*apologies for cross-posts etc* FREE JAGGI SINGH!! Naomi Klein reports in today's Globe and Mail (April 21) that only minutes after she had been speaking to him on the phone, Jaggi Singh was surrounded by three policy/security force members dressed as activist, shoved to the ground and kicked, thrown in an unmarked van, and driven away. When his friends tried to liberate him, they were fought off with batons and the police identified themselves. =20 The fact that Jaggi was encouraging people to move away from the fence, and wasn't engaged in any violent activity that day might have less to do with the fact that some powerful people 1. don't like what he has to say, 2. are apprehensive of his name and ethnicity, 3. are apprehensive of his dark skin colour. In short, racism and repression of free speech have a lot to do with Jaggi's arrest. At this point, no one knows where he is being held. Must we live in a police state rife with racism, whether in Cincinnati or Quebec city? Must we have our civil rights curtailed and suspended by the police and their powerful executive at a whim? FREE JAGGI SINGH!! Police and the mainstream media label the 'dangerous factions' of protests 'anarchist', and use this as an excuse to detain anyone, let alone an articulate, considerate individual like Jaggi who identifies with this political ideology. Is this Stalinist Russia, where dissidents could be rounded up and imprisoned for their political views, despite the fact they had done nothing? The police's labelling of Jaggi and the CLAC is a facile excuse for repression, as anarchism or any other political ideology has little to do with individual acts of violence - whether the shot of a rubber bullet or the throwing of a piece of concrete. =20 One of Jaggi's most powerful messages has been that the free market inflicts violence on the world's poor and the environment. He has been followed covertly, been beaten, taken and had his civil rights suspended without recourse. He has been made a victim of arbitrary silencing and oppression, while leaders inside the fence muse about democracy. What hypocrisy. =20 FREE JAGGI SINGH!! Bear witness to police repression!! DEMAND JAGGI'S RELEASE!! below: reference articles X-Sender: 3ajd7@qlink.queensu.ca X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Light Version 3.0.6 (32) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 10:22:22 -0400 To: 3ajd7@qlink.queensu.ca From: Adam Harden <3ajd7@qlink.queensu.ca> Subject: (ftaa-l) Jaggi Singh arrested Delivered-To: ftaa-l-outgoing@lists.tao.ca Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 00:23:39 -0400 To: ftaa-l@lists.tao.ca From: Bob Olsen Subject: (ftaa-l) Jaggi Singh arrested Sender: worker-ftaa-l@lists.tao.ca JAGGI SINGH ARRESTED April 20, 2001, Quebec City http://www.indymedia.org Jaggi Singh assaulted by police, disappeared by david creighton 8:22pm Fri Apr 20 '01 ottawa phone: 613-728-5716 dcr8on@yahoo.com Photo http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=3D3D35570&group=3D3Dweb= cas=3D t >From Ontario IMC The popular activist organizer was attacked by disguised policemen and whisked away. His whereabouts are now unknown A group of disguised policemen assaulted and kidnapped the non-violent activist Jaggi Singh this afternoon. His whereabouts are still unknown and no charges have been laid. About five o'clock we were standing talking on rue Saint-Jean, a green [minimum risk] zone,Helene Nazon reported, when three or four demonstrators suddenly attacked Jaggi from behind. They grabbed his arms, pushed him down onto the pavement and began beating him. Jaggi shouted out and nearby protesters rushed to his rescue, she continued. One young woman was shoved to the ground and a man was kicked by the assailants, she said. When would-be rescuers appeared to have the upper hand, the assailants drew truncheons from under their coats, announced they were police and warned people away. Then they picked Jaggi up, dragged him into an unmarked panel van parked on Sainte-Claire, Nazon said, and sped away. Ms Nazon is a member of CASA [Welcoming Committee for the Summit of the Americas]. Numerous telephone inquiries to local police authorities revealed no reports of Mr Singh's arrest, location or of any charges being laid. The assailants are described as big men, bouncers, dressed up like protesters, and the attacked as completely unprovoked, and in an area designated green by the Comite populaire Saint-Jean-Baptiste [Patriotic St John the Baptist Committee]. Mr Singh is a well-known organizer and journalist who was similarly treated at the infamous APEC demonstrations in Vancouver and again in Montreal. Jaggi has never committed civil disobedience himself, Ms Nazon said. Other members of CASA condemned the brutal responses by police when the illegal barricades were earlier toppled by demonstrators. "This was complete overkill", said spokesperson Louise Boivin. "There is a problem when a society that calls itself 'democratic' has to suppress legitimate dissent with pepper spray, tear gas and attack dogs", she said. At a press conference tonight spokesperson Julie-Eve Proulx reported a number of 'pre-emptive' arrests, midnight house breakins by police and harrassments of organizers. The torchlight march we organized last night was very beautiful and completely peaceful,=3D94 she said, =3D93and we can= see no reason why police are acting in these extraordinary ways. The 'good news' is that groups that have had difficulties with each other for years, Boivin said, are now working together very effectively. "These police actions certainly confirm the nature of the secret negotiations going on inside the wall", she said. ---------------------------- ftaa-l ----------------------------- resisting the FTAA and capitalist globalization mobilizing for Quebec City, April 2001 creating alternatives ----- to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to: with the following text only: unsubscribe ---------------------------- ftaa-l ----------------------------- From: Adam <3ajd7@qlink.queensu.ca> To: 3ajd7@qlink.queensu.ca Subject: An Article from the globeandmail.com Web Centre Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 10:25:57 -0400 (EDT) X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by qlink.queensu.ca id f3LEQ2p22815 The following is an article from the globeandmail.com Web Centre. Saturday, April 21, 2001 Even the Green Zone wasn't a safe haven By NAOMI KLEIN >From Saturday's Globe and Mail Quebec =97 "Where are you," I screamed from my cellphone into his. There was a pause and then, "A Green Zone =97 St. Jean and St. Claire." Green Zone is protest speak for an area free of tear gas or police clashes. There are no fences to storm, only sanctioned marches. Green zones are safe, you're supposed to be able to bring your kids to them. "Okay," I said. "See you in 15 minutes." I had barely put on my coat when I got another call: "Jaggi's been arrested. Well, not exactly arrested. More like kidnapped." My first thought was that it was my fault: I had asked Mr. Singh to tell me his whereabouts over a cellphone. Our call must have been monitored, that's how they found him. If that sounds paranoid, welcome to Summit City. Less than an hour later, at the Commit=E9 Populaire St-Jean Baptiste community centre, a group of six swollen-eyed eyewitnesses read me their hand-written accounts of how the most visible organizer of Friday's direct action protest against the free-trade area of the Americas was snatched from under their noses. All say Mr. Singh was standing around talking to friends, urging them to move further away from the breached security fence. They all say he was trying to de-escalate the police standoff. "He said it was getting too tense," said Mike Staudenmaier, a U.S. activist who was talking to Mr. Singh when he was grabbed from behind, then surrounded by three large men. "They were dressed like activists," said Helen Nazon, a 23-year-old from Quebec City, with hooded sweatshirts, bandannas on their faces, flannel shirts, a little grubby. "They pushed Jaggi on the ground and kicked him. It was really violent." "Then they dragged him off," said Michele Luellen. All the witnesses told me that when Mr. Singh's friends closed in to try to rescue him, the men dressed as activists pulled out long batons, beat back the crowd and identified themselves: "Police!" they shouted. Then they threw him into a beige van and drove off. Several of the young activists have open cuts where they were hit. Three hours after Mr. Singh's arrest, there was still no word of where he was being held. Throwing activists into unmarked cars and nabbing them off streets is not supposed to happen in Canada. The strange thing is that, in Jaggi Singh's short career as an antiglobalization activist, it has happened to him before =97 during the 1997 protests against the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit. The day before the protests took place, Mr. Singh was grabbed by two plainclothes police officers while walking alone on the University of British Columbia campus, thrown to the ground then stuffed into an unmarked car. The charge, he later found out, was assaulting police. Mr. Singh had apparently talked so loudly into a megaphone some weeks before that it had hurt the ear drum of a nearby police officer. The charge, of course, was later dropped, but the point was clearly to have Mr. Singh behind bars during the protest, just as he will no doubt be in custody for Saturday's march. He faced a similar arrest at the G-20 summit in Montreal. In all of these bizarre cases, Jaggi Singh has never been accused of vandalism, of planning or plotting violent actions. Anyone who has seen him at the barricades, crumbling or otherwise, knows that his greatest crime is giving good speeches. That's why I was on the phone with Mr. Singh minutes before his arrest =97 trying to persuade him to come to the Peoples' Summit teach-in that I was co-hosting to tell the crowd of 1,500 what was going on in the streets. He had agreed, but then determined it was too difficult to cross the city. I can't help thinking the fact that this young man has been treated as a terrorist, repeatedly and with no evidence, might have something to do with his brown skin, and the fact that his last name is Singh. No wonder his friends say that this supposed threat to the state doesn't like to walk alone at night. After collecting all the witness statements, the small crowd begins to leave the community centre to attend a late-night planning meeting. In an instant, the halls are filled with red-faced people, their eyes streaming with tears, frantically looking for running water. The tear gas has filled the street outside the centre, and has entered the corridors. "This is no longer a Green Zone! Les flics (the police) s'envient!" So much for making it to my laptop at the hotel. Denis Belanger, who was kind enough to let me use the community centre's rickety PC to write this column, notices that the message light is flashing on the phone. It turns out that the police have closed in the entire area, no one is getting out. "Maybe I'll spend the night," Mr. Belanger said. Maybe I will too. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ Two new iUnits bond funds, IG5 and IG10 began trading recently on the TSE. 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