Alfie Meadows and Zak King found not guilty – two years, three months, and three trials later
After years of uncertainty and two mistrials, Alfie Meadows and Zak King have been found unanimously not guilty of violent disorder on a demonstration against tuition fees and cuts to education of December 9, 2010. Alfie was beaten so badly by police on that day he needed three hours of emergency surgery after he developed bleeding on the brain.
The following is a press statement from Defend the Right to Protest, who have tirelessly supported Zak, Alfie and other victims of police violence and harassment.
Today a jury has delivered a unanimous verdict acquitting Alfie Meadows and Zak King of violent disorder. Alfie and Zak were amongst thousands of students who took to the streets against the tripling of university fees, cuts to higher education and education maintenance allowance on 9 December 2010.
Zak and Alfie have had to wait more than two years and go through the ordeal of three trials to clear their names. Meanwhile the trial has taken a heavy toll on both Alfie and Zak’s families, with Zak having had to watch his younger brother being dragged through the courts on the same false charge.
The trial has also exposed the same pattern of criminalisation and victimisation by the police and CPS, which we also saw played out in the cases of the Hillsborough tragedy and the miners’ strike at Orgreave.
Alfie suffered a baton blow to the head at the same protest, which required life-saving brain surgery. While the police have so far escaped any form of accountability for their actions, Alfie was charged with violent disorder and has had to fight to clear his name before finally beginning the road to justice.
Of the 15 protesters who pleaded not guilty to charges of violent disorder relating to the 9 December 2010 demo, so far 14 have been found not guilty. In a time of unprecedented cuts to public funding, it is atrocious that the police and the CPS have wasted resources in the pursuit of criminalising protesters.
The trial has allowed us to scrutinise what happened on the day of the protest. The peaceful and kettled protesters were charged at with horses and subjected to indiscriminate baton use. When Alfie’s barrister Carol Hawley challenged officer Wood, a senior officer in charge of the ground operation on the day, on whether their batons had been used as a last resort, his reply was that the use of a machine gun against protesters would have been the last resort. It transpired that police also considered the use of rubber bullets against the student protesters.
The treatment of Alfie and other student protesters stands in stark contrast to the failure to hold any officers to account for violent police tactics or injuries sustained by protesters. In the wake of this verdict we are reminded that we must fight together to defend our right to protest and for justice for all victims of police violence.
“The struggle for justice for my son has finally begun. The whole family has been through two years of total agony. We have been silenced on what happened to our son. We can now move on to the really important thing, which is to get justice for Alfie” (Susan Matthews, Alfie’s mother).
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY CONTINUES TO “CLAMP DOWN ON PROTEST”
Cambridge University upholds decision to punish protesting student
University staff and students outraged
The University of Cambridge has been accused of continuing to ‘clamp down on protest’ by students, staff and lecturers today.
The Septemviri, an internal body within the university, has ruled against an appeal to quash a sentence of suspension against Owen Holland, a graduate student punished earlier this year for protesting during a speech given by David Willets, Minister of Universities and Science.
The University decided to reduce the sentence from 7 terms to 1 term, through acknowledged that Owen Holland has already effectively spent most of the year under the weight of the previous ruling.
Asa Odin Ekman, a graduate student, said:
“The university is trying to appear magnanimous by giving a sentence which in any other circumstance would nonetheless appear absurdly draconian. Owen has already suffered financially and personally from this needless punishment, which follows a pattern of clamping down on protests by real courts as well as this sham one.”
Dr Priya Gopal, lecturer in English, said:
“While this is a welcome rejection of the absurd and unjust initial sentence of 2.5 years, it is a great shame that the university did not choose to uphold the right to protest that ought to be a fundamental to its ethos. The time has come to reform its antiquated and byzantine judicial procedures towards greater accountability.”
Caitlin Doherty, a graduating student, added:
“The University has a commitment to protecting the right to protest that must not be infringed in defence of a bogus concept of a government minster’s freedom of speech. Well we’ll be exercising our rights in the Autumn and continuing to protest against this outrageous sentence.”
The Reinstate Owen Holland campaign group say they will be continuing to protest against the ruling in the new academic year.
[1] David Willett’s lecture was due to be held on 11 November 2011, on the theme of ‘The Idea of the University’. It was disrupted by protestors from the Cambridge Defend Education Campaign. For more information on the scheduled lecture, see: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1817/
[2] On 22 March 2012 Owen Holland was sentenced to a suspension of seven terms by the University Court of Discipline, a statutory quasi-judicial body of the University of Cambridge. For more information about the University Court of Discipline, see: http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/univ/so/2011/chapter02-section20.html#heading1-20.
Patrick: It’s kind of a weird movement, because it started in the private universities, in a very upper class Catholic private university called Iberoamericana. It’s probably one of the more progressive private universities, because it has a quite independent and active faculty trade union. It arose in response to Enrique Peña Nieto who is the PRI candidate for president. The PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) was in power continuously from 1929 to 2000, one of the world’s longest running dictatorships, guilty of incredible abuses of human rights. The most infamous one was the massacre of Tlatelolco on October 2nd, 1968, just before the Olympics, when the Mexican army and paramilitaries killed around 500 people in a square near the center of Mexico City. It’s never been properly investigated. The ex-Mexican president, Luis Echevarria who was the minister of Internal Affairs when that happened, was briefly arrested and charged with genocide in 2006, but was almost immediately released. In spite of all their crimes, they’re on the point of being re-elected after just 12 years out of power. It’s like fascism coming back. The problem is that the party that’s been in power, the PAN (Partido Acción Nacional), has been as bad if not worse than the PRI. So, it’s just gone from the frying pan to the fire and back to the frying pan again. 60,000 have died in these last 6 years of President Calderon from the ‘war against drugs,’ which in reality has been a war against the whole population, at the same time a new form of governance and a new theatre in the “global war against terrorism.” It’s been government through military dictatorship that we’ve had in Mexico since 2006, and the electoral fraud in 2006, too, that started it. Of course there’s a real danger of another electoral fraud. Until May 11th it seemed like Enrique Peña Nieto was going to win the elections easily. There had already been one or two setbacks for him. First, at the Guadalajara International Book Fair in December last year, he was asked what were the three most important books in his life, and he couldn’t name one. He is just such a complete airhead, an ignoramus. This is the guy who’s going to be the next president of Mexico!
So, that was a setback for him in terms of public relations, but nothing like what happened at the Iberoamericana on May 11th, when he went to visit it. He probably expected to get just a really easy ride, because nothing much has happened at the university in years. When he arrived, there were hundreds of students with banners that said things like “Remember Atenco”—which is this town near Mexico City, where when he was governor of the State of Mexico (the state surrounding Mexico City), there was a really vicious repression of the People’s Front for the Defense of the Land (FPDT in Spanish), on the 3rd of May 2006, during the Zapatistas’ Other Campaign. He and then president Fox sent the army and police in and they just massacred the population. They wanted revenge for the defeat of their plans by the FPDT to build a new international airport near Atenco in 2002. I’d never seen such vicious repression—groups of 20-30 police attacking anybody, innocent bystanders. They killed two youths: a UNAM student and a local youth. Houses were raided without search warrants and about two hundred people were just dragged off the streets and taken to prison, and during the bus journey to prison about 30 women were raped or sexually abused by the police in the buses or while getting on or off the buses.[i] It was the rape of Atenco by this butcher. And Enrique Peña Nieto is going to be the next president. Fortunately, these guys (the students at the Iberoamericana) woke up and gave him a really, really hard time. In fact, at one point he was about to abandon his visit, because he was being harassed so much by the students. There’s this beautiful video of him and his bodyguards and the authorities of the university just not knowing what the hell to do—there’s this expression of panic on his face, just completely taken by surprise. Even when he had the meeting, most of the questions were really hostile against him. Under his governorship, the state of Mexico went completely backwards: the number of poor people increased, human rights abuses increased, femicides increased, and so on. He had no answer. Well, for a man who literally depends on the teleprompter for what to say, he had just nothing to say. He just didn’t answer the questions. It was just a complete public relations disaster for him.
But, what happened was, that he has been supported by the two main TV channels, Televisa and TV Azteca, which dominate open TV in Mexico (the free TV), with their telenovelas, these ridiculous soap operas, which dominate coverage—12 hours a day of soaps—a complete manipulation and infantilization of the public. He is their candidate and they’re determined that he’s going to be elected. It also appears the PRI paid huge amounts of money since 2005 to guarantee positive coverage and promote Peña Nieto as a future presidential candidate. So, when that visit to Iberoamericana was televised on the news, they completely edited out all of the demonstrations. It was just incredible. If you compare what happened with what was presented on TV, it’s just two different worlds. And then the various media spokespersons—the president of the PRI, the intellectuals close to the PRI and Televisa—they all attacked the students, saying that they were just members of the PRD, the opposing party of the PRI, the party of the center left, very moderate (López Obredor, who might win the elections). They were saying, ‘these weren’t really students. These were people belonging to the PRD who were sent to the Iberoamericana that day. They’re thugs’—the most ridiculous accusations. If these intellectuals, the spokespersons of the PRI, hadn’t made these really crass accusations, the thing would have died there. But, fortunately, the students had the bullocks to respond. And about 131 of them went online, on YouTube, with their student cards, and said, ‘I am a student of this university, this is my student credential, and how dare the PRI accuse us of not being students.’ Our demonstration was completely genuine. That’s what’s called the ‘Somos Mas de 131′ movement that came out of Iberamericana, on Monday the 14th of May, after this demonstration on the 11th of May. And then, it’s just grown from there.
Of course Televisa was saying it wasn’t an ‘authentic demonstration.’ So, they had a human chain from their university to the head office of Televisa in that part of Mexico City. Just a few hundred turned up from various private universities. The next step was to connect with the public universities. The first really big event was on Wednesday, 23rd May: there was a big demonstration in the center of Mexico City, under this monument that was supposed to be opened in 2010, on the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. But because of corruption and various delays it didn’t actually open until earlier this year. It’s called the Estela de Luz (The Pillar of Light). It’s a big tower that is completely ugly and useless and cost far too much. So, they chose this monument as a meeting place, as an example of the kind of corruption, impunity and ineptitude that they are opposing. They called a general meeting of students from private and public universities to go to that place. Far more people went than they expected—I think about 20,000 students, young people, and ordinary citizens turned up. And that’s really how the Yo Soy 132 movement took off.
Since then, just about every day there’s been some kind of public meeting somewhere. All the meetings are completely open to anybody to attend, and in open places outside. Since Wednesday, the 20th of May, just about every single university in the country, certainly all in Mexico City, has set up its own branch of this movement. It’s all being coordinated on the website of #yosoy132. It’s a kind of social network. In my university, the UAM Xochimilco (the Metropolitan Autonomous University), which is historically a left-wing public university (Subcomandante Marcos was an Arts & Design Lecturer there until he went underground in 1983), last Friday, May 25th, about 100 students turned up—about half student activists and half students who were just curious. Most of my students in the University come from working class, lower-middle class backgrounds—very different from Iberoamericana, which is upper class. It’s amazing that this thing started there; even upper class kids are pissed off at the situation in Mexico, even though the economy is run entirely for their benefit. Still, they’re sick of the corruption and media manipulation. So, this is what kick-started it all off. The students there thought, ‘this movement has to become much bigger than us, much bigger than the private universities.’ The majority of students are in public universities, and of course the social composition of the public universities is completely different.
CW: Could you say a little more about the composition of this movement? Have any faculty gotten involved in it or is it totally student-led?
Patrick: At the moment it is student-led, and I hope it remains that way, because the worst thing that could happen is for the usual intellectuals to take it over. When they had this big meeting in the center of town—at the monument to celebrate the 100th anniversary of independence but which everybody sees as a monument to corruption—there were a lot of university professors and intellectuals and ex-activist, ‘leaders’ from the 1968 movement (they’re all obsessed with being ‘leaders’ of that movement, which is completely different from this movement—and student movements around the world—they’re leaderless). Everybody’s realizing that it’s a special movement. 2006 was a bit like now, a really euphoric moment.
I am in the Other Campaign of the EZLN. We oppose the campaign of López Obredor, because we know that he is really a politician of the center right, a neoliberal “progressive” like Lula in Brazil or the Kirchners in Argentina, but he is able to present himself as being of the center left because the other two parties are of the hard neoliberal, neocon right (the PRI and the PAN). He likes to make a lot of promises about how he’s going to change Mexico, but when he was mayor of Mexico City he adopted ‘zero tolerance’ to repress street vendors and he gentrified the historical center of Mexico City in alliance with the richest man in Mexico, Carlos Slim, so we know that not much is going to change under him, at least not for the better. But still, in 2006 we thought, ‘he’s bound to win,’ because he seemed by far the most popular candidate. We never thought that there was going to be an electoral fraud. But there was, and Calderon became president. The first thing he did was to start this war against the ‘narcos,’ which was in reality a war against working class Mexicans. It’s been downhill since then: it’s been massacre after massacre. The left has just been kind of paralyzed in front of this war, this massacre that’s been going on continuously. So it’s been a really depressing time, these last six years. And also, the electoral campaign has been completely boring, virtually without content, and then, suddenly, this student movement came out of nowhere. We didn’t expect it.
Certainly, we are in front of a completely new situation. There was a meeting on May 25th in the Plaza de Las Tres Culturas (exactly where the massacre took place in 1968), of delegates from all the universities and they have made a declaration of what their aims are now as a movement. Of course it’s quite moderate, if you compare it to the Montreal or Chilean students movements. Their main demand continues to be the democratization of the media. But if we really had a democratized media in Mexico, that would be incredible. If you democratized the media anywhere, that would be incredible! There is of course a certain amount of naivety to think that the Mexican media—which is completely under the control of the worst kind of neoliberalism and of the mafia and the drug cartels—is suddenly going to become democratic; it’s just not going to happen. Nor did it happen in the US or Britain or any other so called democracy. The media is not free or neutral in any country in the world, especially not during elections. It’s a naive demand, but in some ways it has opened up the whole election by exposing the dependence of the political class, particularly their candidate Peña Nieto, on mass media manipulation. I would say that as things stand at the moment, Peña Nieto is in trouble. Everywhere he goes now there are thousands of people opposing him, chanting slogans at him, with placards, etc. A week ago, the PRI responded as they always do: with violence. They just send their thugs to attack students who are opposing any meeting of Peña Nieto. Now, that rebounded against them, because it’s bad publicity—using violence, intolerance against any form of opposition. It looks like the bad old “dinosaur” PRI is definitely back, never mind the talk of a “democratized” PRI.
CW: Is the media covering that violence?
Patrick: Yeah, in a way they have to. They can’t ignore it. The students are at the center of public attention. They’re denouncing the violence, so the TV and press have to report it. Normally they would not report it. It was a trending topic on Twitter last week—one of the top ten topics in the whole world. I read in the newspaper today that Peña Nieto had an election meeting in some provincial city, and when the opposition turned up to attack him, to denounce him, to chant slogans at him, at a public meeting of the PRI, he told his followers not to do anything, which is unusual, because normally the PRI respond by physically attacking any opposition or criticism of them. He just feels so on the defensive that he has to tell his thugs not to do anything. At the moment, suddenly, the election is thrown open. Of course, Peña Nieto is still the favorite. Even if it becomes a close election, the PRI are experts in electoral fraud, and they won’t hesitate in doing it again. The PAN got away with it in 2006 and the PRI will get away with it this year. But, if it’s a very obvious electoral fraud, there could be a massive backlash. Of course the other two parties are trying to manipulate the situation. The PAN called an anti-EPN march. Quite a lot of people went to it, but it was an obvious attempt by the PAN to jump on the bandwagon. López Obrador had a meeting with the students in this symbolic place where the massacre happened in 1968, about a week before the Yo Soy 132 meeting, but again this was another attempt to manipulate the movement.
Because of the origins of this movement, most of the left, me included, was very dubious about it. You know, a movement by rich private students against Peña Nieto: this doesn’t make sense. So, there has been a lot of diffidence towards the movement by the historic left: the institutional left and the extra-parliamentary left. A lot of people, students and faculty, in my university seemed wary of this movement.
CW: Are they trying to influence the movement? Is anybody from the Other Campaign trying?
Patrick: Yes, of course they are trying to jump in on the bandwagon. But, they just said it in a manifesto that they put out (which I translated and put up on facebook) that it is a non-party movement. They are against Peña Nieto; they are against the PRI.Peña Nieto is a fascist and he has shown that again and again—the way he repressed the movement in Atenco was completely fascist. If he becomes president, that’s going to be his political style, just really hard-line, vicious repression: use of rape against arrested women, things like that. Of course he’s tried to moderate his image, recently. Above all we know who’s behind him. He himself is completely stupid—someone who can’t come up with the names of three authors or books that are important in his life. So, in reality, when he is president he won’t be president—there will be people behind him telling him what to do. The most important of those will be Carlos Salinas, the president between 1988 and 1994 and the architect of NAFTA, which has devastated the Mexican economy and has caused so much poverty, and which kicked off the Zapatista rebellion in 1994, on the 1st of January, which was when it came into operation. So, we know who’s going to be the real president of Mexico: Salinas (not to mention Obama). Salinas is a drug traffiker as well, a real mafioso. His brother Raul went to prison for several years for his drug traffiking and for the assassination of Luis Colosio, the PRI’s maverick presidential candidate in 1994. Salinas is a neoliberal drug lord and one of the lynchpins of global neoliberalism, he would have become president of the WTO in 1994 but the Zapatistas rained on his parade. He will just devastate an already devastated country. So, the movement is non-party, but it is not apolitical, as it has been accused of by some people on the intellectual left. It is against the PRI and it is against Peña Nieto above all. That does not mean it is pro-López Obrador or pro-Vasquez Mota (the candidate of the PAN who is on the right of an extreme right-wing, clerical, neoliberal party). In my first reaction to this movement, I thought that this looks like a movement of the PAN, because it is strong in private universities. But it seems it is not. It is rather a movement that wants to radically reform things in a non-violent way. It is, I repeat, a moderate students movement, not a radical movement like the Onda Anomola in Italy or the Red Square movement in Canada. Maybe it is more like the English students movement in 2010. Of course the English students movement had some pretty radical elements in it, they attacked and set fire to the HQ of the Tory Party! Maybe now that the public universities are involved it will become more radical. It’s obviously not as radical as the 1999-2000 UNAM CGH (Consejo General de Huelga/General Strike Council) student occupation movement when they had a strike for one year and they shut down Mexico’s most important public university to stop even minimal fee hikes, which has had a lasting effect in slowing down the neoliberalization of the Mexican public university compared to most other countries.
CW: What is the relationship between this student movement and the universities themselves? You’ve been talking a lot about their relation with electoral politics, but do they have any focus on changing universities?
Patrick: I think this movement was born in the middle of a really dull election campaign that seemed dominated by a corrupt, fascist candidate, and they have hit the nail on the head that this candidate depends on the support of the media, and therefore, the media have to be reformed. Of course the reform of the media is crying out, but the political class are unable to do it because they are completely corrupt and at the behest of the media. So if there is a reform of the media in Mexico, it will have to come from below. This movement will go on after the July 1st presidential campaign. That’s evident. There’s this huge upswell of support for it. It will hopefully last like the Occupy Wall Street movement, going on for months if not years. So, therefore, after the presidential campaign is over, the movement has to focus on what is going on in the universities, which are being privatized and neoliberalized on the sly. They already put in their manifesto, in their demands, which will now go to a general assembly on Wednesday May 30th in the UNAM—which is the biggest university in the Americas, 500,000 students—this document that they produce will have to be ratified by that meeting. I think it’s going to be huge, tens of thousands of people. It’s really exciting… I haven’t felt like this for years, about any movement. Out of despair has come hope. One of the demands is that all higher education must be free, secular and of high quality—like the Chilean student movement. In fact, in their demands, they are calling to build links with the Chilean student movement and Occupy Wall Street. Unfortunately, they didn’t mention the Montreal student movement. The press coverage of that movement has been non-existent. So, it is exciting that they want to build those links and by doing so this will help to radicalize further the movement and reduce the influence of left nationalism and lopez obradorism.
Occupy Wall Street has introduced this term of “The Mexican Spring,” but I think it’s too early to talk about a Mexican Spring. Obviously the movement here is not yet as radical or as important as the Arab Spring, especially the one in Tunisia and Egypt. We can’t talk about regime change yet. But, if the impossible happens, and we do defeat the PRI and their attempt to have an electoral fraud… The movement is already mobilizing massively to prevent electoral fraud. There are always people present in voting stations during elections, but I think this time, it’s going to be literally dozens of people in every voting station to stop electoral fraud (ballot stuffing, stealing of electoral urns, all the usual shenanigans that the PRI get up to on election day). I think it’ll be much harder for the PRI to have an electoral fraud. Until this, what would have been an unimaginable situation, if Lopez Obredor does get elected, there will be massive demonstrations demanding immediate constitutional, political reform, to get rid of this all-powerful presidential figure that dominates Mexican politics. I think regime change is not completely out of the question. We have to see how things go in the next few weeks. The forces of reaction are gathering. They’ve been hit, humiliated, kicked where it hurts—but you can’t rule them out. They’ve been in power for 82 years, and they’re not going to give up power easily. They control the media, the universities, and the political parties (including those of the center left). At the moment, they really don’t know how to deal with this movement, because I think they realize that if they simply repress it, it’ll grow—like in Egypt or in the US with Occupy Wall Street. Then again, it’s a movement that’s hard to co-opt, because it’s non-party, it’s not for sale to the other candidates. Of course, it does have this huge cleavage between rich, privately educated students who are tendentially politically conservative, more likely to favor the PRI or PAN, and the politically more radical, working class, lower middle class, and middle class students in public universities. So there are major social and political divides within the movement that the forces of reaction are going to work hard on to divide the movement in these upcoming weeks. The same happened in Egypt—there were obvious divisions between the Muslim Brotherhood and the left—but the movement held together. So, let’s hope that the movement holds together from the attacks of the forces of reaction from both the right and the institutional left.
This is Part 1 of 2 of an interview with Patrick Cuninghame (Professor at UAM Xochimilco (the Metropolitan Autonomous University); participant in the EZLN’s Other Campaign), conducted on May 28th, 2012. We’ll post Part 2 of the interview soon.
DemocracyNow.org (May 25, 2012) – More than 400,000 filled the streets of Montreal this week as a protest over a 75 percent increase in tuition has grown into a full-blown political crisis. After three months of sustained protests and class boycotts that have come to be known around the world as the “Maple Spring,” the dispute exploded when the Quebec government passed an emergency law known as Bill 78, which suspends the current academic term, requires demonstrators to inform police of any protest route involving 50 or more people, and threatens student associations with fines of up to $125,000 if they disobey. The strike has received growing international attention as the standoff grows, striking a chord with young people across the globe amid growing discontent over austerity measures, bleak economies and crushing student debt. We’re joined by Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, spokesperson for CLASSE, the main coalition of student unions involved in the student strikes in Quebec; and Anna Kruzynski, assistant professor at the School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia University in Montreal. She has been involved in the student strike as a member of the group “Professors Against the Hike.”
wagingnonviolence.org Translating the Quebec student protests
by Joan Donovan | June 7, 2012
Compared to its current clamor, the Quebec student protests began last year with a whimper. In March of 2011, Finance Minister Raymond Bachand announced that Quebec student tuition would increase by $325 every year for five years. By August, student organizations were debating the possibility of an unlimited student strike. In February 2012, student organizations from several colleges and universities endorsed the action and blockaded Montreal’s Jacques Cartier Bridge, a major artery in the city. Over the next few months, numerous violent clashes with Montreal police led to mass arrests. But on May 18, 2012, Quebec’s Premier Charest raised the stakes by instituting “special” Bill 78. This law prohibited protests within 50 meters of any university, effectively making all of downtown Montreal a protest-free zone. May 22 marked the 100th day of the strike, and nearly 400,000 people marched through downtown joyously defying the law.
As the state repression of the student movement heightened, so has the creativity of the students’ tactical repertoire, which has expanded to include marching nude, community assemblies and, especially important in Quebec’s bilingual society, the tactical use of translation though music and words.
J.B. Staniforth, a McGill graduate and writer, explains that there is a Francophone cultural memory that differs from its Anglophone counterpart. “People who don’t speak French have no idea how different Francophone culture and values are from Anglophone culture,” he says, “particularly given the history of Franco culture rooted in protest and rebellion. The Québécois owe much of their present identity to rebelling against the authoritarian rule of Dupléssis in the fifties.” Maurice Dupléssis, Quebec’s Premier from 1936 to 1939 and 1944 to 1959 is best remembered for corrupt politics and violently suppressing the left.
Resisters in Quebec have recently taken up two translation-based tactics in particular that aim to increase participation in the protests and bridge the cultural divide. Protesters have rallied around a series of musical night marches to counteract the increased police pressure. They’ve also started a blog to pit the English media’s coverage against that of the French.
After Bill 78 passed, a decentralized form of resistance fomented in neighborhoods across the city, in which at 8 o’clock every night people participate in the “casserole protests” by banging on pots and pans while marching near their homes. The Montreal police Twitter account, which usually provides information about the location of the central protest, suggests that the police have been unable to follow, corral or control these distributed actions. People of all ages take to the streets with a spirit of joy and resistance. This tactic, borrowed from movements in places like Argentina and Chile, has been taken up by solidarity marches around the world, including a recent one by Occupy Wall Street in New York.
Two casserole marches meet and run cheering toward one another. By J.B. Staniforth
In Montreal, every act of police or legislative oppression is met with new neighborhood nodes emerging, from the suburbs of Saint Hubert to the island communities of Verdun and LaSalle. The clinks and clanks of pots on balconies turn into roaming clusters of people converging at the borders of neighboring boroughs. They stop briefly along the way to greet one another. This is truly a unique moment for the city, as many political issues hinge on a deep cultural divide between Francophones and Anglophones not just in the Province, but also across Canada. The music of the casseroles translates their struggles, giving no preference to a single voice or language. Speaking through music provides the levity and spontaneity necessary to fight back against state oppression during dark times. But this is not the only space in which an act of translation is uniting the people of Montreal and of Canada as a whole.
The movement has faced a challenge in that mainstream media accounts of it reflect a severe cultural divide. While the English media portray the students as entitled and naïve, usually siding with the government, the French reports depict a vastly different scene of students fighting for the civil rights of generations to come. Disheartened by the English language media coverage of Bill 78, a group of friends hatched a plan to fight back using a tumblr blog, aptly titled Translating the Printemps Érable (Maple Spring). They chose tumblr as a platform because it allows for the quick dissemination of information, along with the ability for others to submit content.
Greame Williams, an admin for the site, elaborates on its origins:
I subscribe to the Saturday edition of Le Devoir (a French-language paper), and the morning after Law 78 was passed, the editorial line of the paper was unambiguous in condemning it as a likely illegal and unconstitutional authoritarian act. Then I looked at the Globe and Mail, and they thought that the law was justified in ending the student strike. That was the breaking point leading to the blog being actually created, but poor coverage in the English-language media generally led up to this.
By setting the mainstream outlets against one another, the blog undermines their claims to journalistic objectivity.
A. Wilson, a translator for the site, adds that the problem is also rooted in the limitations of monolingual publishers themselves. “The French media,” she explains, “gets more in-depth, primary-source interviews with main players in the crisis just because many are more comfortable interviewing in French, typically their mother tongue.”
The great irony of the English media’s portrayal of the protests is that many involved in the blog and in the casserole marches do not directly benefit from the students’ cause and see it as anything but naïve. A woman who goes by Anna, an admin for the Maple Spring blog, says:
I am not a student, but I hope to have kids someday and so I am invested in education being affordable in that way. But more importantly, I will benefit from a more accessible, equitable Quebec if the students “win” because we all do; I want my neighbors to be able to educate themselves, and I want our society to have a high and rigorous level of debate. All of this is only possible with accessible education.
With people like Anna recognizing themselves in the students’ struggle, the task of translation and breaking down boundaries seems all the more important. It may help many more of them to turn from bystanders to participants.
“The Strike is for Students. The Struggle is for Everyone!” By J.B. Staniforth
“Casseroles Night in Canada” is quickly replacing the famed “Hockey Night in Canada,” with solidarity protests across the globe last week, organized largely through online social media. The focus of these protests in other locales is different, but they are united by a common cause of valuing affordable education for the social good it provides. That is something that anyone, in any language, should be able to understand.
ABC Radio National’s Julian Morrow talks at length to Montreal-based reporter Ethan Cox about the Quebec student strike, what students are really striking for, the notorious Law 78, and growing public discontent with Jean Charest’s Liberal government. An extremely rare instance of the mainstream media getting an important story right by talking to the right person and asking the right questions. But then ABC Radio National, notwithstanding its recent programming changes, has long stood head and shoulders above any other radio station in the Anglophone world.
Manifestation à Montréal contre la hausse des frais de scolarité et la loi 78. Les gens se retrouvent à des coins de rues pour faire le plus de bruit possible à l’aide de casseroles. Un grand merci à Avec pas d’casque et Grosse Boîte pour la musique!
Protest in Montreal against the rise of tuition fees in Quebec and the new Law 78. Every evening at 8pm people meet in the street with their pots and pans and make all the noise they can. A big thank you to the band Avec pas d’casque and their record label Grosse Boîte.
montreal.openfile.ca Lessons from Montreal: Documenting the tuition crisis for Americans
Sarah Leavitt • Thursday, May 24, 2012
A group of New Yorkers have taken an interest in Quebec’s student strikes and have created a documentary in the hopes of bringing the news of the tuition conflict to Americans.
“After Victoriaville, we could see things were going to get more intense and so we scheduled a trip,” Nate Lavey, one of the filmmaker’s, told OpenFile Montreal via email today. “We knew that the demo on Monday was going to be big, but we hadn’t planned on the government passing Loi 78, which has made the whole situation incredibly tense and dangerous for activists, students and professors.”
Lavey was inspired to make this documentary because of the dearth of coverage in the U.S.
“We had been disappointed by the lack of U.S., English-language coverage,” he said. “We knew radicals had been involved, but since many of them come from francophone backgrounds, their perspective on the strike wasn’t getting out, especially beyond Canada.”
Lavey and his team began shooting the documentary this past Saturday and worked hours on end to get it completed and online by Wednesday morning. After being unsuccessful in receiving funding from independent media outlets, they put their own money into the project. So why was it so important for them?
“We think it’s important that this story — and especially the perspective of radicals — make it out of Quebec. The strike is part of burgeoning anti-austerity movement that is sparking worldwide, so the lessons from Montreal are going to be relevant to people everywhere.”
WHEN Vladimir V. Putin first came to power in Russia, Quebecers could not help but laugh. Poutine, as he is called in French, is also the name of a Québécois fast-food dish made of French fries, gravy and cheese. But these days the laughter is over, as Quebec gets a taste of Mr. Putin’s medicine.
For a change, Americans should take note of what is happening across the quiet northern border. Canada used to seem a progressive and just neighbor, but the picture today looks less rosy. One of its provinces has gone rogue, trampling basic democratic rights in an effort to end student protests against the Quebec provincial government’s plan to raise tuition fees by 75 percent.
On May 18, Quebec’s legislative assembly, under the authority of the provincial premier, Jean Charest, passed a draconian law in a move to break the 15-week-long student strike. Bill 78, adopted last week, is an attack on Quebecers’ freedom of speech, association and assembly. Mr. Charest has refused to use the traditional means of mediation in a representative democracy, leading to even more polarization. His administration, one of the most right-wing governments Quebec has had in 40 years, now wants to shut down opposition.
The bill threatens to impose steep fines of 25,000 to 125,000 Canadian dollars against student associations and unions — which derive their financing from tuition fees — in a direct move to break the movement. For example, student associations will be found guilty if they do not stop their members from protesting within university and college grounds.
During a street demonstration, the organization that plans the protest will be penalized if individual protesters stray from the police-approved route or exceed the time limit imposed by authorities. Student associations and unions are also liable for any damage caused by a third party during a demonstration.
These absurd regulations mean that student organizations and unions will be held responsible for behavior they cannot possibly control. They do not bear civil responsibility for their members as parents do for their children.
Freedom of speech is also under attack because of an ambiguous — and Orwellian — article in Bill 78 that says, “Anyone who helps or induces a person to commit an offense under this Act is guilty of the same offense.” Is a student leader, or an ordinary citizen, who sends a Twitter message about civil disobedience therefore guilty? Quebec’s education minister says it depends on the context. The legislation is purposefully vague and leaves the door open to arbitrary decisions.
Since the beginning of the student strike, leaders have told protesters to avoid violence. Protesters even condemned the small minority of troublemakers who had infiltrated the demonstrations. During the past four months of protests, there has never been the kind of rioting the city has seen when the local National Hockey League team, the Canadiens, wins or loses during the Stanley Cup playoffs. The biggest demonstration, which organizers estimate drew 250,000 people on May 22, was remarkably peaceful. Mr. Charest’s objective is not so much to restore security and order as to weaken student and union organizations. This law also creates a climate of fear and insecurity, as ordinary citizens can also face heavy fines.
Bill 78 has been fiercely denounced by three of four opposition parties in Quebec’s Legislature, the Quebec Bar Association, labor unions and Amnesty International. James L. Turk, the executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, called Bill 78 “a terrible act of mass repression” and “a weapon to suppress dissent.”
The law will remain in force only until July 1, 2013. The short duration says it all. It amounts to a temporary suspension of certain liberties and allows the government to avoid serious negotiations with student leaders. And it grants the authorities carte blanche for the abuse of power; just hours after it passed, police officers in Montreal began to increase the use of force against protesters.
Some critics have tried to portray the strike as a minority group’s wanting a free lunch. This is offensive to most Quebec students. Not only are they already in debt, despite paying low tuition fees, but 63 percent of them work in order to pay their university fees. The province has a very high rate of youth employment: about 57 percent of Quebecers between the ages of 15 and 24 work, compared with about 49 percent between the ages of 16 and 24 in the United States.
Both Quebec and Canada as a whole are pro-market. They also share a sense of solidarity embodied by their public health care systems and strong unions. Such institutions are a way to maintain cohesion in a vast, sparsely populated land. Now those values are under threat.
Americans traveling to Quebec this summer should know they are entering a province that rides roughshod over its citizens’ fundamental freedoms.
After a rare nighttime debate at the National Assembly, Bill 78 was approved by a vote of 68-48 on Friday afternoon with the nearly full support of the Liberal caucus and the right-wing Coalition Avenir Quebec.
Given the tongue-twisting name of, “An act to enable students to receive instruction from the postsecondary institutions they attend,” the bill imposes severe limitations on a Quebecers’ right to hold a spontaneous assembly:
Semesters at campuses impacted by the student strike are immediately suspended, due to start again in August.
Demonstrations with more than 50 people must provide the police with a time, location and duration at least eight hours in advance. The police may modify any of these parameters at any time.
All gatherings are banned within 50 metres of a campus.
Student associations not “employing appropriate means to induce” their members to comply with the law are guilty of violating the law. Individuals also fall under this and can be guilty by omission or for providing advice.
Fines range from $1,000 for individuals to $125,000 for student associations. Fines double for repeat offences.
Opposition from legal scholars
Many of Quebec’s organizations and professional associations showed some concern about the law. Typically a quiet and conservative organization, the Quebec Bar came out swinging against the bill.
“This bill infringes many of the fundamental rights of our citizens. The basis of a democracy is the rule of law. We must respect the law. We must also respect fundamental freedoms, like the freedom to protest peacefully, the freedom of speech and the freedom of association,” Bar President Louis Masson told The Globe and Mail.
Speaking to CBC’s The House, former judge John Gomery was critical of the law. While some believe that the law would not stand up to a court hearing, a sunset clause of July 1, 2013 will probably keep it out of the Supreme Court.
“My view is that this legislation is part of the extreme reaction that this debate has provoked. Violent demonstrations provoke violent reactions,” Gomery told CBC host Evan Solomon. “I think it is surely going to be contested before the courts.”
Quebec favours the law
According to a CROP poll commissioned by La Presse, 66 per cent of Quebecers are in favour of the law. Some are discounting the poll because of its small sample of 800 responses. The poll also showed a record low level of Quebecers supporting a tuition freeze: 32 per cent.
CLASSE takes down calendar
So that it is not found guilty of aiding protest that might not be properly planned or executed, the student coalition CLASSE removed a calendar from its website where students added planned activities. A central point for organizing protests, CLASSE was facing a fine of $125,000 for the first offence.
Montreal police lines jammed by people filing “protest reports”
In a bid to undermine Bill 78, hundreds of people called their local Montreal police precincts on Friday, attempting to file plans for “protests” composed of 50 friends going out for an evening. Under the law filing these plans of a dubious value is required.
According to the Montreal police, most of the plans filed were bogus.
It’s all Greek to Margaret
In a column for The Globe and Mail, Margaret Wente compared Quebec’s tuition protesters to debt-riddled Greece. While criticizing the province’s “cradle-to-grave” social system, Wente claimed that rioting students are “overwhelmingly middle- to upper-middle class.” Calling herself appalled, Wente concluded by stating that Quebec students would “shut down Alberta” if given the chance. Greek Quebecers were not happy with the comparison.
Following the Russian example?
Russian President Vladimir Putin has revealed that he is looking to bring forward a new law to crush Russia’s protest movement: $32,000 fines for people engaged in unauthorized protests. The Putin-Charest photomontages are imminent.
Are you planning on a Barbeque or a soccer game in a public park in the province of Québec? Make sure to invite no more than eight people. Once Bill 78 becomes law, the organizer of a gathering of 10 or more people* in a public place will be required to notify the police in writing eight hours in advance of said gathering with a full itinerary of the group’s movements.
Obviously, police are not going to arrest some kids at a soccer game, but what if the kids on one team all have red squares on their uniforms and the other team has the Liberal Party of Québec (PLQ) logo? And what if the PLQ players can pick up the ball with their hands and have referees remove the red square goal keeper whenever she gets in the way? Has this innocent game now become an illegal political gathering, protesting the draconian Bill 78 without a permit?
These are the kind of tactics being used by protestors in Putin’s Russia to avoid similar government restrictions on freedom of assembly. Such tactics illustrate the problem of enforcing bans on unpermitted demonstrations without looking like authoritarian thugs. By targeting the impromptu concert-demos of the anti-authoritarian feminist punk rock group Pussy Riot, Russian authorities have given the phenomenon international notoriety.
Quebec Bill 78 echoes Russia’s anti-protest idea: is it Jean or Vladimir Charest?
By Andy Radia | Canada Politics – Sun, 20 May, 2012
It is a little ironic that the Quebec government’s Bill 78 came down on the same day a Russian anti-protest bill was to be introduced.
Friday was supposed to be the first reading of a draconian draft law in Russia that would raise the maximum fines for organizers of unsanctioned protests to $48,000 from $1,600. Participants’ fines would increase to $32,000 from $160.
Quebec’s legislation, which passed Friday, also sets multiple requirements on public demonstrations and threatens stiff penalties to people who disrupt college and university classes.
The bill has been met with a chorus of criticism.
Louis Masson, the head of the Quebec Bar Association, says the Bill “clearly limits” the right to freedom of assembly. Constitutional lawyer Julius Grey told CBC News that Bill 78 is a “terrible law” that suspends the freedom to association, express and protest, without sufficient reason. Pauline Marois, leader of the opposition Parti Québécois, said it was “one of the darkest days of Quebec democracy” and demanded Premier Jean Charest hold elections because of the unpopularity of the law.
And, according to the Associated Press, the U.S. consulate in Montreal has warned visitors and U.S. expatriates to be careful because of the demonstrations.
Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, Russian President Vladimir Putin will have to wait for his legislation “to cope with an increasingly assertive opposition.” The anti-protest bill in that country was abruptly delayed until next week because of disagreements within the government.
What’s contained in Quebec’s Bill 78? Openfile.ca has published this list explaining the new rules:
-Semesters at campuses impacted by the student strike are immediately suspended, due to start again in August.
– Demonstrations with more than 50 people must provide the police with a time, location and duration at least eight hours in advance. The police may modify any of these parameters at any time.
– All gatherings are banned within 50 metres of a campus.
– Student associations not “employing appropriate means to induce” their members to comply with the law are guilty of
violating the law. Individuals also fall under this and can be guilty by omission or for providing advice.
– Fines range from $1,000 for individuals to $125,000 for student associations. Fines double for repeat offences.
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