The Ottawa Citizen
November 19, 2001
By Susan Riley

'There are dangerous, violent hooligans here," read the graffiti scrawled in chalk on a downtown building. "The cops." Not an original accusation, perhaps, but not wildly inaccurate.

During a weekend of small and ongoing provocations, the most disturbing and violent incident I witnessed was initiated by the Ontario Provincial Police. As 2,000 peaceful demonstrators were streaming out of LeBreton Flats Saturday morning on an anti-globalization march to the Supreme Court, a phalanx of large and heavily-armoured riot police pushed though the crowd to corral a couple of dozen hooded youths, members of the now-infamous Black Bloc.

The young people, who were doing nothing more than shuffling along with everyone else and chanting sporadically, were set upon by snarling dogs and shoved roughly into a circle by truncheon-wielding cops. Other marchers, many middle aged and some with young children, looked on in disgust or outrage and began shouting: "Let them go! Let them go!"

The youths were released, but a handful were pounced upon a few blocks further along by police, pulled out of the march -- which was still peaceful -- wrestled to the pavement and taken away. Onlookers who who tried to intervene, or simply ask questions, were struck, pushed to the ground and lunged and snapped at by the dogs. If weapons were found on the young protesters (that was the pretext for the assaults), they clearly wouldn't have been howitzers, or anything capable of penetrating formidable police defences. Had the kids been breaking windows, or turning over cars, they would have been inviting reprisal, but the police action was utterly unprovoked, ludicrously overdone and succeeded only in souring what had been a sunny and peaceful event.

The police involved (and it is important to note that not all forces, or individual officers, over-reacted) only confirmed the paranoia of their most extreme critics: The police are armed and dangerous; they don't like peaceful protest; they are looking for trouble, not, as they claim, trying to protect the public.

At last April's protests in Quebec City, police were throwing tear gas around like confetti, but they were also pelted vigorously with concrete blocks, lead pipes and bottle bombs. In Ottawa, a handful of slightly-built young people swore, made menacing gestures and wore the anarchist uniform, but apart from a broken window and some graffiti -- "smash the state" and "activism is not terrorism" were favourites -- there was no threat to public safety. Unless graffiti is now terrorism, too.

In fact, the gravest threat to the running dogs of capitalism (the phrase has new meaning now) was not what happened in the streets, where the message was often incoherent and the slogans typically simplistic. The real provocation occurred inside a jam-packed Anglican church on a leafy street in the Glebe Friday night, at a teach-in featuring several well-educated veterans of the struggle for global justice, from both North and South.

Their point, amply documented and passionately conveyed to an attentive crowd, was that the world's poorest have actually become poorer in the 30 years since globalization -- a parcel of policies including privatization, free trade and forced cutbacks in social spending -- has been most aggressively pursued by the rich countries. Perhaps the most damning testimony comes from the World Bank's own research, specifically a 1999 report which states: "Globalization appears to increase poverty and inequality ... The costs of adjusting to greater openness are borne exclusively by the poor, regardless of how long the adjustment takes."

Another year-old CIA study, Global Trends, reports: "The rising tide of the global economy will create many economic winners, but it will not lift all boats... (It will) spawn conflicts at home and abroad, ensuring an even wider gap between regional winners and losers than exists today."

So irrefutable is the evidence that globalization is not helping the poor that World Bank and IMF officials meeting here on the weekend acknowledge they have to do better. Their remedy: more globalization. In the closing press conference yesterday, Finance Minister Paul Martin said he was devoted to the same goal as the protesters: alleviating poverty. But the meetings produced no agreement to increase overseas aid; in fact, U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill publicly questioned the efficacy of such aid.

Street protests may not change minds, but they do build community. But it is the dissemination of real examples and real statistics about the true impact of globalization that is more subversive.

Susan Riley writes here Monday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail sriley@thecitizen.southam.ca .