BY EVA CHENG
Canadian police have launched a ferocious campaign to discredit, intimidate and, they no doubt hope, scare off would-be protesters from the April 20-22 Summit of the Americas (SoA) in Quebec City.
Leaders from 34 countries of the Americas, bar Cuba, will gather under Washington's lead to give a boost to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) which is scheduled to take off in 2005.
Workers contracted by the police are racing against the clock to install a four-metre-high metal fence, anchored in concrete, to surround a 4.5 square kilometre area around much of Quebec City's Old Town which covers, apart from the Congress Centre summit site, six hotels and the Quebec provincial parliament building.
Until the 9000 expected summit participants and guests leave, the fenced-off area will be the "security zone", guarded by heavily armed riot police.
Check points are being set up around the "security zone" and security passes issued to the 15,000 residents inside that area. Only those with a photo ID pass will be permitted to enter the summit venue.
A local prison will be emptied, so the police trumpeted, to make space for the anticipated mass arrests, and special round-the-clock courtrooms will be installed to process the expected flood of cases. As many as 5000 police will be deployed, with rented apartments in various locations to spy on protesters.
"If we look at the history of past international summits, there has been a prevalence of violent protest", Julie Brongel, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police spokesperson, told reporters in Quebec on February 17. However, from the November 1999 Seattle World Trade Organisation meeting to the September 26, 2000 meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Prague, most physical clashes at these summits originated from the police.
Warren Allmand, a former solicitor-general of Canada and currently president of the Rights and Democracy civil liberties organisation, described the security measures as an expression of the police's "growing tendency to resort to harsh measures to quell any possible sign of dissent".
But the protesters aren't deterred. They plan to stage a series of counter actions.
The SoA protest actions are being organised by three co-ordinating groups: the Montreal-based Convergence des luttes anti-capitalistes (CLAC) and the Quebec City-based Comite d'accueil du Sommet des Ameriques (CASA); the Operation Quebec printemps (OQP)-Table of Convergence; and the Reseau quebecois sur l'integration continentale (RQIC), a coalition of 19 groups, and Common Frontiers (CF), which comprises 12 groups. The CLAC-CASA is a direct action-oriented coalition in favour of the outright rejection of FTAA/IMF/WTO.
The Table of Convergence and related groups have set April 1-2 for a non-violent blockade of the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in Ottawa — "Operation SalAMI" — if their demand for the Canadian government to release the hitherto secret FTAA negotiation text isn't met by then.
In Quebec City, the CLAC-CASA is staging an "anti-capitalist" day of action on April 20. The RQIC-CF is organising a "people's summit" between April 17-21 and a street protest demonstration on April 21.