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[source: sovernet-l; Tue, 08 Feb 2000 17:40:42]

Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 19:42:27 -0500
From: "Ben Mahony" <ben.mahony@uleth.ca>
To: vancouver-d@lists.tao.ca
Subject: Human rights Abuse in Canada Amoung Native People
 

Greetings All:

I write this from the Native American Studies Department at the
University of Lethbridge.
Many people, including Dr. Tony Hall and I, have done research on the
mistreatment of Native protesters at the Gustafsen Lake standoff in
central BC, Canada in 1995.

Landmines, a media smear campaign, the use of armoured personnel
carriers and the shooting of unarmed protesters in an agree upon
"no-shoot-zone" were elements of the RCMP and military action at
Gustafsen Lake.

We have a very important and very new video which is of crucial
importance to anyone concerned with human rights, Native issues, social
justice, media issues and human decency. Within 48 hours we hope to have
it in digital form which would employ "quick time" software to be viewed
on the the internet. The exact particulars have yet to be factored out
but our pressing need is that there be a place to situate this film. If
any human rights, native, or media organization can help us with this,
please E-Mail me at ben.mahony@uleth.ca or Dr. Tony Hall at
hall@uleth.ca. Otherwise, call Ben Mahony or Sean Couglin at
403-329-6281 and leave a message on our home number.

I will include a copy of a recent mainstream news article, published by
Dr. Hall in the Vancouver Sun, 21 JAn 2000, which underscores the
importance of this issue as an international human rights issue and
indigenous issue. The footage shows the use of land mines on Native
people by the Canadian military as well as other shocking abuse of
native protesters by Canada's polcie and military. It is important to
get this to as many people as possible in the shortest possible time.

What we need is a server to put it on. We were thinking we would put
this one hour video into six ten minute segments for easier download. It
could also be sent in a zipped file which would tranfer more quickly.

Any advice would be helpful for us but the main thing is we need to send
it to someone or many people/organizations who can support it on thier
server.

Please contact us immediately if you can help us.

Sincerely,

Ben Mahony
Native American Studies Department
University of Lethbridge
E-Mail: ben.mahony@uleth.ca
Phone: 403-329-6281

Here is Dr. Hall's article from the Vancouver Sun:
Subject: Don't Bury the Tragedy at Gustafsen (fwd)

please forward and distribute

DON'T BURY THE TRAGEDY AT GUSTAFSEN
VANCOUVER SUN, JANUARY 21, 2000  P. A 19

Anthony J. Hall
Department of Native American Studies,
University of Lethbridge hall@uleth.ca

In 1995 a modest Indian sun dance ceremony at Gustafsen Lake burst into
an angry dispute over contested title to a small patch of ranch land.
This Native stand was met by the most severe police and military crackdown
in BC’s history.
The little band of dissidents justified their defiant stand by invoking
provisions of the country’s constitution, which they maintained
confirmed the status of their sacred sun dance grounds as unceded Indian
territory.
Very quickly police moved to block reporters from any direct contact
with the so-called “Indian renegades”.
Once the protestors were prevented from telling their side of the
story, the RCMP moved quickly to characterize them and their
controversial lawyer,
Bruce Clark, as criminals and terrorists. Before the confrontation ended,
more than 400 RCMP and Canadian army personnel lined up against about 20
native and non-native protesters who styled themselves as defenders of the
Shuswap Nation.

In an 11-page report on CBC’s coverage in 1995, CBC ombudsman David
Bazay details how the RCMP commandeered unmediated access to the
airwaves of CBC Radio in BC.  Jeffrey Dvorkin, who was the head of CBC Radio
News, was contacted during the height of the standoff by RCMP Staff Sargeant
Peter Montague.
The Mountie told Dvorkin that a “hostage taking” was underway and lives
were at stake. The only way to avert tragedy, claimed Montague, was for CBC
to allow the police to broadcast an unedited message.  Dvorkin gave the
RCMP the benefit of the doubt. He later learned, however, that Montague had
badly misrepresented the truth.  As Bazay reported, Dvorkin’s subsequent
letter of complaint to the RCMP received no response.

In characterizing the quality of police-media relations throughout the
whole episode, Bazay wrote, “There was no way [for reporters] to confirm if
the RCMP were giving the full story — or the degree to which it was
sanitized or exaggerated — or if they were giving any part of the story at
all.”
Bazay noted that the RCMP acknowledged later that they used
“psychological warfare” whose aim was “to smear the reputations and to
destroy the credibility of the protestors.”

Bazay’s report is the most recent addition to an overwhelming body of
evidence proving that the police systematically and repeatedly lied to
the media and the public to discredit not only the dissidents in the Native
camp, but also the very serious legal and political arguments they were
trying to make. In the words of Province columnist Joey Thompson, the
media “got had.”
After sitting through much of the eight-month criminal trial of the Shuswap
Defenders, she concluded that much of what the RCMP reported in 1995
“was a crock” and that reporters had overwhelmingly bought the RCMP myth
of “our men in red blazers against trigger-crazed Indian thugs”.

So far there has been no great chorus of mea culpas nor any vast outcry
demanding a public investigation into what really happened. Instead,
this sad episode suggests that virtually anything goes when it comes to
the dirty business of demonizing and wrongfully criminalizing the most
militant wing of the First Nations sovereignty movement.
John Shafer, an erudite cyberwarrior who hosts a BC campus radio show,
has been especially tenacious in keeping the issue alive. “Gustafsen
epitomizes in many ways the uniquely Canadian way of ‘disappearing’ an
issue-- studied indifference,” he says.

I maintain that the RCMP’s smear campaign has served many political
agendas since 1995.  Its main purpose was to protected the fragile
structure of the BC treaty negotiations.  The governments of Canada and BC
wanted to continue bargaining with those band chiefs and their staffs whose
power base rests on the pillar of federal funding and the federal Indian
Act. This framework helps keep the BC land issue within the more manageable
confines of domestic policy.  The alternative is to allow it to spill into
forums of international law, where some believe the question of First Nations’
land title most properly belongs.
The Gustafsen group harboured some of the pre-eminent advocates of
moving the whole complex title issue to an international venue.  That might
involve including the UN and bringing in judges from outside Canada who
could arbitrate disputes between federal, provincial and Aboriginal
authorities from a position of disinterested neutrality.

Hence I contend that the hidden agenda of the police and the Canadian
military at Gustafsen was to kill the message of the international
character of the BC land dispute by smearing and destroying this argument’s
most commited messengers. It also cannot be overlooked that in 1995 there
was significant political mileage to be gained from a get tough approach
directed at Indians, and especially at “renegade” Indians.
While there is much self-serving incentive among those implicated to
treat the Gustafsen story as old news, that is unsupportable.  Attorney
General Ujjal Dosanjh, who was responsible for police operations at Gustafsen
Lake, is now running for premier. His handling of this crisis requires
scrutiny and discussion.

And there is the case of Mike Schlueter, a retired sargent, who is
suing the federal government for $3 million because he lost his hand when
one of the explosive devices he was setting around the Indians’ protest camp,
accidentally went off.  His accident was part of the federal military’s
extensive involvement, code named Operation Wallaby.
The evidence of Schulter’s missing hand points to the apparent
discrepency between what the Canadian government called the military’s
“advisory role” and what was really going on in the media black-out zone.

I have seen police video tape of an explosive device being detonated as
a truck carrying Indian negotiators ran over it. Such a device, I
believe, can appropriately be described as a land mine. I’m not alone in my
suspicion that the Canadian government set land mines around the protest camp.
In 1996 Professor Philip Stemming of the Centre of Criminology at the
University of Toronto wrote the Globe and Mail, remarking on the
distance between rhetoric and action as Canada took a leading role in
pushing for a land mine treaty just after it had seemingly used these same
devices at Gustafsen Lake. “Why, and by what authority (and on whose
authority) was such a ‘device’ deployed... And why were these questions not pressed and
answered at the time?” asked Stemming.

Three years later, those questions still have not been addressed
despite Canada having played a leading role as a global land-mines opponent.
How would Canada be viewed if it were revealed that the last time Canada
deployed land mines was in 1995 against its own people?
Can we imagine any Native group invoking the law of self-defence to
protect physically any river, any mountain, any forest, or any sacred site
anywhere in the Americas, without being labelled as radicals and terrorists by
the local authorities?  The extreme over-reaction to the Native assertion
of an Indian right to control a tiny sun dance site, points to the fragility
of Canada’s claims that the rule of law prevails over political expediency
when it comes to governing the country’s First Nations.
One way to address this issue might be to accept the advice of the
Assembly of First Nations to conduct a full public inquiry into the
relationship of the RCMP with Aboriginal peoples.  This inquiry would have to deal with
the dubious police tactics repeatedly employed by the Mounties in their
many confrontations with Native activists.  It would also have to come up
with an explanation of why it is that almost half the individuals killed by
the RCMP over its entire history have been Aboriginal.

The need to turn the page on this dark chapter points to the importance
of the treaty negotiations in BC. The success or failure of this process
will signal to the world what kind of society Canada is becoming. A key
element in the successful resolution of the old land dispute, however, must
be a public airing of the abuses of our public institutions in the country’s
continuing Indian wars.
If the RCMP could tell the CBC a bare-faced lie in order to gain
unedited access to the Crown broadcaster’s air waves, what else might the
Mounties have concocted in their media spin campaign to demonize the
self-declared Shuswap Defenders?  Will any elected official formally take
political responsibility for the gross abuses of the public trust exposed in Mr.
Bazay’s report?

The hard truth that has been so coercively supressed is that the
Canadian constitution has been systematically violated in the way BC developed
outside the framework of treaty law that Canada inherited from its imperial
parent.
Before a lasting resolution of the BC land issue is possible, there
must be some real grappling with the aim and methods of Operation Wallaby and
the infamous boasts of Staff Sargeant Montague that smear campaigns are an
RCMP specialty.

hall@uleth.ca
for more info: http://kafka.uvic.ca/~vipirg/SISIS/GustLake/support.html

For a public inquiry:

pm@pm.gc.ca  Prime minister Jean Chretien
premier@gov.bc.ca : NDP BC Premier Dan Miller
 

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