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ALL OUT AGAINST THE OAS IN WINDSOR
By Hassan Husseini
(This article is from the June 1-15/2000 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, Canada, V5L 3J1.)
STARTING ON THE June 3-4 weekend, Windsor, Ontario will play host to the year 2000 General Assembly of the Organization of America States. Headquartered in Washington D.C., the OAS is made up of 35 member states in the Americas and the Caribbean - except Socialist Cuba which was suspended in 1962. Canada hosts this year's meeting in celebration of its tenth anniversary of joining the OAS as a full member. But for the vast majority of people of the western hemisphere, the OAS is nothing to celebrate.
Chief among the issues to be discussed by the trade ministers at this meeting will be expansion of the Free Trade Area of the America (FTAA). The OAS meeting in Windsor will be guided by the same neo-liberal capitalist agenda that is being forced on the peoples of the world through institutions like the IMF, World Bank and the WTO. As organizations in the hands and in the service of monopoly capital, these are responsible for economic policies that result in increased poverty, privatization of public assets and programs, loss of sovereignty, and escalating attacks on labour rights and democracy.
Given this backdrop, the reception for the OAS in Windsor will be far from welcoming. Thousands of trade unionists, youth, students, women, environmentalists, and others from Canada, the US and across the Americas will be there to oppose capitalist globalization, free trade and military interventions. The spark ignited by tens of thousands of demonstrators against the WTO in Seattle, and again this spring in Washington at the IMF/World Bank meetings, will be continued in Windsor this month.
Committees in many Ontario cities are mobilizing their communities to go to Windsor. The major rally on June 4th is being organized by the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and other groups in Windsor under the slogan of "Rally for Democracy, Social Justice and Fair Trade in the Americas."
Other actions are planned in the city starting on May 27, with many events on the June 2-4 weekend. For example, a forum organized by the CAW will take place at 7 pm, Friday, June 2, at the CAW Hall, 1855 Turner Road. On June 3, a teach-in with labour and social activists will be held from 10 am to 8 pm at the Capitol Theatre, located at 121 University Ave. West.
While differences over tactics and strategy exist within the different anti-globalization forces, participants and organizers remain focused on exposing the real corporate agenda behind this OAS meeting, and the inherently anti-human, anti-people and anti-environment nature of capitalist globalization. This can be done most successfully through organizing mass united actions in the streets of Windsor.
For our part, communists will work for increased unity of all the anti-globalization forces in preparations, during and beyond Windsor. This approach has been central to the Communist Party campaign against globalization that we launched on April 15. Our aim is to help deepen the class and anti-imperialist content of these struggles, while advancing a clear alternative for "a world for people, not for profit." This means the complete rejection of imperialist globalization and the institutions which advance this process, not simply the injection of feel-good "social clauses."
For more information on the anti-OAS actions or to reserve a seat on the "Red Bus" to Windsor, please contact the Ontario Committee CPC: tel. 416-469-2446, e-mail pvoice@web.net.
(Hassan Husseini is the Organizer of the Communist Party of Canada-Ontario.)
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