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World

Face to face with readers

Now that I’m safely back in the bosom of
my family and the heart of perestroika, fol-
lowing an intensive and gruelling five-week
speaking tour of Canada, I have a few
reflections on the experience.

Above all, I am deeply enriched: For a
journalist, there can be no more stimulating
process than to have to face critical feed-
back, the inquisition of the readers.

This was no rubber-chicken circuit. The
Tribune cannot afford the hotel bills, rented
cars, expense-account meals and other dub-
ious frills that go with the big time. It is our
good fortune to be driven into a far more
direct and intimate relationship with our
readers.

From Vancouver Island to Montreal, I
was literally passed from one group of Trib
readers to the next. They put me up in their
homes, fed me, transported me, introduced
me to their friends and neighbours. They
organized meetings in rented halls, confer-
ence rooms or people’s homes. They took
me around and pressed me — with varying
degrees of success — upon their local
media outlets. They worked me to exhaus-
tion, but otherwise treated me with tender
care. At the appointed time, they faithfully
delivered me to the Trib readers of the next
community.

At this point, let me dispense with the

statistics: I spoke 39 times, in 19 Canadian
towns and cities, to a total audience of per-
haps 2,000. In addition, there were 16 radio
spots, 10 television appearances, and seven
interviews with the print media. Many were
with the alternative media, but over half

FROM
MOSCOW

were with commercial mainstream outlets.
Only in large cities did the big boys com-
pletely freeze us out.

Heart and soul of the tour, however, was
in the chemistry, the dialogue and discus-
sion generated in face-to-face meetings with
Trib readers and the astonishingly broad
cross-section of the Canadian independent
left that showed up.

Canadians are clearly very interested in
Soviet affairs, more so, perhaps, than at any
time in history. Many of those who came to
my public meetings were simply concerned
that the shifting posture of such an enor-
mous and weighty land as the Soviet Union
promises — or threatens — to project tidal
waves of change around the globe. Many
others, however, expressed more profound
and specific hopes and fears about the pro-
cess of perestroika within the USSR itself.

I found broad and diverse echoes of my
own sense that socialist ideals are facing
some tough but invigorating challenges in
our time, and that the outcome of the Soviet
experiment will significantly influence the
destiny of socialism in the entire world.

Besides open, public meetings, I had
some encounters with more specialized
groups, some of whom are new to dialogue
with the Tribune, and the Communist
Party, which I represent. In two cities, for
instance, the United Jewish People’s Order
(UJPO) held special meetings to quiz me,
with obvious fascination, about the secular
Jewish cultural revival underway in the
USSR. In Winnipeg, a large group of Uni-
tarians and World Federalists raked me
over the coals — to, I hope, our mutual
benefit — as did the editorial collective of
Canadian Dimension magazine. Ditto fora
gathering of left-wing academics in Toronto,
Doukhobors in Kamsack, Saskatchewan,
journalism professors and students in
Ottawa, political science classes in Regina

r az

Fred Weir with meeting chair Libby Griffin at meeting for members of the Associa-

tion of United Ukrainian Canadians and Federation of Russian Canadians in Van-

couver April 2.

and Montreal, Ukrainian-Canadians in
Winnipeg and Vancouver ....

For the first time in my experience I
found it possible to achieve effective dia-
logue and even, to some extent, a common
language concerning the USSR, with an
extraordinarily broad range of Canadians.

Questions were hard and urgent. Here I
can list only some of the most typical:

© Do the outbreaks of nationalism in the
Baltic, Caucasus and other Soviet regions
threaten the constitutional integrity or even
the survival of the USSR?

© What is the essence of the economic
reforms, including such forms as co-
operatives, farm leaseholding and joint ven-
tures? Why are they necessary and are they
basically socialist?

© What do the recent elections signify for
the Soviet political future? Are they evolv-
ing toward a multi-party system?

@ Why do Soviet women seem to be
immobile as an independent political force?
Why is there so little criticism of sexist struc-
tures, traditions and realities in the USSR?

© What’s happening with the youth? The
working class?

@ Is the Soviet Union getting set to aban-
don Third World liberation struggles?
What is the full meaning of the Soviet with-
drawal from Afghanistan?

© How should the Canadian peace
movement reformulate its strategies, taking
into account changed Soviet and global
realities?

© Will perestroika last?

© After so many years of defending the
USSR in a mechanical and inflexible
fashion, how do Canadian Communists

react to changes that show them to have

been wrong about so many things?

I gave no definitive answers to any of
these, nor am I qualified to. Basically we
began a discussion that will be going on for
a long time. I will continue doing my best to
contribute to, and feed that process with
information.

I came to Canada to speak about the
Soviet Union and, having done that, I
would like to say a few brief words to those
many people who were curious how I was
re-discovering Canada. Ours is a vast, beau-
tiful, incredibly promising land. But cross-
ing it now, seeing it through the eyes of an
intimate outsider, as it were, I have deve-
loped a few disturbing questions of my own.

Much has changed in less than three
years that I’ve been away. Politics seem to
have polarized. So has wealth. The big,
commercial media (or does it only appear to
me?) has grown anemic, less informative
and more sycophantic in its attitude to
power.

Some experiences on my tour shook me,

and changed me. On Vancouver Island,
Pacific Tribune manager Mike Proniuk
took me through the awesome beauty of
“Cathedral Grove” — one of the last
stands of virgin rain forest in B.C. — then
showed me whole mountain-sides that have
been clear-cut by logging companies, who,
in their haste for quick profit, leave up to 30
per cent of the harvest strewn across the
naked slopes.

Later, Trib supporters Paul Van Zand and
Dawn Wesenberg drove me through the Oka-
nagan Valley where this year alone 70 vine-
yards and much of the wine industry have
closed down, thanks to free trade. In
Alberta, Norm Brudy took me through the
famous West Edmonton Mall, touted as a
sort of Disneyland-with-shopping, but
actually a despairing consumer wasteland
that warns starkly of our fate if the market-
place is allowed to become the absolute
paradigm of culture.

In Thunder Bay, an employee in a shelter
for homeless men told me the city was filling
up with job-seeking transients on the rum-
our that a South Korean firm was planning
to build a pulp mill in the area. Elsewhere I
saw, for my own first time in Canada, a man
eating out of a garbage can while people
standing at a streetcar stop delicately
averted their eyes. That in my own home-
town, once known as “Toronto the Good”’.

Images of doom and-gloom? Hardly. But
there is a vast and profound shift taking
place, throughout the world, and everything
we once knew and took for granted is

. changing, sometimes unrecognizably.

My greatest discovery was what I would
like to call the Tribune community. All of its
members are deeply rooted in the soil of
Canada, have realized in their own lives
some of the great promise and potential of
Canada, as well as suffering some of the
bitter disappointments our society can mete
out. Trib readers are university professors,
students, industrial workers, farmers, small
business persons, clerical workers, senior
citizens, unemployed and many other walks
of life. What unites them is social activism,
the struggle to make Canada better. Many,
not surprisingly, are Communists, but just
as many are not.

My biggest disappointment is the
number of places where there are many
Tribune readers that I did not visit. In par-
ticular, Atlantic Canada. The plane carry-
ing me back to Moscow touched down in
Gander, Newfoundland, and I madea wish:
maybe next year?

I honestly do not know whether any of
my more mainstream colleagues are obliged
to go out and face their readers once in a
while, but the perspective it brings is unique
and irreplaceable. I highly recommend it.

‘Bodyguard’
accompanies
exile to
Guatemalan
peace talks

Scholarly-appearing Kevin Neish
doesn’t look much like a bodyguard.

But on May 8, he’ll board a plane for
Guatemala to accompany a Guatemalan
exile and legal worker to ensure she
returns safely from a working visit to her
homeland.

Marta Torres, a Vancouver resident
and one of five top leaders of the United
Guatemalan Opposition, is part of a five-
member delegation to participate in the
government’s talks on reconciliation
with the labour, peasant and Native for-
ces fighting for democracy.

She'll be there for most of May and
Neish, a vocational instructor at Camo-
sun College in. Victoria, will be her
“unarmed bodyguard” — with the bless-
ings of his union and the Victoria Labour
Council.

Guatemalan
exiles have been
visiting the Cen-
tral American
nation, notorious
for its succession
of genocidal mil-
itary juntas back-
ed by the United |
States, since the
country switched
to an elected civ-
ilian government
three years ago.

The govern-
ment of President
Vinicio Cerezo has
issued invitations
to the exiles. But |
ayearago Torres {
and several other
Guatemalans were
arrested or de-
tained by armed
troops at the airport in Guatemala City
when they arrived on a fact-finding tour.

The fact that they were accompanied
by parliamentarians and congress mem-
bers from several countries, as well as
Canadian “witnesses,” is credited with
their release after several hours.

Torres is going this time to attend the
talks of the National Reconciliation
Commission, set up to comply with the
accords of Esquipulas II, the Central
American peace plan. The plan, a five-
nation agreement patterned on a prop-
osal by Costa Rican president Oscar .
Arias, calls for mutual respect of boun-
daries and governments and an end to
human rights violations in the signatory
countries. 7

The leaders of the opposition are well
aware that the military still calls the shots
in Guatemala. But any dialogue that can
save lives is worth the effort, Neish says.

Neish, secretary of the Victoria
Labour Council’s international affairs
committee, was asked to pack his bags
last week by the Solidarity Working
Group, an organization similar to Van-

couver’s Trade Union Group.

He goes with the support of the coun-
cil, which sent letters and telexes to the
Guatemalan government, as did local
MPs John Brewin and Lynn Hunter of
the New Democrats. :

- He has also received the support of his
union, the B.C. Government Employees
Union, and has requested the support of
the B.C. Federation of Labour and the
Canadian Labour Congress.

TORRES

Pacific Tribune, May 8, 1989 « 9