April 2001
“Where are you?” I screamed from my cellphone into his.
There was a pause and then, “A Green Zone—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 fifteen 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 Jaggi 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 Comité Populaire St-Jean Baptiste community centre, a group of six swollen-eyed witnesses read me their handwritten accounts of how the most visible organizer of yesterday’s direct-action protest against the Free Trade Area of the Americas was snatched from under their noses. All say that Singh was standing around talking to friends, urging them to move farther 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 Singh when he was grabbed from behind, then surrounded by three large men.
“They were dressed like activists,” said Helen Nazon, a twenty-three-year-old from Quebec City, “with hooded sweatshirts, bandanas 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 Michèle Luellen. All the witnesses told me that when 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 Singh’s arrest, there was still no word of where he was being held.
Nabbing activists off the streets and throwing them into unmarked cars is not supposed to happen in Canada. But in Jaggi Singh’s short career as a globalization activist, it has happened to him before—during the 1997 protests against the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. The day before the protests took place, he 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 assault. He had apparently talked so loudly into a megaphone some weeks before that it had hurt the eardrum of a nearby police officer. The charge, of course, was later dropped, but the point was clearly to have him behind bars during the protest, just as he will no doubt be in custody for today’s march. He faced a similar arrest in October at the Group of 20 summit for finance ministers in Montreal. In all these bizarre cases, Jaggi Singh has never been convicted of vandalism, of planning or plotting violent activity. Anyone who has seen him in action knows that his greatest crime is giving good speeches.
That’s why I was on the phone with him minutes before his arrest—trying to persuade him to come to the Peoples’ Summit teach-in that I was co-hosting to tell the crowd of fifteen hundred 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 reason 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. There is a commotion in the doorway, and 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’en viennent!” 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,” Belanger said. Maybe I will too.