Plans for Parallel Conference of the OAS

This article was published in the original Podium magazine on May 28, 2000, with the tag line, "One of the Podium's most popular articles, the story of a social justice meeting."

by Prema Oza

Various social justice groups from Ottawa, Toronto, Windsor and Detroit are busy making last minute preparations for alternative events and counter strategies in response to the preparatory meeting of First Minister's of nations belonging to the Organization of American States (OAS). While some groups are busy planning a parallel conference, other groups merely want to shut down the OAS event.

The OAS is a governing body similar to the United Nations. It holds an annual General Assembly with lower level First Minister's to discuss policy formulation and implementation to be followed by a Summit meeting of heads of state to develop implementation strategies. It touts itself as "the western hemisphere's principal forum for political, social, and economic dialogue." Currently, there are 35 members that comprise the OAS, including such economically and culturally diverse countries as: Canada, Ecuador, Haiti, Spain and Panama.

According to the international organization's website, it's mandate is to work collectively to safeguard democracy, human rights, peace and security while "expanding trade and tackling complex problems caused by poverty, drugs and corruption." In addition, the OAS claims to have made a commitment to a "focus on education [and] justice...."

While social justice groups may differ on approach, both sides agree that the OAS is not living up to its lauded mandate.

"Human rights, social and cultural rights and environmental sustainability need to be treated as superior to corporate rights," said Jim Porter, one of the meeting organizers.

While some groups want to shut down the meeting altogether, others merely want to enhance dialogue, etc., and have organized a parallel conference to take place around the OAS meetings themselves.

Historically, parallel conferences to international meetings of such bodies as the UN and IMF are seen as an ideal venue for social justice groups, also known as non-governmental organizations or NGOs, to raise awareness among both citizenry and the media. They are viewed as a an alternative source for grassroots knowledge that often gets pushed aside in the hustle-and-bustle of high and mid level meetings among politicos.

Vito Signorelli, a member of the MAI Coalition, appeared to echo many of the sentiments of those in attendance when he said, "I don't wanna shut it down, I wanna kick it in the ass. We should be drawing attention to the fact that they're not doing their job."

Regardless of the movement's intent, local law enforcement officials are taking no chances, and are stepping up security precautions to avoid what the media is hyping as another potential "battle in Seattle."

Social activists argue that the OAS has ignored its own mandate by becoming a rubber-stamping organization that pays mere lip service to the countless lives it is supposed to be protecting. The OAS, similar to the UN, lacks enforcement abilities. Detractors claim that it also suffers from social myopia where corporate greed often supercedes individual and collective rights and freedoms.

Angela Ventura of the Salvadorean Association of Windsor encouraged the meeting to engage in dialogue with the OAS in the hopes of working together.

"We need to work closely with the agenda of the OAS," she said. "We should request the OAS to be part of the agenda of the (parallel) conference."

There were some well-placed concerns over preaching to the converted with regard to the agenda of the parallel conference. The steering committee will look at a platform for a debate of issues and not just an opportunity to hear speeches and declarations.

The parallel conference has garnered some pretty major support in leading labour and social justice circles. Among the tentative list of speakers are Maude Barlow of the Canadian Labour Congress. In addition, the conference itself is largely being coordinated by the Montreal-based International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development (ICHRDD) - the brainchild of former NDP federal leader Ed Broadbent.

One can assume that the parallel conference will be large in scope and attendance, atracting a number of NGOs from across Canada and the world, as well as dignitaries and the press.

Concerns over representation were raised by Refugee committee member, Sungee John, who said that the organizing should be reflective of the nations being represented.

The goals of the parallel conference are simple, its task enormous. How do you make a bunch of stuffed shirts see that any and all trade agreements and social policies must comply with human rights laws? According to the ICHRDD's current president, Warren Allmand, "Canada can and must exercise its leadership. Human rights should not be viewed as a 'trickle-down' effect of international trade."

Among the tentative events that will comprise the parallel conference are various guest speakers from Canadian and Latin American labour and social justice groups, debates on current concerns of OAS member countries, awareness raising events in the preceding days of the actual meeting (dubbed the International Days of Action), a rally at Dieppe Gardens, a peace concert and an Earth Day gathering.

The actual First Minister's meeting of the OAS will be a Windsor first in terms of scale, and is set to take place here June 4-6th. The location of Windsor is no coincidence due largely to the political pull of our Deputy Prime Minister, the Honorable Herb Gray, who lobbied to have the conference held in his home riding. According to the organization's protocol, the June meeting will yield various policy initiatives which will then be ratified by the actual OAS meeting of world leaders in Montreal next year ---where yet another international protest is more than likely.


Prema Oza is a Canadian print journalist and radio personality who has appeared in or on various newspapers, magazines and call letters in Winnipeg, Ottawa, Toronto, Windsor and Detroit, Michigan. She is currently pursuing a degree in Political Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

Injustice In The Penal System

This article was published in the original Podium magazine on April 18, 2000, with the tag line, "Angela Davis speaks in Windsor/Detroit." Ms. Davis had spoken at Wayne State University on February 11, 2000.

by Prema Oza

'Teacher,' writer, strong, black woman, activist, leader, wrongfully imprisoned prisoner - all labels used to describe Angela Davis, past and present. Of them all, perhaps activist is the most appropriate, as is witnessed by her life of struggle, injustice, and by her ardent desire to help others. In an era with few worthy icons, she stands virtually alone.

Davis was in Detroit in February, speaking at Wayne State University on behalf of various campus groups. In a stirring lecture titled, "Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex," she painstakingly outlined the long and sordid past of prison systems in the United States. To the average, informed Canadian, it is clear that these conditions sadly mirror our own system. Or, at the very least, the US scenario is where we could be headed pretty damn soon, as we as a nation begin to toy with the idea of privatization.

"Privatization of health care, education and punishment" go hand-in-hand for state legislators and lawmakers, according to Davis. Other similarities exist, such as the growing rate of aboriginal, non-white, and other socially stratified men and women. Another alarming similarity is the rise in drug-related sentencing in Canada. According to Davis, "the US imprisons more citizens proportionately than any other country in the world. By February 15, two million people will be incarcerated in federal, state, and county jails."

The over-capacity audience was led through an intricate and unscrupulous maze of covert prison ideology and the skewed priorities of correctional facilities in the United States: "confinement," "containment," dehumanization and rehabilitation according to "societal norms", rather than education, actual rehabilitation and eventual release for non-dangerous offenders. As a frequent visitor to correctional facilities to do outreach with inmates, she also highlighted what she has seen firsthand: the gender component of incarceration, that the numbers for women in prison "are increasing at a rate higher than men."

Davis knows all too well the stark reality of life inside the American corrections establishment. As a member of the Black Panther Party, she was falsely accused and imprisoned on charges of murder and conspiracy, only to win an eventual acquittal and release after public protest in 1972.

Incarceration wasn't always the American way when it came to criminal deterrence. As the economy became further de-industrialized, Davis says, the economy adjusted itself accordingly, and government saw less of a need to preoccupy itself with matters of low political relevance, such as social spending, and more with issues like corporate investment, structural adjustment programs (SAP) and trade negotiations with equally suspect nations.

In the post civil war era, "the criminal legal system developed along the side of segregation; and the reservation system; and the development of the industrial proletariat and rising immigration. The US annexed Hawai'i [and] Puerto Rico, and thwarted Cuban independence." In the spirit of "Reagonomics" during the latter half of the 1990's, a so-called "war on drugs" took place, and prisons in America burgeoned under the strain.

In this new era of global capitalism, Davis made a strong argument for the virtual cottage industries thriving inside prisons in North America. Such industries are "extremely profitable" and "analogous to Asian sweatshops". Today, prison industries are "more profitable than unionized labor" in a way that moving production south was cheaper for multinational corporations. Indeed, Davis is correct in assuming that as long as corporate might is right in North America, "the power of corporations will rise to be an unbridling power."

To further exemplify the state view of women, Davis outlines how, historically, women in prisons were women who did not conform to societal norms, as was illustrated in the recent fact based Hollywood film, Girl Interrupted. Unlike men, women were seen as restorative. They were fallen women with a remote possibility of being reprogrammed into being good wives and mothers. Many of their crimes were considered to be of a sexual or moral nature, such as premarital or biracial sex and drunkenness. Now the tendency has become more standardized - confinement and containment of the general female population also, argues Davis.

Davis uses the example of welfare mothers as a further example of abject vilification of this segment of society. "The campaign against welfare mothers is about a minute part of the federal budget, and [yet] became a subject of debate. How is it that black [and] Latina women are responsible for all sorts of things, like crime? So the welfare system was destablized. And this corresponds with women in prisons because women with families, with jobs earning minimum wage [without adequate] child care, are more likely to work within illegal economies like drugs or sex services."

The majority of women incarcerated during the Reagan era were convicted on drug-related charges. Why? They had not hurt anyone? Answer: unlike their dealing partners, they had no one to "give up" to prosecutors, and subsequently served the full extent of their time, according to Davis, while the men who offered up everyone they knew and generally got out earlier.

Davis also categorically slammed the death penalty policies of a few determined yet clueless states in the US, including that of Presidential hopeful George Bush Jr. Some states have, however, called for a moratorium on executions as there have been cases of wrongful deaths of innocent inmates.

"After executions, it was a big story of one person. Now we have an assembly line of death," said Davis, "women are being executed. I really hope in the year 2000 we can save Mumia Abu Jamal," she added. The audience responded with applause.

Davis foresees the mass, cross-sector demonstration in Seattle as "a big new era in activism. What I'm asking you to do is look at the present as history. When I began to look at the history of prisons in the US, and [at] women, it made me look clearly at what's happening today. It wasn't until the late 18th, early 19th century that prisons began to take shape as the dominant mode of punishment. Now we can't think about crime except in relation to prisons, or punishment except in relation to crime."

An example of extremist perceptions of punishment would be the growing trend toward "super max" institutions, Davis said, where solitary confinement is a reality for the general population -- sort of a "recapitulation of solitary time". It does not rehabilitate the prisoner, it serves no real purpose other than to drive the prisoner "insane", thereby further irrevocably cutting himm off from society; "and yet it is a [viable] punishment strategy." No doubt because, among other things, recruitment of correctional personnel is at an all time low for obvious reasons.

"Our communities are being devoured by systems that [are] profiting from oppression, " Davis said, "profiting under an expanding prison industrialization. " She wondered out loud why there has been no enormous mass uprising.



Prema Oza is a Canadian print journalist and radio personality who has appeared in or on various newspapers, magazines and call letters in Winnipeg, Ottawa, Toronto, Windsor and Detroit, Michigan. She is currently pursuing a degree in Political Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.