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Photo Essay

'That's What Canada Is For'

Remembering, in words and images, the emotional peace protests that George Bush chose to ignore one year ago.

Sandra Shields and David Campion 24 Feb 2004TheTyee.ca

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The day before the invasion of Iraq, I was visiting my grandmother in Alberta. She was having heart palpitations and was under doctor's orders to stay calm. We were watching the news when George Bush came on, speaking about good and evil, justice and freedom.

"I'm so worried he's going to do something terrible over here," Grandma said. "He's such an evil man. Doing all those awful things to his own people." She was talking about Saddam Hussein. She thought he was about to attack North America.

"Oh, Grandma," I said, "I don't think he has that much power."

Her look said I obviously hadn't been watching the news lately. "He does dear," she said.

It was around the same time that a poll had been released showing 70 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. There was no reason for this beyond the weight that words acquire when leaders say them over and over on the news.

'Like a parade'

I started going to the peace marches in November of 2002 on a gray Vancouver day. Robson Street was full of people stretching back so far it was impossible to see them all. Near the front, a group was singing folk songs. Further back someone had a ghetto blaster. As the marchers made their way past The Gap, some of the shoppers and clerks came out to watch. Among them, a small boy clapped his mittens together, and his father said, "It's like a parade, isn't it!"

For 20 minutes the people passed: strollers and peace signs, Lawyers Against War, Veterans Against Nuclear War, people in wheelchairs, Doctors Against War, moms and dads. A girl carrying a sign: "Collateral Damage is Children Like Me." Another sign, held by a woman: "Believe in Peace."

The march ended at the art gallery where the crowd filled the lawn. Organizers said there were 15,000 of us standing together in common purpose. A Kurdish-Canadian doctor gave a speech and talked about how mass media makes us feel like our actions are insignificant, like we can't change anything. He said that decades ago, when people demanded equal rights for women, they were told they were crazy, that it would never happen. When people opposed slavery, they were told the same thing. Now, he said, that's what they're saying about peace.

At home that night, there was almost nothing about the marches on the internet. The next day, both national papers carried the same wire story that mentioned Vancouver only in a list of cities where people had demonstrated.

Mercedes is better

The year 2002 ended with United Nations inspectors in Iraq, US forces sailing to the Gulf. On Christmas Eve, the radio played the voices of children singing a new carol. "War is over, if you want it," they sang, "War is over now."

In January, the marching began again. George Bush kept saying, "Weapons of mass destruction," but many of us heard, "Oil," instead. On Saturday, February 15th, we woke up to the news that a million people were marching in London. "No blood for oil," was echoing around the world.

Before leaving for the march in Vancouver, I made a sign with "War is Terror" on one side, and a red peace sign on the other with "is Better" written underneath. On the way to the meeting place at the waterfront, there were several blocks where I felt self conscious - the only person on the street carrying their politics on a piece of cardboard taped to a stick. Closer to the march, there were others with signs, laughing and talking, and I relaxed, carrying mine high until a young woman ran up.

"You've got the Mercedes emblem on your poster," she said, "instead of the peace sign. The peace sign has three arms on the bottom."

There were only two arms. My sign read: "War is Terror. Mercedes is Better." I dropped the sign so "Mercedes is Better" was hidden against my chest.

It was noon, it wasn't raining, and the roads leading to the waterfront were clogged with people, tens of thousands of us. There were babies and old people and everyone in between. People smiled at strangers and ran into friends. A group of women were singing on a street corner, voices bouncing off concrete.

When we began to march, we were spread over more than a dozen blocks. Eventually, I left the marchers and took a shortcut to the art gallery. Near the front steps, a man was making a sign. With his felt pen, I turned Mercedes into peace, then climbed up on a low wall overlooking the lawn, held my sign high and waved it in the air.

A young guy climbed up beside me. "Wow, there's a lot of people here," he said. We watched as the marchers jammed the lawn then filled the streets. We grinned at one another.

"This is so great," he said. We couldn't stop grinning.

Dwight Eisenhower, president of the United States in the 1950s, the WWII general who signed every American condolence letter coming out of Europe for three years, warned in his final speech as president about the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He is also known for saying: "I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of their way and let them have it."

For a few heady hours, it felt like that moment had arrived.

'Those protesters out there'

Two months later, when the war started, I was in Alberta. A few days after the bombs began to fall, I called my grandmother to check on her heart.

"Don't you just hate this war?" she said. She had been watching it on TV. "You know what really gets me upset? It's those protesters out there, doing those protests."

An hour earlier, there had been a march in downtown Calgary where 5,000 of us had gathered. My 10-year-old godson carried a sign he made: "Somewhere in Texas there is a village that's missing its idiot." A well-dressed middle-aged couple said they'd never been to a march before but felt they had to do something.

I couldn't find anything to say as Grandma talked about how the protesters were just making things more difficult. When the line went quiet, I said something about it being a tough situation. I was worried about her heart and didn't want the war to spread into our relationship.

Words from Nuremberg

An elderly friend, a Jewish woman who survived Nazi Germany, emailed a quote from the Nuremburg Trials. There, in the voice of Hermann Goering, were the tactics that had put me and Grandma on opposite sides of the divide.

Naturally the common people don't want war. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

George Bush drew the parameters early: Either you are with us or against us, he said, and blanketed a complex situation with a simple equation. The silence between me and Grandma was one small consequence. I never told tell her what I knew of the twisted history behind the war, the space to do it didn't seem to exist.

When the war started, I joined the rest of the world in watching too much CNN. On the TV, the marches appeared unruly and prone to violence. Between dispatches from embedded reporters and pictures of burning oil wells, there were fast food commercials and ads for new cars. In hours of viewing, there was nothing about the history of America's involvement with Saddam's regime. Before each commercial break, the words appeared: "CNN the most trusted name in news," then a well-modulated voice said, "No one gets you closer, all day, every day."

Raging for peace

Two weeks into the war, I was back in downtown Vancouver for another peace march. The troops had failed to find world-threatening weapons, and the American administration had begun to talk about liberation and democracy instead.

The turnout wasn't as strong as before the war. The sporadic chanting sounded threatening. Near the end of the march, a group of young people in black clothes with facial piercing were shouting, "Hey, hey, USA - how many kids did you kill today?" My grandmother would be terrified.

The hope of the earlier marches was gone, along with the simple message: "Believe in peace." Now the message was complicated and shot through with emotions that were far from peaceful. I arrived at the end of the march thinking about anger and how it ricochets; Saddam makes George angry, George makes me angry, me and my fellow protestors make Grandma angry. The war over there had started battles over here. Between my dad and I there was a strained agreement not to fight. Like Grandma, he has faith in the nightly news.

'That's what Canada is for'

The official war was almost over when we marched on April 12th, 2003. The crowd was the smallest yet. There were maybe 2,000 of us.

A woman named Joy was walking with her 4-year-old son. She looked like she had been crying. She said her 80-year-old father was marching in Ontario and she drew inspiration from him. He had been holding candle-lit vigils for months.

A middle-aged man wearing a cast on his arm said he wasn't discouraged. He thought this has been a huge moment in history. The marches, he said, have been a good exercise and may have had an effect given that our country didn't join the war.

"It's not in America's history to make peace," he said, "that's what Canada is for."

His name was Paul and he broke his wrist falling from a war memorial while wrapping it in plastic and duct tape just after the United States went on orange alert and Colin Powell told people to be ready to seal their homes in case of a chemical or biological attack. One of Paul's
friends had spoken with a relative in the US who said people were terrified, that the country was sold out of plastic and duct tape.

When we reached the art gallery, we didn't even begin to fill the lawn. A young woman from Iraq was one of the speakers. She asked, "How dare the Americans claim to be liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein when they put him in power?" She talked about how, in the 1980s, the US sold chemical weapons to Saddam, even though it was known that he was using them against his own people. She cited the famous CIA memo that said of Saddam, "He's an SOB, but he's our SOB."

Minute of silence

Two days later, George Bush declared the war over. By the end of 2003, Saddam was found hiding in a hole and Black Hawk helicopters continued to be shot out of the sky. CNN stopped showing pictures of dead American soldiers coming home. On the internet, estimates for the number of civilian Iraqis killed ranged from 5,000 to 15,000. Figures for the Iraqi soldiers who died during the invasion ran to the tens of thousands.

Christmas came and there were children singing on the radio. Their sweet voices caroling, "War is over, if you want it, war is over now."

A few days later, a panel of experts on the radio detail the ways in which the war on Iraq increased the threat of terrorism. The world, they all agreed, is more dangerous now than it was before the war.

At the march back in April, one of the speakers had called for a minute of silence. In the crowd, an old man with white hair started talking to himself, disturbing our collective quiet. His blue polyester suit was well worn, his shirt yellowing at the collar. A thin scar ran down his
face. His eyes were alert. He spoke loudly, "You can live without going insane," he says. "That's all war is - a kind of insanity."

The award-winning team of writer Sandra Shields and photographer David Campion, who live in Delta, B.C., have published in the Globe and Mail, Geist and Macleans. Where Fire Speaks, a documentary book about the time they spent with the Himba people of Namibia, was recently released by Arsenal Pulp Press.  [Tyee]

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