~ came from church

WORLD

Shipment pushes
Tools for Peace
aid to Nicaragua

over $2 million

TORONTO — A boatload of blankets,
shovels, hammers, saws, bandages, pencils
and sanitary napkins arrived in Nicaragua,

Feb. 2, a gift of solidarity from the Cana- ~

dian people.

While these may seem like everyday
items in Canada, the goods, $2-million
worth, are desperately needed by the small
Central American nation, hurting badly
from a seven-year war against U.S.-backed
mercenaries.

The project was undertaken by Tools for
Peace. After only five years it has 100 com-
mittees across Can-
ada, stretching from
Victoria to St. John’s,
the Yukon and North-
west Territories to
Windsor, Ontario.

“Tt was a real
people-to-people
effort,” Vancouver's
Phil Westman, Tools
for Peace national
co-ordinator, told a
Queen’s Park press
conference.

“Much of this

collection boxes,
from school child-
ren giving a pencil
or notebook.”

There were many such examples. A
group of teachers, the Louis Riel Brigade,
who travelled to Nicaragua to assist the
country’s literacy campaign, undertook the
pencil and notebook project. Collections
were taken up in the schools. Their teachers’
associations were approached for funding.
In addition to hundreds of donated books,
the brigade was able to have thousands
more specially printed with “From Canada
to Nicaragua for Peace.”

Reports that Nicaraguans were able to
teach workers how to rebuild the homes
and buildings destroyed by the mercenaries,
but did not have the hammers or saws to
give them, made tools the special project of
83-year-old Cy Allen and his wife Mary.

A retired mechanic, Cy had given his own
tools and gathered others for past Tools for
Peace efforts. This year he approached a
north Toronto building supply dealer who
offered the hammers and saws to Cy at cost.
The couple collected enough donations to
purchase 60 hammers and 40 saws. These
were supplemented by others purchased
through fundraising.

Tools for Peace operates by connecting
Canadian organizations with their counter-
parts in Nicaragua. The Nicarguan groups
make the requests and Tools for Peace does
its best to comply. Canadian farmers were
approached for boots, shovels, axes and files;
labor unions for hammers and saws; health
organizations for bandages and antiseptics;
women’s groups for sanitary napkins.

In addition to the many personal efforts,
school boards, municipal councils, labor
unions, churches, women’s groups and for
the first time, the Quebec Assembly of
Bishops, have shown their support for
Nicaragua in a concrete way.

But while the Canadian people have been
generous, organizers feel the Canadian
government could be more forthcoming.
Canada has given $35-million in aid to

Cy Allen of Scarborough, Ontario and
his wife Mary collected 60 hammers and
40 saws for the Nicaraguans.

Nicaragua over the past six years, but other
western nations such as Sweden have supp-
lied four times that amount.

Tools for Peace staff representative, Jan-
ice Acton, thinks Ottawa should make
Nicaragua a priority aid project and con-
sider giving up to $100-million over the next
year.

“The U.S. trade embargo makes a higher
level of bilateral assistance necessary. Nica-
ragua is the hope for the whole region of
Central and Latin America. It is recognized
as the best recipient for aid by the NGOs.
By helping it, other
countries in the
region are benefit-
ting.”

The organizers feel
Canadians would
support their gov-
ernment taking more
initiative in Central
America. A_ public
opinion poll con-
ducted last year
indicates. that the
vast majority of
Canadians did not
feel Ottawa was
doing enough for
social justice.

They note that
Central America
was the biggest single issue in briefs pres-
ented to a special parliamentary committee
charged last year with examining Canada’s
foreign plicy. And according to their reports
about 200 letters on Nicaragua arrive every
week at External Affairs.

“Canadians feel a sense of fairness, and
what’s happening in Nicaragua isn’t fair,”
says Barbara Stewart who is stationed in
Nicaragua for Tools for Peace. “Hundreds

- if not thousands of Canadians have been to

Nicaragua; worked in brigades; experienced
what the Nicaraguans are experiencing.
There is a deep feeling of solidarity.

“There is also outrage at the tremendous
and senseless loss of life. This is seen as
illegal by the United Nations, the OAS, the
World Court in the Hague, by GATT, the
non-aligned nations, by every major Euro-
pean government — and the Canadian
government.”

Atkin thinks Canada should take a more
active role in ending the war. While Ottawa
has indicated its support for the Contadora
peace process, which the American admin-
istration has actively scuttled, it has not
criticized Reagan’s actions.

“Hopefully at the upcoming Reagan-
Mulroney summit, the prime minister will
raise the question of U.S. interference and
raise Canadian concerns to the diplomatic
level,” Atkin says.

Some offical response to public pressure
can be seen. About 50 Canadian profes-
sional and technical people are now work-
ing in Nicaragua in government-sponsored
programs. Where there were six CIDA pro-
grams in the country two years ago, today
there are 12.

But while the Mulroney government is
still refusing to open up an embassy in Nica-
ragua, insisting on covering the region from
neighboring Costa Rica, the Liberal Party
has indicated a shift in its policy, saying it
would now favor an embassy in Managua.

10 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, FEBRUARY 11, 1987

Laurel Whitney, Toronto co-ordinator, Janis Acton, National Education co-ordinator,
Barb Stewart, staff person in Nicaragua, Phil Westman, national co-ordinator.

WEAPONRY IN SPACE: THE DIL-
EMMA OF SECURITY. Mir Publish-
ers, Moscow, 1986. Available from
Progress Books, Toronto, $8.95. ~

Star Wars may be becoming the fas-
test growth industry in America, an

between the past month’s major head-
lines.

In the wake of the Reykjavik non-
agreement, the U.S. — or the Reagan
administration, at any rate — would
seem to have made a fateful choice: to
seek vastly increased funding for SDI, to
press ahead with operational tests in
space (the first of which was secretly
conducted last September), to imple-
ment a “phased deployment” of anti-
missile weapons as rapidly as they
become ready, and even to turn the pro-
jected civilian space station into a a vehi-
cle for military research.

The goal of this accelerated activity,
according to many experts, is to quickly
overturn the ABM treaty (the last piece
of arms control legislation standing in
the way of Star Wars), and to entrench
SDI as an indisputable political, eco-
nomic and military fact of American life.
U.S. hawks apparently hope that the
“institutional momentum” thus engen-
dered will make it impossible for a hostile
Congress, or the next administration, to
even think of reversing the process of
space militarization.

In this context, the warning of scient-
ists who, among all the people on earth
are best situated to see exactly what we
are in for, acquire a new weight and
urgency.

Perhaps the most important such
effort so far is a thorough study under-
taken by a collective of prominent Soviet
scientists, drawing upon the work of
dozens of experts from a variety of disci-
plines, which was released at a press con-
ference in Moscow last month. Entitled

Security, the book reflects a measured,
almost clinical, scientific evaluation of
the potential workability of a Star Wars
defence system, possible countermeasures,
and its impact upon global security.

The scientists, among them many
names well-known in the West, such as
Roald Sagdeev, Yevgeny Velikhov and
historian Georgi Arbatov, have pro-
duced a broad analysis which fits specific
technical data into a wider political and
strategic framework and context.

This is important because examina-

ee warn of
Star Wars plans

unhappy reality which can be read ©

‘complicated, but also that this can be

Weaponry in Space: The Dilemma of

tion of particular components of the
proposed space-based anti-missile sys-
tem leads them to the conclusion that
many of them do indeed have workable
potential not only as defensive, but also
as offensive weapons.

However, say the Soviet scientists, one
of the “cardinal delusions” of SDI prop-
onents is the belief that specific break-
throughs in this or that area of research
mean that a full-fledged anti-missile
screen is feasible and possible.

The dream of a Star Wars shield that

adi : soem
pe ae eae eae ee OSS Gwe ome ee a

will make nuclear weapons impotent and
obsolete must contend with the ingenuity
of Soviet scientists and engineers who,
spurred by the security imperatives of
their own nation, will do everything they
can to penetrate it.

A full chapter on possible counter-
measures gives an ample foretaste of
what Soviet scientists might come up
with. Their point here is not only to
demonstrate that American efforts to
seize unilateral security at Soviet expense
can be hopelessly compromised and

done more cheaply and effectively than
the elaborate counter-countermeasures
that the U.S. will have to deploy.

The Soviet authors of this study
apparently do not think that American
leaders honestly believe their own pro-
paganda, i.e., that an impenetrable anti-
missile defence is a realistic goal.

Therefore, they say, “We can only
view the U.S. plans to deploy (Star Wars)
as a desire to make use of the country’s
scientific and technological potential to
achieve military superiority.”

Far from relieving the threat of
nuclear war, they conclude, this is a for-

mula for an endless, ever escalating arms
race on earth and in space which will
make nuclear conflict more, not less
likely. .

That this is the most urgent question |
our age, and this cogent study by Soviet
scientists provides well-timed answers, is
clear. Shall we pursue the chimera of
military security by permitting the con-
struction of an enormously expensive hi-
tech Maginot Line in outer space? Or will
we force our leaders to address the roots
of the nuclear confrontation, and begin
to make serious changes in the system of
global relations?

Judging by today’s headlines, and the b

findings of this study, we may have less
time to make that decision than we think.

— Fred Weir