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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Rebuilding L'Îlot Fleurie |
Current rating: 0 |
by Eric Laursen
Email: laursene (nospam) earthlink.net (unverified!) |
23 May 2001
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One affinity group's story at the FTAA protests. How we made repairing a local community space destroyed by police part of our protest. |
One of the more egregious actions of the Quebec City police and their various paramilitary reinforcements during the Summit of the Americas occurred in the early morning of Sunday, April 22, when many activists were already packing to go home. A squad of cops bulldozed the tent city erected under the Dufferin-Montmorency Highway overpass, arrested some 25 sleeping people including cooks from the kitchen where Food Not Bombs! was preparing meals, and, for good measure, demolished L\'Îlot Fleurie, a community garden and sculpture space that had been maintained by local squatters (among others) for a long time.
The affinity group I belong to had arrived in Quebec City late the night before. A couple of us took a drive along the perimeter fence on Sunday morning to see what was happening. When we went by the overpass and the tent city site, we discovered that it was deserted and demolished. Nothing was left of the FNB kitchen but some tin walls covered with graffiti denouncing the police eviction.
At a spokescouncil meeting at Laval University that I attended shortly afterward, I was surprised to hear no discussion of any further actions to be held on Sunday. The facilitators gave some general reports on the previous day\'s actions - including little or nothing that we didn\'t already know - and then moved on to planning jail solidarity for those who had been arrested. All well and good, but we had come to QC the night before hoping there was still something we could do to show our opposition to the FTAA. So we decided to take another look around town to see for ourselves if any groups of activists were still attempting to challenge the cops, the wall and the summit \"dignitaries.\"
It was slow driving through a city of narrow, one-way streets, half of whose center was fenced off, and with no one in our group having a firm grasp of the city\'s geography - or even a dependable map. We didn\'t find any large groups of activists anywhere, although the air was still saturated with tear gas and squads of riot cops stood ready to gas anyone who appeared to have any idea about defying the perimeter fence.
Late in the afternoon we stopped by the tent city area for another look, and we found what was left of L\'Îlot Fleurie. The garden had literally been bulldozed - swept up into a neat mound of rocks, dirt, bits of wood and a few bits of vegetation, just a few feet from where the garden itself had been the day before. A few of the folks who maintained it were doing their best with a couple of rickety shovels and trowels, a wheelbarrow and their bare hands to put it back together.
The sun was going down and we were planning to leave town that evening. We hadn\'t found a way to express our opposition to global corporate hegemony in the way we\'d thought we would - loudly, militantly, taking it right to the Wall of Shame and the delegates who refused to listen to the people\'s voice.
That\'s what the TV cameras had been showing all of the last two days, but with a slightly different spin - rowdy protesters tearing down the barriers the forces of \"order\" had set up so that our \"democratically elected officials\" could deliberate without being subjected to pressure from the \"mob.\" What they hadn\'t shown were the acts of violence being perpetrated by the Summit\'s troops on the community of Quebec City. Focusing only on certain flashpoints, they didn\'t convey the violence that the entire perimeter fence did to the city itself and to the people who live and work there. They also didn\'t convey the horrible physical conditions and occupied-city atmosphere created by air so soaked with tear gas that people\'s skin burned, they couldn\'t see, or (as in my case) their throats and sinuses became infected and hurt for days afterward. And they didn\'t, for the most part, bother to cover the violence that destroyed a community garden that had helped rescue some green space for poor people from the ugliness created by a knot of highway overpasses and onramps.
So we finally figured out what our action for the day would be - to help rebuild L\'Îlot Fleurie. An older man wearing a cap with a plastic frog on it, directed us to poke around in the mound of dirt for large rocks to build back the foundation of the garden, which was built on top of asphalt. Then we started wheelbarrowing dirt to fill in the new structure while he and another man formed terraces using smaller stones and pieces of wood. Every now and then an interesting rock would turn up, or the remains of a plant from the old garden that just might grow again. By the time we had to knock off and hit the road, the mound of ruin the cops had created was about two-thirds gone and the new garden was taking shape.
The man with the frog on his cap loved puns, and he promised us the new garden would be \"vert et ouvert\" - green, and open to all. I don\'t know what his or the garden\'s history with the cops had been up to then, but I would describe his attitude toward what had happened that morning as philosophical. There\'s always the danger that the powers-that-be will just tear it all down again, but he wasn\'t going to let that bother him. Gardeners tear up and redo their work all the time to try something new - maybe he was happy for the excuse to try a different approach. He certainly wasn\'t filled with despair.
Ever since Seattle, our political-corporate leaders have been pleased to warn local communities about the \"violent\" protesters who will trash their cities if thousands of militarized Robocops aren\'t deployed to protect the luxury hotels and convention centers that house delegates to meetings like the Summit of the Americas. They never tell them about the cost to community itself of their \"security\" measures - to the principle of free speech, to people\'s right to enjoy the place where they live, and to the possibility that people can cooperatively build something that nurtures life outside of the state-corporate system. Every window broken by an activist becomes an excuse for more repression at the next ministerial meeting in the next town - which, quite correctly, breeds more militant resistance. But the state never stops to realize that perhaps it has a responsibility to repair the damage it does to the community it is supposed to serve. We have to clean up that mess ourselves.
Part of the ideal of building a non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian future is confederation - local communities working together cooperatively to accomplish things they can\'t do alone. So whatever skills we bring with us to another city from our local organizing work, we should be willing to put at the disposal of that city\'s communities to help them repair the damage the state does to them while we\'re there. Those communities shouldn\'t be left feeling that we came, we stumblingly brought the police down on them, we bandaged up our wounded (on the streets or in jail), and then we took off.
I hope the people at L\'Îlot Fleurie will welcome activists again should Quebec City decide to host another meeting like the Summit of the Americas, because they know we aren\'t just using their space as a staging ground for actions that will be over in two days. We\'re there because we want to be part of their community, and to help protect it from the forces we\'re protesting against. |
See also:
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=42582&group=webcast
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