Canada's Keep-out-the-Roma Policy

Romani victim of Nazi medical experimentation attempting to make seawater
potable, Dachau Concentration Camp. Retrieved from
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_ph.php?ModuleId=10005149&MediaId=917

Asked how many Jews Canada should accept from Europe after (not before) WWII, a Canadian official famously answered “none is too many.” This answer is now well-known in Canada since the publication in 1983 of the eponymous book, None Is Too Many, by Irving Abella and Harold Troper. Many Canadians knew that Canada wasn’t very enthusiastic about admitting European Jews before WWII, even when Canadian officials were aware of their persecution by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. But it was a shock to readers of Abella and Troper’s book that even after the war, when the concentration camps had been opened and the bodies of the dead revealed to the world, there were still people who didn’t want to admit any Jews to Canada

Very few people during and after WWII knew that another minority ethnic group in Europe had also been slaughtered:  the Roma, or Gypsies, as they were then known. No one knows how many Roma were slaughtered in the Holocaust, but 500,000 is a common estimate. They were treated just as the Jews were: rounded up, sequestered, concentrated, starved, sent across the continent in cattle cars to extermination camps, brutalized and murdered, as in the mass gassings of Roma in Auschwitz. One Roma victim was an 11-year-old girl whose picture is the symbol of the restored Westerbork concentration camp in the Netherlands. Westerbork is where Dutch Jews and Roma were concentrated before being deported to their deaths, 1,000 people at a time every Tuesday morning. This little Roma girl was photographed peering out of a cattle-car door, wearing a white scarf that her mother fashioned for her out of a pillow-case because she was ashamed to be seen with a shaven head. (Anne Frank was deported from Westerbork too.)

Romanian Ghetto in Baia Mare, where the Mayor ordered a wall be built around the Roma to seal the
settlement off from the rest of the city.  The website cited offers many more pictures like this one.
Retrieved from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2285796/Romanian-gypsies-living-condemned-ghetto-mayor-built-wall-around.html

Now, it seems, the slogan “none is too many” has been resurrected. Canada has a new immigration law, Bill C-31, called Protecting Canada’s Immigration System. In keeping with  long-standing practice, the government is cracking down on countries that produce “too many” refugees. Our new law states that certain designated countries of origin (DCO), mostly in Europe, are democracies and therefore highly unlikely to produce refugees. People arriving in Canada from those countries will be “fast-tracked” and sent back if not found to be refugees, without the rights to appeal of refugee claimants from other countries. The legal community says that means that many refugee claimants will not have time to prepare their cases or even find legal counsel.

One person opposed to these new rules in Gina Csanyi-Robah, a Canadian Roma of Hungarian ancestry. She is opposed to these measures because Hungary has been designated a DCO, yet Hungary is a country where many Roma live and where they are persecuted. The standard prejudice against Roma is that they are nomadic wanderers who never settle down and don’t send their children to school. The reality is that for centuries they were chased across borders whenever they did try to settle down, although sometimes they were enslaved, as in what is now Romania, where Roma who displeased their masters might be crucified. In “democratic” post-Communist Hungary, many Roma are—or would like to be—permanently settled in their homes, going to work every day and sending their children to school. But that’s difficult when there are racists burning them out of their homes and murdering them. This isn’t a government practice, as under the Nazis, but the Hungarians who intimidate the Roma don’t seem to be very worried about being punished. And about 50 per cent of Roma children are in special-needs schools where they are unlikely to receive more than a primary education.  

Nowadays, the Roma are supposed to be citizens of whatever European state they live in, and if that state is a member of the European Union they are supposed to have the right to move freely around Europe like everyone else who is a European citizen. They are entitled to live for three months in any European country and longer if they can support themselves. But that isn’t what has happened: instead, in the last few years France and Italy have rounded up legally-resident Roma and deported them back to Eastern Europe. And some of the new democracies like the Czech Republic and Slovenia have used various spurious criteria to claim that Roma who were born there and/or lived there all their lives were not citizens in the first place, though these measures did not always succeed.

Meanwhile in Hungary, the far-right political party, Jobbik, makes explicitly racist statements about the Roma, and paramilitary groups attack them. And according to The Economist (January 12, 2013) it’s not only Jobbik that is prejudiced against the Roma. A founding member of the ruling party, Fidesz, called Roma “animals” and described them as “unsuitable for living among people.”   

So why, under these conditions, does the Canadian government claim that the many refugee claimants from Hungary, among whom are a significant number of Roma, are just here to collect social welfare benefits or free health care? It’s not enough to say they don’t need to come to Canada as they can move to other parts of Hungary or Europe, when anti-Roma sentiment is widespread and other European countries round them up and deport them. Canada is a party to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. According to this Convention, if you are persecuted for reasons of “race,” nationality, or “membership in a particular social group” you can claim refugee status in a country that is not your own. Many Roma are persecuted in Hungary and it’s not at all clear that the Hungarian government or the European Union is willing to protect them from mobs of Jobbik fascists and the others who consider them unworthy of life in Europe. Yet it seems as if our government –which has accepted Hungarian Roma refugees in the past—now wants to put a stop to their entry to Canada.  Maybe it’s not “none is too many” but it sure sounds like “any more is too many.”

Sources: Some of the information about the situation of Hungarian Roma and the effects of Bill C-31 is from several articles in the Canadian Jewish News in December 2012 and January 2013: many in the Canadian Jewish community feel a sense of obligation to the Roma, who were their companions in death 70 years ago. I also relied on a chapter by Helen O’Nions, “How citizenship laws leave the Roma in Europe’s Hinterland” in a book I am co-editing with a colleague, Margaret Walton-Roberts, called (tentatively) Slippery Citizenship.

Book Note: Kamal Al-Solaylee’s Intolerable

The chances are very high that like me, most readers of this blog know very little about Yemen. All I ever knew about Yemen is that it used to be divided into “socialist” and non-socialist spheres, that it reunited in 1991, that it’s reputed to be one of many Middle Eastern sites of terrorism, and that it sort of went through an Arab spring in 2011.

You can rectify this a little bit if you read Kamal Al-Solaylee’s Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes, published in 2012 by HarperCollins. Kamal is a Canadian citizen who was born in Yemen and grew up as the youngest child in a huge Yemeni family (11 siblings in total: seven girls and four boys) in Aden, Beirut, Cairo and Sana’a, the first and last cities in Yemen. He came to Canada in 1996, as a highly qualified immigrant with a Ph.D. in English from Nottingham University. Kamal managed to very quickly work his way up through various odd jobs in the arts and journalism to a full-time job at the Toronto newspaper, the Globe and Mail; later, he became a professor of journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto, a position he holds today. Here is a picture of Kamal from his Ryerson University Website.

Kamal is gay. Part of the book (cover depcted at left) is about his coming out, in a society is which homosexuality is deeply frowned upon. As he writes about his mother and seven older sisters, you wonder if they knew he was gay or whether they just knew he was different; not that many little boys, for example, want to go fashion shopping with their sisters, let along sit around with fashion magazines ahead of time picking outfits they think their sisters should wear. Perhaps his sisters knew but didn’t know, as to admit he was gay in conservative Arab society might be unthinkable. In any event, Kamal spent his adolescence in Cairo but did not know how to connect with the gay scene there until he visited one of his sisters in England and called a gay hotline for advice on where to meet other gays when he returned to Egypt. For a couple of years he enjoyed the gay scene but then his father, unable to make a living in Cairo, relocated the family back to the city of Sana’a in Yemen. Kamal had no choice but to go along, even though Yemen is a country where gays can be publically flogged or even hanged. He doesn’t say much about fear of exposure in Yemen, but if you think about it, the pressure must have been unbearable. Indeed, his old-fashioned mother encouraged him to “escape” when he received a scholarship to England, so maybe she did –sort of—know the danger he was in, even if she couldn’t admit it to herself.

Kamal Al-Solaylee's faculty photo, retrieved from
http://www.ryerson.ca/journalism/facultydirectory/
undergraduate/al-solaylee.html

The fact that he is gay is probably one reason why Kamal is so sympathetic to his sisters. When they lived in Cairo, the whole family would go to the beach and the girls would wear bikinis. Later on though, as the Muslim Brotherhood gained strength in Egypt, Kamal’s oldest brother because very religious, far more so than their secular, anglophile father, who had owned real estate in Aden before it went socialist. The brother put more and more pressure on the sisters to conform to Islamic dress and codes of modesty.  Once they returned to Yemen, the sisters had no choice to conform and gradually, as their options for independent living narrowed, they voluntarily turned to Islam for comfort.

I was interested most in what Kamal wrote about being gay, and about his mother and sisters.  But the book also conveys a sense of what life was like for prosperous and secular Arabs during the years he grew up. Kamal and his sisters attended Catholic schools: this was not a problem, as the most important thing was to get a good education.  His oldest sisters had good jobs; no one said women should not earn money. The family was close-knit and unmarried brothers and sisters all lived at home with the parents.

The book also conveys a sense of what it’s like to live in a state of warfare. The Al-Solaylee family left Beirut for Cairo when they couldn’t stand Lebanon’s civil war any longer. Then in Yemen in 2011, they encountered warfare again, as they lived through bombing raids. Electricity was rationed, gas and fuel were scarce, and people moved from the central city to the suburbs to avoid being bombed. However much we read about, it’s hard for us in Canada who have never experienced war (I never have) to grasp the day-to-day troubles, even if everyone in your family stays alive. 

Kamal Al-Solaylee’s book is a good way to learn about real life in the Arab Middle East.

Rape Culture and Cultural Relativism

Every feminist blogger in the world is probably writing about the rape of a 23-year old woman student in New Delhi in December 2012.  Like everyone else, I am outraged by this rape. As one of the Indian activists I heard on the Canadian Broadcasting Company said, it was particularly cruel and violent. It appears that a group of men who were on a private party bus tricked her and a male friend to join them, and then raped her to death, damaging her internal organs with metal tools.  It is sad, though, that it took such a violent rape to galvanize Indian women and men to action. The same woman I heard on the radio said that this was no “ordinary” rape, by which she meant the day-to-day rapes that Indian women experience, often by relatives or acquaintances.

Protesters in New Delhi, India on 27 December 2012 after a brutal gang rape on 16 December 2012
caused the death of a young Indian woman. Retrieved from
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/12/28/india-rape-victim-singapore.html

If any good comes out of this rape, it is the mobilization of women in India and elsewhere to demand that the police and the courts take rape seriously. There are still places in the world where, if a woman reports a rape to the police, they will then rape her in turn: as “damaged goods” she is fair game.  

This brings me to debates about cultural relativism in human rights, which have annoyed me since I started publishing on human rights in 1980. Some people claim that human rights are a “Western” invention and imposition on the rest of the “non-Western” world. This is factually incorrect in all sorts of ways. Non-Western countries at the UN voted for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 (Canada only voted for it at the last minute, having lots of doubts!).  Since then most countries of the world have signed onto a long list of human rights documents. And there are human rights and women’s rights activists all over the place. In 1980 a male African scholar at a conference told me that African women didn’t “need” rights because men treated them so well. I went home and asked an African student what she thought of that: she replied that her brother-in-law had beaten her pregnant sister to death, and then took custody of the infant who survived the beating. Nowadays, there is a huge African feminist movement and no scholar could get away with saying such a ridiculous thing about women not needing rights.

 One way around the argument that the “West” imposes human rights is in effect to argue its opposite, that all “cultures” have human rights, they just have different conceptions of human rights. That’s what I heard a bunch of my male colleagues saying at an academic conference in the late 90s. It was unbelievable. A group of distinguished white men, all well-known scholars of human rights, argued that all cultures protected human rights. When I stood up and criticized them, pointing out that there are very few cultures in which women enjoy human rights even in principle, let alone in practice, they shushed me! But if all cultures have human rights, then women are not human. Women exist in all cultures but in very few do they have rights. Even in the West, women’s rights are very recent. My mother’s generation, for example, were expected to follow their husbands blindly wherever they went; were not able to get credit in their own name; and in Quebec, where my own mother lived, were not even able to have emergency surgery without their husbands’ permission. This actually happened to a friend of my mother: her husband was away on a business trip and she had to find him (without email, etc.) before she could have surgery.

Catharine MacKinnon's law faculty photo,
retrieved from http://www.law.umich.edu/
FacultyBio/Pages/FacultyBio.aspx?FacID=camtwo

Of course, you could ask where does rape fit into this? One of my all-time favourite feminists is the American legal scholar, Catharine MacKinnon. She was one of the first scholars to argue that rape is torture. I remember her sitting with a bunch of male suits at a conference at Banff in Alberta in 1990. She talked about “Linda Lovelace,” a pseudonym for a woman renowned in the 1970s as a pornographic actress (this was at a time when many rebellious North Americans idealized “free love”—which often meant men sexually exploiting women as much as they wanted). Linda Lovelace was actually the victim of a cruel, sadistic pimp, not a willing actress in a sexually liberating age (see reference below).  Catharine made some of the men she was sitting with very uncomfortable, describing in excruciating detail what happened to Linda Lovelace. 

If human rights really are a Western cultural idea, then I say “Go for it!” Human rights protect everyone from torture. And torture is what rape is, for many victims. The Indian student on the bus was a torture victim. It used to be thought that only agents of the state could commit torture; so the policeman who beat up a prisoner at the station committed torture, but the same policeman who went home and beat up his wife was just committing a private crime. Catharine MacKinnon—and others like her—showed us that private citizens can and do torture each other.  The women who are demonstrating and blogging all over the world against rape are not victims of Western cultural imperialism: they don’t need Western women to tell them rape is torture. We have to change all cultures that encourage, condone, or tolerate rape. A culture based on the suppression by torture of a huge part of its population is not a culture worth preserving.

Update, January 18, 2013: One of the commentators on this blog said s/he had expected more depth on this topic. It's hard to go into much depth in a blog. For more on what I think about cultural relativism, see my article "Cultural Absolutism and the Nostaliga for Community," published in Human Rights Quarterly in 1993, vol. 7, no.2. It's available on line for free from Scholars' Commons (Wilfrid Laurier University) but I haven't figured out how to put the link on yet.  Also, I published an article "Universal Women's Rights since 1970" in Journal of Human Rights, 2012, vol. 10, no,4, but it's not free on-line.

Reference: Catharine MacKinnon, “On Torture: A Feminist Perspective on Human Rights”, in Kathleen E. Mahoney and Paul Mahoney, eds. Human Rights in the Twenty-First Century: A Global Challenge,Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1993, pp. 21-31.

Labour Rights, Miners’ Rights

Labour Rights, Miners’ Rights

Over the end-of-year break I read Jennifer Haigh’s 2005 novel, Baker Towers. This novel is about a family living in the fictional Bakertown, in the coal-mining region of Pennsylvania in the 1940s and 50s. Bakertown is named after the mine-owning family, the Bakers, and Baker Towers is the facetious name for two huge piles of scrap from the mines that dominate the landscape and pollute the atmosphere. Miners are paid partly in scrip, company-issued “money” that can be used only to buy goods at the company store. The father of the family risks being fired when he buys a stove from an independent businessman at a lower price than he would have to pay at the company store; it’s delivered in the middle of the night.  The miners also live in company housing, so if a miner loses his job, his family becomes homeless. Many of the miners die of pulmonary diseases after spending their youth on their hands and knees in the tunnels, digging for coal.

 

This novel reminds us of what conditions used to be like for miners in North America. It’s only a few decades since trade unions were able to obtain better conditions for men working in such arduous conditions. Yet many governments and corporations treat trade unions as enemies. The Canadian government has recently passed a law forcing trade unions to publicly reveal their officials’ salaries, yet it hasn’t passed a law forcing corporations to do the same. Michigan recently joined many other US states in passing so-called “right-to-work” legislation that is meant to undercut unions’ bargaining power by removing their right to make sure all employees at a company are members of the union. This may sound like a question of freedom but it pits members against non-members, making it much easier for employers to divide workers against each other.

Westland Coal Miners, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1942. Retrieved from http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/mmh/machinery/dangeroustrade.cfm

In South Africa, the last five months of 2012 were a period of miners’ strikes for higher wages. In at least one instance, police attacked miners and over 20 were killed. The new deputy leader of the ruling African National Congress, Cyril Ramaphosa, was a union leader during the struggle against apartheid. Now he is a multi-millionaire businessman who called for police action against the miners during the strikes, according to leaked emails (reported in The Economist, Dec. 22, 2012, p. 71). Ramaphosa is a far better option to take over South Africa after President Jacob Zuma retires than Julius Malema, the so-called “youth” leader convicted of hate speech for calling for “Boers” (white Afrikaaner South Africans) to be killed (Malema was expelled from the ANC). But it’s still very worrisome that Ramaphosa, a former union leader, should turn so quickly against miners asking for better pay and working condition.

Police officers surround the bodies of miners they shot during a protest
at Lonmin platinum mine, South Africa, 16 August 2012. Retrieved from
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/17/world/africa/south
-african-police-fire-on-striking-miners.html?_r=0

Meantime, the Canadian government has announced that the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) will be promoting partnerships between Canadian mining companies investing overseas and non-government organizations (NGOs). The idea is that NGOs have expertise that mining companies don’t have, in matters such as community organization.  So the mining companies, conscious of the reputational risk of merely exploiting resources in less developed countries without doing anything to help the communities where they are based (and whose land they may be using) will be able to avail themselves of NGOs’ expertise in building schools, clinics, etc. But I’ll bet the one kind of NGO CIDA won’t be promoting as potential partners is trade unions. Trade unions possess expertise in organizing workers to demand their rights, including higher wages and better working conditions. Trade unions also know how to organize strikes. This is the kind of expertise the local miners working for Canadian companies really need but I doubt very much that CIDA will provide it.

I’m not all that fond of Marxism after the horrors that so-called Marxist regimes have perpetrated in the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere, but I still think the slogan “Workers of the world unite!” is a good one.

Book Note: Tamas Dobozy’s Siege 13

When I was a child, I picked up a habit my parents had. Whenever they met a new person from Europe they tried in a roundabout way to figure out where that individual had been during World War II.  My father was a refugee from Nazi Germany who ended up in Britain, where he married my Scottish mother. So they always wanted to know where the latest European immigrant had been and what his or her political views were. We went to a Polish doctor, for example, because we knew she had been in the resistance against the Nazis and later in a Nazi concentration camp. Other Europeans did the same thing when they met us, trying to place my father’s accent and find out his history so they could figure out whose side he might have been on.

I was reminded of this when I read the brilliant set of short stories, Siege 13, by one of my colleagues at Wilfrid Laurier University, Tamas Dobozy of the Department of English and Film Studies. Tamas’ book recently won the Roger’s Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was also a finalist for the 2012 Governor-General’s Fiction Award. One of the stories in Siege 13, “The Restoration of the Villa where Tibor Kalman Once Lived,” also won the 2011 O’ Henry short story award.

Some of Tamas’ stories are set in Budapest during the siege of 1944-5, when Soviet and Nazi troops (the latter with their indigenous Hungarian Arrow Cross allies) battled for control of the city. Desperate to save his life, one character in Siege 13 deserts one side for the other, killing his closest comrades in the process, trying as hard as possible to become one of the winners. Bodies lie in the streets, buildings topple, food disappears, families disintegrate, people lose their limbs in the fighting and beg others to kill them. In one story, it seems as though a family, unable to absorb the death of a son, decides to adopt two other young men. The family even pretends one of the young men is the actual dead son, although clearly he is not and may well be, from his looks and his language, a young German. In another story, a family emigrates to Canada but is haunted by the memory of a relative raped multiple times by Soviet soldiers during the siege, to the point where the women of the family, consumed by guilt, convince themselves that they see the rape victim alive, well, and rich in Toronto. Meanwhile, in the post-WWII Communist gulag, men designated as “cows” are taken along by escaping prisoners to be killed and eaten en route (as they hope) to freedom. And a woman in Budapest tells a visiting Canadian about a mythical “Museum of Failed Escapes”, full of balloons, boats and other paraphernalia created by would-be escapees from communist rule.

Several of the other stories are set in Canada in the Hungarian immigrant community. “Who is who?” and “where were you during…?” are questions everyone asks, whether of people’s allegiances and whereabouts during the siege or in the cruel aftermath of WWII under communist rule. A popular character at a Hungarian social club is “outed” as a former censor for the Soviet-backed regime. Even much younger children of émigrés are obsessed with Hungary; one character spends his time pretending that he has pictures of various Hungarian assassins. A young child tries to build a doomsday machine, as if he is genetically encoded with the doomsday siege of his ancestor’s beautiful city.

These days, it is fashionable among academics to who work in “post-conflict” societies to speak about ways to achieve reconciliation among various factions who in the recent past were busy killing each other. Some scholars admire the policy in Rwanda, where people are not permitted—by law—to identify each other as Hutu or Tutsi. In 1994 Hutu extremists murdered somewhere between 500,000 and one million Tutsi: this was the most extreme of a series of reciprocal genocides of Hutu by Tutsi in Burundi, and of Tutsi by Hutu in Rwanda, since independence in the late 1950s. I have always doubted that the Rwandan policy will actually facilitate “reconciliation.” My guess is that everyone knows exactly who is who in Rwanda, even if they aren’t permitted to say it aloud. Tamas Dobozy’s book is a forceful reminder of how deep political antagonisms are and how long they last. Maybe, you might argue, if the Hungarians had had some sort of truth and reconciliation commission after independence from Communist rule in 1989, these antagonisms might be forgotten. Maybe they are being forgotten anyway as the older generations die off and the younger ones enjoy freedom and the chance to make money.  But then we see the rise of Jobbik, the neo-fascist political movement in Hungary, which persecutes the Roma and is highly suspicious of Jewish Hungarians.

If I lived in Hungary now I would be reverting to my childhood ways, trying to figure out who is who, ethnically and politically. And I surely would not want to “reconcile” with the Jobbik fascists, any more that I would with both the fascist and the communist perpetrators of mass atrocities in Budapest during WWII. The Siege, with its portraits of bitterness, fear, cowardice, opportunism, and perpetual deep mourning, provides better insight into human nature than much of the optimistic literature on reconciliation.

Capitalism Good, Communism Bad—except for prison labour! IKEA and the East German police state.

An IKEA in Dresden, Germany. Retrieved from
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/16/german-police-ikea-bomb-attacks

I maintain a website on political apologies, which can be accessed here: http://political-apologies.wlu.ca. I define political apologies quite broadly to include apologies by private entities such as churches and corporations as well as governments. Last week I read an article by Kate Connolly in Toronto’s Globe and Mail (see reference below) about one such apology. Peter Betzel is the head of the German branch of IKEA, the furniture and houseware giant based in Sweden. He has issued an apology to former East German political prisoners who while in prison had to manufacture products for IKEA. You can read the same article here, in the British paper, the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/nov/16/ikea-regrets-forced-labour-germany.

East Germany was not a nice place. Spying was rife and the political police, the Stasi, were everywhere. Punishments for not being “loyal” to the Communist Party were draconian. From what I’ve read, a favorite punishment was to remove, or threaten to remove, children from their parents’ care if the parents did not toe the line. That’s what happened to one of the prisoners mentioned in Connolly’s article, whose three-month-old baby was taken away from her.

A standard punishment for not fulfilling your quota of IKEA products in the course of a day was solitary confinement. One of the prisoners mentioned in Connolly’s article, Alexander Arnold, said that if you produced less that 80 per cent of your quota, you’d be thrown into an isolation cell for ten days. The quota wasn’t for a standard eight-hour working day, either: the day was much longer than that. Such isolation is a form of torture. Imagine if you had to spend ten days, or even one day, without seeing or speaking to anyone. Arnold said he still has nightmares about his time in solitary.

Some people can endure solitary confinement. When I was a teenager in the mid-1960s, my parents had a friend from the then Czechoslovakia. He spent eight years in Communist prisons as punishment for trying to help someone else escape the country.  Seven years were spent working in mines without proper protective equipment. One year was in solitary confinement. He was a wonderful human being, warm and open, who eventually made a good life for himself in Canada in the hotel industry. But very few people can survive what he survived under such awful conditions and come out as whole, psychologically stable, friendly people. For some individuals, even one day in isolation can do serious damage.

My guess is that IKEA was not the only company to use East German prison labour. Just as we’ve learned over the years than many private German corporations were complicit in Nazi exploitation of slave labourers (Jewish, Polish, and others), so we will probably learn that East Germany sold its prisoners’ services to many Western capitalist corporations. And despite the efforts of many non-governmental organizations over the last two or three decades to monitor the buying habits of major retailers of consumer goods, corporations are probably still using products made by prison labour now. This is OK if the prisoners are well-treated, paid a reasonable wage, and not punished for not meeting quotas. It’s better to work than do nothing. But it’s not OK if conditions resemble the ones that prisoners had to endure in East Germany.

The German branch of IKEA owes compensation to each and every prisoner it employed, and lots of it, even if it employed them inadvertently and indirectly. Until that compensation is paid, I plan to boycott IKEA and I think that other people should do so as well. An apology is not enough.

Reference: Kate Connolly, “IKEA apologizes for prison labour,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), Nov. 17, 2012, p. A26.

Tess and the Republican Crazies

I belong to two women’s book clubs, and recently for one I read Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, originally published in Britain in 1891. This was a scandalous book for its time.

Tess’ father, John Durbeyfield, is a layabout who discovers that his ancestors were a powerful family named d’Urberville. Seeking to ingratiate himself with a wealthy family of the same name, he sends his innocent daughter Tess to work for them (not knowing that they are an upstart family that took the name just to make themselves seem important). The son of the house, Alex d’Urberville, rapes Tess when she is asleep. She returns home pregnant and has a son, who soon dies.

Sometime later, Tess goes to work in a dairy, where she meets a clergyman’s son named Angel Clare (what could be more indicative of his own innocence?) who is training to become a farmer, and they fall in love. On their wedding night (before consummating the marriage) Angel confesses to Tess that he is not actually “pure”: he had a two-day relationship with a woman. Tess, confusedly thinking that the same rules apply to women as to men, then confesses that she was raped.  Angel leaves her, telling her that her “real” husband is Alex.

Now poverty-stricken and without hope, Tess goes back to work on a farm. Soon she encounters Alex again. He has had a temporary conversion to evangelical Christianity, during which phase he proposes to Tess to make amends for the rape. When Tess tells him that in fact she is married, Alex replies that he is her true husband and convinces her that Angel will never return for her. Tess eventually goes off with Alex: when Angel returns soon after, she kills Alex and hides with Angel for three weeks before being discovered and eventually hanged. Angel, it is implied, then marries her truly “pure” younger sister.

So what we learn from this book is that only 121 years ago in the United Kingdom, if a man raped a woman he became her true husband. We abhor this kind of thing now, when we read about marriage-by-rape being practiced in some parts of the world. Yet we still have to fend off the Republican crazies who argue that rape can’t produce babies or that if a child results from rape, it is “God’s will.” According to the New York Times, Todd Akin, the Republican Senate nominee for Missouri, said in August that in a “legitimate rape” (by which he presumably meant a “real” rape) women’s bodies blocked off pregnancy:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/us/politics/todd-akin-provokes-ire-with-legitimate-rape-comment.html?_r=0 Apparently Akin missed biology class as a youngster. Then Richard Mourdock, a Republican Senate candidate for Indiana, said in late October that it was “God’s will” if women became pregnant as a result of rape: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/24/richard-mourdock-rape_n_2009739.html So from their point of view, when Alex raped Tess it wasn’t a “legitimate” rape and she must have somehow consented, and anyway  it was God’s will that she became pregnant.

This would be funny if it weren’t so serious. These two Republican crazies were defeated in the November 6, 2012 Presidential election and apparently the Republicans are now thinking about whether it is a good idea to alienate every American voter who is not white, older and male. Nevertheless, it is worrisome that the Republicans not only had a candidate who thought that rape could not cause pregnancy, but also had an earlier debate among the various men contending to become the Presidential candidate about whether women should have access to birth control.

Without birth control, women are slaves to their own bodies. It is bad enough that there is still no universal right in international law for women to use birth control. Instead CEDAW (the clumsily named Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which came into force in 1981) says in its Article 16, 3, e that men and women have equal rights to “decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of their children.” Much good that does women when there is a disagreement with their men. Women should have an absolute right to use birth control, whether their male partners agree or not. And while I regard abortion as a social tragedy and wish for a time when no women would ever want one, in the world we live in now, women absolutely need the right to abortion on demand. Women have to control their own reproduction if they are to be able to support themselves and the children they freely choose to have.   

I was somewhat active in the struggle for women’s rights in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  By accident, I even took part in one of the first huge marches for women’s rights in New York City in 1970 or 71. Like many women of my generation, I thought that debates about whether women “asked for” rape, or whether they should have access to birth control, had been long settled in North America, even if in many parts of the world women still don’t have the right to abortion. I don’t relish the idea of having to go out on the streets again when I am in my 70s or 80s to defend women’s rights.

Unfree Labor in Canada

When I was a child in the 1950s, my mother told me she had a sister who had gone with her husband to live in Australia via a program called “assisted passage.” As I then understood it, a farmer had assisted their emigration from Britain by paying for part or all of the cost of their transportation to Australia, in return for which they had to work for him for two years. In my child’s mind, I thought this was very generous of the farmer. But in 1999, I finally met this aunt. When I asked her about her two years working for the farmer, she told me it was like being a slave.

Mexican migrant worker in Leamington, Ontario. Retrieved from
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2012/02/07/f-migrant-workers-faq.html

So I was interested in the research that Jenna Hennebry and Janet McLaughlin, two of my colleagues at Wilfrid Laurier University, have conducted on temporary workers in Canada. I live in the province of Ontario, where much farm labor is done by temporary workers from the Caribbean and Latin America, especially Mexico. These workers—mostly men—come to Canada year after year to work on our farms, but they are not permitted to migrate permanently. They stay every year for as long as eight months without their families, then they have to go home. They are not permitted to change jobs; they are tied to the employer who sponsored their migration and they have to live on the employer’s property. Although technically speaking they have some rights to health care, they often have no transportation to get to doctors and they are afraid that if they take sick time their employers will fire them. Employers can fire them at will: they don’t have to give cause; and as soon as you are fired, you have to go home. So it’s also not a good idea to complain about your working or living conditions, or your employer may decide to get rid of you and you will be deported.

According to Janet and Jenna, temporary farm workers in Ontario are not allowed to join trade unions; they are also excluded from provincial regulations about maximum hours and overtime pay. They are obliged to pay taxes and pay into the employment insurance program, even though they can’t benefit from it since they have to return home if they are unemployed. Not surprisingly, most of these hard-working people whom the Canadian government doesn’t want to stay in the country are Latinos or people of African descent.

Temporary workers in Canada aren’t slaves or even indentured laborers: they can quit their jobs if they want and go home. They are paid –often minimum wages—and their housing, such as it is, is provided for them. Technically speaking, their governments are supposed to protect them if they are abused in Canada. But in fact they are caught in a system that tells them that no matter how hard they work in Canada and how long, they can never migrate here. Yet our government claims that it wants people to migrate to fill gaps in our labor supply. “Canadians” born and bred don’t like farm labor jobs, which can last for many hours a day during harvest time.

Horacio Gallegos, a Mexican migrant worker in Leamington, ON 2002, retrieved
from http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2011/04/18/migrant_workers
_health_suffers_due_to_housing_labour_study.html

Also, like many other Western industrialized countries, Canada hasn’t signed the 1990 United Nations’ International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and their Families. It seems that migrant-sending countries want migrant protection, but migrant-receiving countries don’t. Canada likes to boast about how it’s a country built on immigration, but it favors highly educated, highly skilled migrants, preferably those who can bring money into the country. Poor people, even if they work hard and can already speak English (in the case of Ontario) aren’t as popular, even though there is a shortage of Canadians willing to do unskilled farm labor. My guess is the reason the government doesn’t want to accept these workers as permanent migrants is that it would have to pay them unemployment benefits during the off-season.  And since they work such long hours, they might also become permanently ill as a consequence: by shipping them home, the government off-loads their health costs onto other governments or onto the workers themselves. Janet and Jenna say that seriously ill or injured workers are usually returned home.

Right now it’s fashionable to urge people to “eat local,” especially to eat food produced within 100 miles of where you buy it.  The idea is that your food will be healthier and you will support local farmers. But as far as I can determine from Jenna and Janet’s work, the farmers I would support if I followed the “eat local” policy might well be exploiters of temporary workers.  If I really care about human rights, I would do better to boycott Ontario farmers!

References:

Jenna A. Hennebry and Kerry Preibisch. “A Model for Managed Migration? Re-Examining Best Practices in Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program.”  International Migration, 2009.

Janet McLaughlin, “Classifying the ‘ideal migrant worker’: Mexican and Jamaican transnational farm workers in Canada.” Focaal--Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology,  vol. 57, 2010, pp. 79-94.

Janet McLaughlin and Jenna Hennebry, “Managed into the Margins: Examining Citizenship and Human Rights of Migrant Workers in Canada,” chapter prepared from Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann and Margaret Walton-Roberts, eds. Slippery Citizenship, in progress.

Canada's Crime Creation Policy

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews in Parliament, retrieved from
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/02/16/pol-twitter-tell-vic-everything.html

On  August 2, 2012 I posted a blog on torture in American prisons. Lest it be thought that I like to criticize the Americans but not my own country, I want to point out that our current Conservative government is engaged in a policy to ensure more crime in Canada. The government thinks that the way to combat crime is through stiffer sentences, even though we know that “tough-on-crime” policies fail and even though Canada’s crime rate has been falling since 1992 and is now at the same level as 1972, according to an article by Gloria Galloway in the Globe and Mail. The government  has instituted minimum sentencing rules that don’t give judges the discretion to take the particular circumstances of the offender into account; some judges have refused to abide by these rules, saying they violate our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Yet data on recidivism rates show that offenders given non-prison punishments are much less likely to reoffend than those who are incarcerated, according to an article in The Walrus, a Canadian monthly, by Edward Greenspan, a prominent Toronto lawyer, and Anthony Doob, a criminologist.

The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for Prisoners say that “Where sleeping accommodation is in individual cells or rooms, each prisoner shall occupy by night a cell or room by himself,” but our prisons are now so overcrowded that double-bunking in cells built for one is common. In fact, according to Galloway, it’s so bad that the president of the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers, Pierre Mallette, is complaining. With serious overcrowding, fights and other disruptions are more frequent and guards have to rely more on firearms. Mr. Mallette is also worried that there aren’t enough educational programs for the inmates, who will be released one day into the community without the resources they need to survive without committing more crimes. Yet the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for prisoners also say that “further education shall be provided to all prisoners” and that  “recreational and cultural activities like sports, music and other hobbies shall [also] be available to all prisoners.” Without these programs, there will be more mental illness, more fighting, and more attacks on guards; and more former prisoners will return to crime upon their release.

And then there are the aboriginal prisoners. With more incarceration and higher rates of recidivism the crime rate will undoubtedly increase in aboriginal communities. And one can predict that there will be even higher rates of suicide than the shockingly high rates that already exist among aboriginals, when prisoners are released into the community without the resources to fend for themselves.

Meantime, the same government that has opened an Office of Religious Freedom in its foreign affairs department has decided to cut the number of chaplains available in our prisons by eliminating paid part-time positions Yet according to an article by Jill Mahoney in the Globe and Mail, most of the paid full-time positions are for Christian chaplains, while 18 of the 49 part-timers are members of minority religions. The government thinks Christians can minister to all prisoners, even providing services for all of them. I am sure the Christian chaplains would do their best to minister to prisoners’ psychological and social needs, but how can a Christian chaplain conduct a Muslim, aboriginal or other service, or recite the correct prayers? I guess our current government supports freedom of religion for everyone except people in Canadian jails.

Canada has the resources to take care of our prisoners, we have the trained personnel, and we have the chaplains. But we also have a government that won’t look at the evidence and that uses a purported surge in crime to garner the populist vote. God help us all when the crime rate rises as a result of these policies.

References:

Gloria Galloway, “Overcrowding makes life dangerous for workers and inmates in prisons,” Globe and Mail, September 14, 2012.

Edward L. Greenspan and Anthony N. Doob, “The Harper Doctrine: Once a Criminal, Always a Criminal,” The Walrus, September 2012, pp. 22-26.

Jill Mahoney, “Prisons to lost non-Christian chaplains,” Globe and Mail, October 6, 2012, p. A16.

Thanks to:

 Andrew Basso for helping me with the research for this post.

Genocide Denial 2012: Pol Pot Revisited

A few days ago Chris Alcantara, one of my colleagues in the Department of Political Science at Wilfrid Laurier University, forwarded me an article by one Israel Shamir in a newsletter called CounterPunch, entitled “Pol Pot Revisited.” You can find it at

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/18/pol-pot-revisited/. Chris suggested I might want to reply to Shamir’s genocide denial. Shamir seems to think that all the evidence of genocide and mass atrocities that has accumulated since Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 is false.

Stupa filled with skulls of Khmer Rouge victims at Choeung Ek,
retrieved from Wikimedia Commons
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Buddhist_Stupa_at_Choeung
_Ek_killing_fields,_Cambodia.JPG

Yet every scholar of genocide and of Cambodia that I have ever encountered agrees that the Khmer Rouge perpetrated genocide against ethnic and religious minorities (Chinese, Vietnamese, Muslim Chan) and politicide against ethnic Khmer whom they viewed as their opponents; they also cleared out Phnom Penh, the capital, in order to implement a radical, so-called “peasant,” revolution. Shamir admires the Khmer Rouge for its attack on Phnom Penh, which he thinks was a cesspool of money-grubbing capitalists. He doesn’t mention the horrible deportations of all its residents in the space of three days, the deaths of children, the elderly, and the sick on the forced march to the countryside. He doesn’t mention that both urban and rural ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese were murdered en masse. The Cambodians may be “peaceful and relaxed” in 2012, as he claims -- though I doubt that those who live in poverty and insecurity spend much time being relaxed—but they definitely were not in the late 1970s. The Khmer Rouge were not peaceful; they were cruel and brutal. Their victims were certainly not relaxed: they worked ferociously long hours in the countryside, and in the hours they were not working somehow had to find food to supplement their extremely meager rations without getting into trouble for “stealing” roots and weeds. Child prisoners were neither fed, educated, nor cared for in any way; they died en masse as slave labourers.

Mass graves at Choeung Ek, retrieved from Wikimedia Commons
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cambodia_choeung_ek
_mass_graves.JPG

In fact, Shamir’s piece reads like a leftover from Stalinist days. He says that the memorial of the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek, which he visited, “recalled other CIA-sponsored stories of Red atrocities, be it Stalin’s Terror or the Ukrainian Holodomor.” Timothy Snyder says in his recent book, Bloodlands, that about three million people died of starvation in Ukraine in 1932-33. Stalin’s official stole Ukrainians’ crops and exported food overseas while Ukrainians starved.  There’s also plenty of evidence that Stalin’s purges and political terror caused millions to die, though the exact figures aren’t yet known. As well as reading Bloodlands, Shamir should read The Black Book of Communism.

I have a question for the editors of Counterpunch. There’s plenty to criticize about capitalism and globalization. I am sure Shamir is correct in saying that Cambodian women manufacturing T-shirts for the world market earn very little and are not permitted to unionize. I’m also prepared to accept his assertion that Cambodian forests are being denuded of valuable trees. Shamir is also correct that the Americans bombed Cambodia ferociously (and illegally) during their war against the Viet Cong in the early 1970s, that many peasants fled to the capital to avoid the bombing, and that to understand what happened in Cambodia in the late 1970s we have to take the American bombing into account. But why also publish genocide denial? Even if every person who was murdered, tortured to death, or died of starvation or dehydration in Cambodia from 1975 to79 had been a blood-sucking capitalist, it would still be genocide. You’re not allowed to engage in the mass murder of any social group.

Bones of Khmer Rouge victims, retrieved from
Wikimedia Commons
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Killing_fields_bones.jpg

But I also have a question for myself: should I even bother, as I am doing now, to reply to Shamir? Is it better to reply or just ignore such an obvious denial of what every reputable scholar of the field acknowledges as genocide? I certainly can’t reply in this short blog to everything Shamir claims as truth. And it’s all the more surprising that Shamir himself writes what he does, since he knows that former Khmer Rouge members still hold power in Cambodia. Shamir tells us that the Cambodians he met on his short trip there “have no bad memories of [the Pol Pot] period.”  But he tells us this despite acknowledging later in his article that “the present government does not encourage…digging into the past, and for good reason: practically all important officials above a certain age were Khmer Rouge members, and often leading members.”

There’s one interesting little factoid in this piece though.  Shamir tell us that Cambodian factory workers earn about $80.00 per month, which may well be accurate. Then he tells us that “NGO reps earn in one minute the equivalent of a wormer’s monthly salary.” I did the math: at $80.00 per minute times 60 minutes per hour times 40 hours per week, that works out to $192,000 per week for “NGO reps.” A great opportunity for young activists starting out in life with massive student debt!

References:

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, New York: Basic Books, 2010.

Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.