Violence sometimes a matter of survival

Page 4

"We were not terrorists," ex-Felquiste Paul Rose told writer Ann Charney in an interview published in Saturday Night in 1984.

"We wanted to avoid terrorizing the population," explained Rose, who served 12 years of a life term for the October 1970 "execution" of Quebec Labor Minister Pierre Laporte - a murder official inquiries later suggested he didn't commit.

Out of solidarity, however, Rose accepted responsibility along with Felquistes who were involved.

But he insisted in the 1984 interview that then prime minister Pierre Trudeas "used us (the FLQ) to terrorize the population...People in Quebec were more scared of the army than they were of the FLQ."

When I interviewed Rose for the Toronto Star in December 1988, he said he no longer felt violence was needed to achieve independence.

"Conditions have changed.....We no longer face the blockages, the repressive atmosphere.....Now we can use democratic means.....To achieve (our) goals.....That wasn't possible when Trudeau and (then mayorJean) Drapeau were there."

Laport's death affected me. We had known one another for 25 years - ever since our young reporting days in the legislature press gallery in Quebec City.

Yet sad as I was the night his death was discovered, it occurred to me then , as it does now, that "terrorism" is a passe-partout we use all too loosely. Perhaps like beauty, terrorism often may be in the eye of the beholder.

Which is another way of saying violence is repugnant to anyone who is sane - until it's a matter of survival.

The chorus of politicians and editorial writers pontificating about Warrior "terrorism" may have replaced words like "Reds" - anyone who didn't consider the "Free World" paradise on Earth - to discredit people, however legitimate their cause, that society has pushed to acts of desperation.

To Israelis, for example, Palestinians who resort to violence in the occupied territories are terrorists. The British said the same of Israeli pioneer who used violence to gain a homeland they saw as theirs.''

South Africa's white minority branded the African National Congress as a terrorist group because it regarded armed struggle as the only means to end apartheid, a form of terrorism about as extreme as anyone ever devised.

Black activists in the United States were terrorists, but whites winked at the lynching and the institutionalized violations of human rights perpetrated by Southern rednecks.

It's certain that, unlike the young Kateri Tekakwitha, the Lily of Kahnawake's Mohawks, few of the Warriors would qualify for sainthood. If it were otherwise, Soldier of Fortune, the U.S. combat magazine wouldn't be set to anoint them.

But can anyone really affirm the men at the barricades in Oka and Chateauguay are ipso facto criminals holding fellow Natives hostage?

How complacently the same news media that hail liberation movements in faraway places swallow whole the irresponsible, provocative, unproven allegation - shades of the "apprehended insurrection" of the October Crisis - that the standoff in Oka and Chateauguay is really an "armed insurrection!"

How disappointing to hear Parti Quebecois leader Jacques Parizeau, a man whose judgement usually is more sound, joining the law-and-order chorus by calling Premier Robert Bourassa - and, au besoin, Canada's armed forces to disarm before a settlement is negotiated!

Why can't we look in the mirror and ask ourselves such pertinent questions as:

What created this crisis if our own failure to face up to the ugly injustices to which Native peoples have been subjected since time immoral?

Why didn't the powers-that-be take action in March when the immediate cause - the golfcourse madness and the luxury-condo scheme at Oka - led Mohawks to set up the barricade?

How could the Mohawks have procured all that firepower were it not that our laws make it possible even for mentally deranged people like Marc Lepine to buy la as easily as kids buy lollipops?

Why did the politicians and bureaucrats urn off their hearing aids while "civilized" Indians like Max Gros-Louis and band council members kept warning not to count much longer on the Torrance and patience of Natives?

Sure it's easy now to shout, "Send in the army" and "Liberate Mercier Bridge!" - if one doesn't give a damn about human life.

Bernard Landry, minister of finance and external trade in the PQ government , who spent hours with leaders of Kahnawake's Longhouse called the experience "one I'll never forget."

Like Bourassa, like Native Affairs Minister John Ciaccia and like the late Rene Levesque, he is against violence, whatever its source.

Yet Landry's visit to Kahnawake made him realize how without so much as a beg-your-pardon, we can railroad tracks over their land, open highways on their land, build a bridge on their land and put through the St. Lawrence Seaway. Then we wonder why Natives are up in arms.

Nor should we buy that wishful-thinking theory Natives are hostages of the radicals.

"Not once did I detect a sign of sidunity," Landry told me. "On the contrary, I sensed a remarkable solidarity and heard it expressed in no uncertain terms."

When "moderate" Konrad Sioui, vice-chief of the Assembly of First Nations, said no one is likely to come out of the crisis with "clean hands," some translated the expression as "mains blanches." An innocent lapse perhaps, but one that may speak volumns of our sensibility.

(Bantey is a columnist with The Montreal Gazette. The above column appeared in The Gazette 29 July 1990).