| Monday, April 4, 1988

k by Mike Gordon Canadian University Press When U.S. president Ronald Reagan ar- : rives in Toronto this June, a group of Canadians will be there with a warrant for his arrest.

The same Canadians also plan to arrest the leaders of Canada, Great Britain, France, Japan, Germany and Italy for their crimes against humanity, as they gather in Toronto > for the Group of Seven Nations summit.

b Billed as the "Citizen’s Arrest of the Of- | ficial Terror Network," the activists will be taking part in a three-day tribunal inquiry into the international crimes of the seven na- tions. Using Canadian law and United Nations conventions, the tribunal will indict the seven government leaers of crimes of pover- ty, war, torture, the arms race, pollution, homelessness and genocide from Northern Ireland to Micronesia.

"These seven nations are basically an economic group that are waging an ongoing war against everything - the environment, our children, and the planet as a whole,” said Ken Hancock, tribunal organizer from the Alliance for Non-Violent Action.

Witnesses from around the world will testify at the tribunal from June 9-12. The tribunal is intended, in part, to ensure the seven nations adhere to international human rights standards, such as the Nuremburg laws, making preparation of crimes against humanity a criminal offence.

“We’re not just looking at war as a con- flict between nations, but as a condition of the economic and political system these men run,” Hancock said.

Hancock sees the Hans Christian Andersen fable, the Emperor’s New Clothes,

as a metaphor for the leaders’ true nature.

“Not only is the emperor naked with power," he said, “but the emperor is a terrorist." Speakers ranging from Native Canadians to Central American refugees will testify against the seven nations before a jury. The embassies of each country have been in- vited to send a defense attorney to represent them, but so far none have responded.

The citizen’s arrest will be an act of non-violent obligation under international law. Organizers expect Canadian security of- ficials to arrest them, possibly before they at- tempt to deliver the warrant.

"Any desire to squash this kind of resis- tance is going to be handled diplomatically through the court, but there will certainly be

the Other Press

an overt use of force," says Hancock. In a way, he says, the action is theatre, as well as a practical and political action.

"The whole point is that the summit they’re having is theatre as well," he said. "It’s an event put on to sell themselves to the public.”

In the tribunal, witnesses and prosecut- ing attorney’s will cite international agree- ments Canada has ratified, such as the U.N. Conventions on Human Rights, and Against Torture, which decree no signing country will provide safe haven for torturers, and will deport suspects to their countries of origin.

The tribunal will also use Bill C-71, the War Criminals Act, which gives immigration officials power to bar from the country those known to engage in war crimes.

The Bill was passed in September 1987 after the Deschenes Commission revealed evidence of former nazi war criminals living in Canada. By the time the Bill passed, it was amended to include any crimes against peoples at any point in history.

"So we say we agree - don’t let the seven countries in," says Hancock.

The Bill also provides for prosecution of anyone involved in war crimes against Canadian citizens.

Hancock says the best result of the tribunal would be to show the War Criminals Act cannot be used fairly if the government applies it selectively to fit its political agen- da.

"Canada is obviously not going to prosecute its allies," he said, adding, "Ob- viously, they never meant it to apply to them- selves."

Witnesses will testify at the tribunal in several categories. Three sections will focus on human rights. Another will deal with damage to the environment and human health. One will concentrate on, "What we call ‘indefensible nuclearism’ - the whole chain of nuclear terror and the destruction to the environment," says Hancock. A final tes- timony will focus on economic crimes - crimes against the poor in the face of un- checked military spending.

Native testimony against the Canadian and U.S. government will be a strong ele- ment in the tribunal. With much internation- al attention focused on South Africa’s white- minority rule, and now the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Canada’s treat- ment of its Native people’s is often ignored.

Few Canadians, for instance, know the South African government studied the

Canadian reserve system as a model for the apartheid bantustans.

Jury members in the human rights sec- tion will include John McMurty, a University of Guelph professor; Chris Levan, from Queen’s Theological College; Art Solomon, a Native elder; and Charles Roach, a lawyer from the Toronto black community.

Other ‘prosecuting attorneys’ will in- clude Philip Agee, ex-CIA agent and author; Mirna Anaya, from the El Salvador Human Rights Commission; and Philip Berrigan, an activist who, as a member of the Plough- shares 8, has served time in prison for taking part in non-violent actions against U.S. militarism, including the hammering-in of nuclear warhead nose-cones.

The tribunal may also include tes- timony by children -possibly pre- filmed due to the intimidation of a public forum - and others on the psychological terror of growing up with nuclear weapons, the subject of a recent McMaster University study.

Another speaker will be Clair Culhane, Canada’s most outspoken prison abolitionist and prisoner rights activist. Culhane sees the tribunal as an opportunity to raise issues often ignored within the social justice move- ment, such as the torture of Canadian prisoners, and the prison system as a $6 bil- lion profit industry.

If the tribunal is going to discuss inter- national human rights - abuses, she says, it must cast an eye to the Canadian prison sys- tem.

In 1982, Archimbault prison in Quebec was the scene of one of the worst prison riots in Canadian history. Three guards were killed, and three prisoners committed suicide. "The prison was closed for 10 days, and the guards took out their fury on prisoners," including violent and humiliating physical and sexual abuse, she said.

The riot was so bad it sparked an inves- tigation by Amnesty International, the Inter- national Federation of Human Rights (Paris), and the American Civil Liberties Union.

"If they talk about torture in other countries, it’s about time they talked about it here."Culhane will also speak to Canada’s international obligations and complicity in war crimes. "I will be linking up Canada’s role in Vietnam, and its ongoing role - as a colony of the Americans, kowtowing to Pen- tagon policy, acting as what I call ‘friends of the butcher’ - with our role in Chile, Pales- tine, Nicaragua, South Africa."

Summit leaders will downplay the

_ Page9

| Who will pardon Ronnie Raygun?

tribunal as having no authority. But then again, political and religious leaders have a long tradition of arrogance towards the public whom they claim to represent, says Hancock.

"The system is geared so decisions are left in the hands of an economic elite who profit from them,” said Hancock, "There’s not much responsibility at a popular level."

The tribunal uses language the or- ganizers feel most accurately describes the roots of our system and its effects on the planet’s population. "Terrorism is a word used in our society towards non-state actions - that’s ‘retail’ terrorism, as opposed to ‘wholesale’ terrorism of governments,” he said.

"The elite never refer to actions they do as terrorist. They say it’s for democracy and freedom," said Hancock. "That’s part of our responsibility in holding a popular event to show what is being done.”

Clark recently referred to Israel’s repression of Palestinian protests in occupied West Bank and Gaza as human rights viola- tions under international standards - deten- tion without charge, excessive force against civilian protests, torture.

"If that’s a standard, it’s one we could use against the many actions of the seven na- tions," said Hancock.

But while the tribunal will focus on U.N. charters and the War Criminals Act, he says he wants to avoid using a totally legal framework. "We don’t want to forget that there’s also a moral international consensus that it’s wrong to slaughter millions of people, wrong to let people freeze to death in the streets of Canada while we talk about nuclear subs.

"I don’t want to see us lose that, or give it less importance, just because it isn’t writ- ten down. It isn’t written in U.N. charters," said Hancock, "it exists in people’s con- science.”

International law also outlines the law of omission - refusal to act and resist com- mitted war crimes. The point of the tribunal is not to merely condemn world leaders, but to question our role in letting these crimes continue.

"To know these policies, it’s our responsibility to resist them," says Hancock. "We know if we do nothing, we enter the realm of criminality and violence too."