grands ecoles, young people are expected to do a series of ‘stages’ (internships) until they are lucky to get a ‘real’ job...[the real problem is] this economy desperately needs a jump- start.” The nationwide student protests are considered the largest since the infamous May 4th student riots in 1968, when students became highly radicalized around questions of student rights, workers’ rights, US and French military intervention in Vietnam, and social funding for France’s education system. Reassessing Canada’s Military Role Abroad Amanda Stutt, The Ubyssey (University of British Columbia) VANCOUVER (CUP)—Heavy criticism was handed out over Canada’s current role in Afghanistan and Haiti during a talk Tuesday at the Student Union Building’s Norm Theatre on the campus of the University of British Columbia. Canada’s recent two-year military presence in Haiti has been a “brutal occupation and has been wiped from the historical record, less than a'few months after its finaliza- tion,” said Nathan Crompton, a third-year political science major during the “War, Gender and Terror” forum. The history of Haiti as a nation has been completely obscured because of this, he added. Nita Palmer, a UBC student organizer, discussed the political reasoning behind the military interventions in Haiti and Afghanistan. She noted how the geo-political positions of these nations are viewed as “hubs of Canadian imperialism.” “Occupying Afghanistan opens up a lot of opportunity for economic expansion...throughout all of Europe and Asia,” Palmer said, citing an agreement signed following the 2002 invasion to run an oil pipeline fromTurkmenistan down to Pakistan. This pipeline would run straight through Afghanistan, she added. Palmer emphasized that Haiti is another strategic point. She noted that because Latin America is a hotbed of social movements, the occupation of Haiti made it a key political foothold in Latin America. Palmer also argued that Canada’s role in these occupa- tions has brought destruction to not only the lives of peo- ple in occupied nations, but also to the lives of Canadians because of increases in military spending. “Students and youth bear the brunt of these cuts to social programs by increasing debt and poverty...These are not just attacks on people in Haiti and Afghanistan, but also are attacks on people in Canada,” she said. Women’s Studies Professor Sunera Thobani spoke pas- sionately about “an urgent need to commit ourselves to anti-war, anti-racist, anti-imperialist movements.” In the context of the current occupation of Afghanistan, she said that prominent western women who spoke in support of the invasion—referring specifically to Laura Bush’s public comments about the oppressed state of women under the Taliban regime—legitimize the occu- pation of Afghanistan, that “has been represented as a feminist project of liberating women.” However, she outlined that in contradiction to this premise, that the war “has had devastating consequences for the women in Afghanistan.” “Afghanistan still continues to be seen as ‘the good war,” she stated, “and what this discourse has done about liberating Muslim women is that it has given the war a legitimacy that it otherwise wouldn’t have had.” In addition, Thobani stressed that since the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration presented an idea of an attack on the West and the response in Canada was to accept this discourse of Western values “being under attack by Muslims.” “The Muslim is now defined as the threat to national security,” she said. “Muslims today [don’t operate] in North America as a religious category, [they] operate as a radicalized category.” “We need to confront this anti-Islam hysteria,” she said.