This is what democracy looks like!
April 19-22, FTAA Summit Protest, Quebec City

by Steve Chase

Photos by Jason Houston

This movement is spreading, putting down roots around the world, and laying the foundations of real reform in how we organize and conduct our political and economic lives.

This crowd was not the relative handful of purple-haired, body-pierced, and marginalized young people that were featured in photos in the newspapers back here in the States. This was tens of thousands of ordinary people of all ages - most of them - in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, many marching with their young children. I remember one "union" kid, probably around nine or ten years old, carrying a hand painted sign in French that said, "End the exploitation of child labor now!" That looked like a good photo opportunity to me, but according to the Boston Globe, this child and her parents simply don't exist. We were all but erased from the official record. I even checked the AP photo database of the Summit protests that day on the web and, out of 332 photos, I didn't find a single photo of this march - the main march of the weekend's protest events! Nor was there anything of the week-long teach-in/conference that had precedeed the summit of national leaders and brought together thousands of rank and file labor activists and members of NGOs to study the issues surrounding corporate globalization and "free trade." A free press is a precious thing - and one clearly not yet achieved in this country.

Remarkably, Quebec TV ran almost around the clock news on the march, the teach-ins, and various other direct actions, including protesters cleaning up the streets of downtown Quebec City on Sunday afternoon. They also did extensive and numerous interviews with the participants of the big march, including labor folks and people in NGOs like local neighborhood associations, the Sierra Club of Canada, and the 100,000 member Council of Canadians. And these were not just soundbites. They let each individual explain why they were protesting the FTAA for five or ten minutes! In this country, the mass media focused largely on the "hippy looking" youngsters at the wall being teargassed and reported that the weekend was nothing but violent clashes with police that were "vaguely reminiscent of the 1960s."

Yet, this event was hardly reminiscent of the 1960s. During the entire 1960s, when did we ever see an international, tri-lingual coalition of tens of thousands union people, environmentalists, feminists, and civil rights activists challenging officials from 34 nations at the same time and articulating a common agenda that supports popular democracy, sustainability, wilderness protection, labor rights, shared prosperity, and fair trade throughout the hemisphere? This is a new and unprecedented coalition that has emerged over just the last few years. It is hardly a weird historical flashback. This growing and diverse movement is also potentially more powerful than the social movements of the 1960s because of its composition.This movement is spreading, putting down roots around the world, and laying the foundations for the possibility of real reform in how we organize and conduct our political and economic lives.

I hardly think that these demonstrators "failed" as the editors of the Boston Globe would have you believe. They achieved their objectives of mobilizing thousands more people, like me, into the global justice movement, raising the FTAA treaty negotiations to popular consciousness as a potential problem, and helping solidify the emerging coalition of labor, environmentalists, and human rights activists who now have greater capacity to continue working together in the future. They also made sure that while the FTAA negotiations were conducted in private, they were not secret or outside of public awareness. Shutting down the negotiations - as at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle - was never considered a likely outcome of the protests nor a serious objective of the protesters.

Some rocks were thrown and, being Canada, an occasional hockey puck!

This is not to say there wasn't some truth to what the Globe and other papers reported in the text of their stories. It just means they tended to leave out the most important parts, focusing on the most negative and the least significant parts of the weekend, and sloppily smearing the actions of over 50,000 people by confusing them with the actions of a few dozen to at most a hundred young people who are either immature, ideologically over-zealous, understandably angry at police brutality, or, probably in some cases, undercover police officers trying to incite protester violence. In particular, most media reports did not make clear that the vast, vast majority of the 6,000 to 10,000 demonstrators that surrounded the concrete and steel wall were militant but nonviolent in their efforts to take their protest right up to the wall--which they saw as a symbol of the exclusion of NGOs and labor organizations from the treaty discussions.

This lively group of protesters catapulted stuffed animals over the fence, toilet papered the fence and the trees close to the perimeter, tied banners to the metal mesh of the wall and painted slogans on the concrete base. They tried to give flowers to cops, sang protest songs, and beat drums. They held political discussions and meetings right on the streets in front of the wall. A good five to six thousand of these folks contented themselves with holding dances and drumming festivals near the fence and chanting slogans and flashing peace signs to the police and military people. Still others attempted to nonviolently blockade the entry gates so vehicles had trouble getting in or out of the compound. Some of the most daring tried to pull down the fences (which they accomplished at several places during the weekend). None of this though can fairly be called violence.

Indeed, there was no reported rock throwing on Thursday, and only a few dozen protesters threw anything even potentially harmful over the fence on Friday when the tear gassing started. Some rocks were thrown, a Molotov cocktail, more than a few golf balls, and - being Canada - an occasional hockey puck. Also, once the police started clubbing people, shooting rubber bullets when the first breach of the wall happened, using concussion grenades to disperse crowds doing nothing hostile or life-threatening, and shooting people with water cannon tanks, then a few people began throwing chunks of concrete and about a dozen more Molotov cocktails. As a defensive measure, they also threw back toward the police the tear gas canisters that had been fired at them over the wall. It wasn't until the middle of Saturday night, however, during clashes between the police and about 1,500 protesters who remained on the street that some of these people--eyewitnesses estimate no more than a few hundred at most--regrettably started breaking windows in banks, slashing the tires of corporate media trucks, setting trash cans on fire, and indiscriminately writing graffiti on local shops and residences. Things got fairly gnarly and undisciplined at this point. Yet, the papers don't make it clear how few people were involved in such activities. Nor do they spend any time focusing on the demonstrators who were doing other things and using creative nonviolent tactics in a very difficult circumstance of a massive police attack and arrest sweep in the middle of the night, long after reporters had gone to bed.

I came away with a great respect for the courage and creativity of the vast majority of the militant young people active around the wall - which local residents had dubbed the "Wall of Shame" when it was being built in the week before the meeting. In conversations with some of these activists, I found them to be smart, deeply committed, and fairly disciplined in their nonviolent direct action efforts.

Still, it is important to admit that there were up to a few hundred vandalizing and somewhat violent protesters near the end of the weekend. Nor should we romanticize them as somehow being more radical or militant than the other protesters. They were screwing up, making tactical errors, doing just what the police were trying to get them to do, and releasing - against all common sense - pent up rage after two days of fairly extreme police brutality and the nearly constant tear gassing of the entire downtown area. This weakness will need to be addressed in future strategy discussions.

The tear gassing of the downtown by the police, however, deserves special mention. This indiscriminate gassing ultimately ended up hurting thousands of peaceful demonstrators - including myself and my colleagues, as well as local residents. So indiscriminate was it, in fact, that even the heads of state had to be moved to a different meeting space because the gas was so thick that it got into their building.

Yet, it was also quite intentional. Two in our group, for example, saw a crowd of two hundred protesters a few blocks away from the wall, sitting and standing together late on that Saturday afternoon. They were doing nothing provocative when, suddenly, they were attacked by the police, who rushed them while pounding their nightsticks on their plastic shields, and then shot off five gas canisters directly into the midst of this small crowd. We heard similar stories throughout that Saturday and Sunday.

Tear gas is amazingly painful and it was everywhere. We were even trapped in a restaurant about a half mile from the wall because the air outside the restaurant was impossible to breath without choking and experiencing searing pain in one's eyes. Getting gassed several times in one afternoon and evening is an experience not soon forgotten. I can understand how someone might snap under such circumstance and engage in short-sighted and counter-productive activities. What amazes me is not that such activities happened toward the end of the weekend in the middle of the night, but how so very few of the 6,000 to 10,000 militant demonstrators actually engaged in destructive activities even in the face of intense police provocation. It was quite remarkable to watch such forbearance, courage, and discipline. A lot of these kids may dress sloppy, have colored hair, and perhaps know little about the history and philosophy of the anarchist and socialist traditions that they seem to identify with, but many, many, many of them are smart, caring, dedicated, and strategically thoughtful about what they are doing. The newspapers would never give you that impression, but it is true. And, while I might have disagreements about several of their tactical choices or the organizing value of their "alternative" look, which strikes me as a poor way to reach out to most citizens, I was impressed with these young people. With more political education and organizing experience under their belt, many of these folks will grow into an inspiring generation of social leaders.

They also know a hell of a lot right now. That should not be underestimated. It was this alternative youth culture segment of protest participants that organized a staff of volunteer civil liberties lawyers to serve as direct action observers as well as counsel for arrested or detained protesters. They found accommodations for over 10,000 people and fed them a free (donation requested) breakfast every morning from between 7 and 10. They created numerous websites and listserves across North America to coordinate the organizing of events and mobilizing people to get to Quebec City. They established welcoming centers and independent media centers to counter the corporate media cover-up of what really went on here. They trained thousands of protesters in nonviolent direct action tactics before the big weekend. They also organized hundreds of campus teach-ins and conferences on free trade and the fight for corporate accountability throughout North America in the months leading up to the protests. And they worked as a respectful partner in a much larger coalition where most people did not share their counter-culture ways, their exact strategic orientations, or their often youthfully extreme and abstract political ideologies. I felt ancient among them, but these kids are all right.

On Saturday night, as I lay in my sleeping bag in a small lecture hall at the Laval University listening to about fifty young "freedom fighters" sleeping and snoring peacefully on the floor all around me, I had an interesting thought. The lack of democracy in our society is real. Police brutality is real. A corporate-dominated media that has a hard time telling simple truths is real. Yet, we don't live in a fascist police state - at least not yet. My friends and I, and hundreds of U.S. activists like us, were able to cross the border. Ten thousand of us travelers could now sleep peacefully at the University in its gyms and lecture halls without fear of a police sweep through the University in the middle of the night. We did not have to worry about arbitrary arrest, assignation, or "disappearing" while we rested for the next day of protest and educational activities. We have much more room to maneuver than say a Mayan Indian activist in Guatemala. There is, thus, a significant difference between an undemocratic, sometimes repressive society and a dictatorial, authoritarian police state. Somehow that nuance of difference felt good even in the midst of the situation in Quebec City.

Yet, it also made me realize how fragile our freedoms of speech, association, and organizing are and how easily they can be lost and compromised. There is clearly much danger in the future for further erosions of our basic freedoms as corporate interests try to create a world without any countervailing influences. The future, if there is to be any kind of future that we can call decent, will require that more and more of us begin to exercise the democratic freedoms hard won by the struggles of the many citizens, rebels, organizers, and reformers who have gone before us. We will have to stand on these people's shoulders and work hard in whatever ways that are open to us to build democratic social movements that are powerful enough to win over the majority of the people and overcome the resistance of elitist elements in this society who will try to block these movements with ridicule, legal repression, and organized violence. It is a tall order, but I felt that kind of movement maturing in our midst that weekend in Quebec City. And I would not trade that feeling for anything in the world.

Steve Chase teaches at Antioch New England Graduate School. His writings have appeared in Orion, Terra Nova, The Trumpeter, Whole Terrain, Z Magazine, Sojourner and other national publications. He is currently leading Antioch's effort to establish a masters program in Environmental Advocacy and Organizing.

For a more complete version of this text, contact Steve Chase at Steven_Chase@antiochne.edu.

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