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BRITISH COLUMBIA

B.C. Communist Party leader
Maurice Rush Monday charged that the
arrest of three Haida elders on Lyell
Island “brings shame to British Colum-
bia” and called on the provincial
government to drop the charges and
“apologize to the Native peoples for this
disgraceful action.

“The responsibility for this action lies
at the door of Premier Bill Bennett and
the Socred government who have
adamantly refused to sit down with the
leaders of B.C.’s Native peoples and
Negotiate their aboriginal rights and
title,” Rush said in a statement issued
this week. “Bennett and the Socreds are
displaying the kind of racist attitudes
which the world today is condemning in
South Africa.”

Three Haida elders, Watson Price, 80,
Ethel Jones, 65, and Ada Yovanovich,
61, were arrested by RCMP Nov. 16 as
they sat in front of a symbolic blockade
of spruce boughs on the logging road to
Lyell Island. The road is used by Frank
Beban Logging, the contract logging

company for Western Forest Products

which holds the Tree Farm Licence on
Lyell.

The three were taken to Sandspit,
finger-printed and charged with mis-
chief. They were later released on their
own recognizance pending a court
appearance Jan. 29. Presumbly, they
could also face contempt charges for
defying the a
Supreme Court
injunction prohi-
biting any obstruc-
tion of the logging
road.

As they were
being charged,
several hundred
Haidas and sup-
porters demons-
trated outsidethe ~
provincial legis- MAURICE RUSH
lature in Victoria in support of Native
land claims and an end to logging on
Lyell Island.

The arrests were the latest action in
the mounting dispute between the Hai-
das, who have also been backed by the

Haida arrests ‘bring shame to B.C.’

NDP, environmentalists and the United
Church, and the provincial government
which has refused even to discuss the
land claims and has approved forest
companies extension of logging into
areas covered by claims, many of them
environmentally important wilderness
areas. Lyell Island is in the South
Moresby region of the Queen Charlottes
which have been under aboriginal claim
by the Haidas for all of this century.

The Haidas have pledged to continue
their defence of their ancestral lands
from further logging. ““We’re very proud
of our elders who made their own deci-
sion to resist logging and we know there
are many more like them,” said Ernie
Collison, director of the council of
Haida Nations.

Rush blasted the provincial govern-
ment for refusing to address the aborigi-
nal claims of B.C. Native Indians.

“The Socreds have refused to recog-
nize that the Native peoples have any
rights,” he said. “It should be recalled
that Premier Bill Bennett was the major
opponent at the federal-provincial con-

ference to the incorporation of Native
rights to self-government in the Cana-
dian constitution. We now see why.

“This right wing government in Vic-
toria wants to open up all forest lands to
the big logging companies, including
traditional Native lands such as the
Queen Charlottes and the Stein Valley,
as well as provincial parks,” Rush
charged. “It’s a matter of putting corpo-
rate profits over the rights of Native
peoples and the needs of the people of
Bey

He emphasized that the dispute was
not only an issue for Native people.

“Tt is a major issue for all British
Columbians who should stand up and
demand that the Bennett government
stop the persecution of Indian people
who are fighting for their rights; cancel
all logging on forest lands where there
are aboriginal claims; and undertake
immediately to enter into negotiation to
reach a settlement with the Native
peoples on their aboriginal rights and
title,” he said.

‘No aid to

Four Vancouver aldermen have deman-
ded the federal government cease aid to the
s0vernment of El Salvador because of the
8TOss violations of human rights committed
by the Central American nation’s regime.

In a letter, Committee of Progressive
electors aldermen Bruce Eriksen, Harry
Rankin, Bruce Yorke and Libby Davies,
Protest the recent $8-million donation for
what Rankin called El Salvador’s “‘concen-
tration camps.”

And three leading members of B.C.’s

Progressive community have demanded
Ottawa cease all direct aid to El Salvador’s
Tuling junta’s “bombs and beans” program.
Although it seems like a humanitarian
8esture, it aids the policy (of the Salvadoran
Junta) in forcing the people off of their
land,” said Latry Kuehn.
Kuehn, a teacher and former president of
the B.C. Teachers Federation, made his
Charges at a press conference in Vancouver

City hall Nov. 14.
€ was accompanied by Evert Hoogers,

President of the Canadian Union of Postal
Orkers’ Vancouver local, Fr. Jim Roberts
a Rankin, along with representatives of
€ Soldiarity Committee with the People of
Salvador.
€ speakers said the Canadian govern-
a has no place aiding a regime which
4 acks its trade unions, engages in satura-
‘on bombing of the countryside and forces

the wholesale forced relocation of its civili-

ans,

band, they warned, the propping up of the
+ vadoran junta by the U.S. Reagan
Ministration, and the administration’s
military activities in the other Central
ea countries, could lead to regional
i ‘There is an overwhelming sense of
™Mpending disaster in the region,” said
Uehn, who recently toured El Salvador,
Seale, Honduras and Nicaragua with
€r Canadian teachers at the invitation of
f © Central American Teachers organiza-
‘on, FOMCA,
suche said military expenditures con-
med some 40 per cent of the budgets of
se countries, “and in each, American
est is behind what is taking place.” The
Rae is to surround Nicaragua with a mil-
Ty buildup in each of the neighboring
tes, he said.
fr € impact, he said, is a drastic curtail-
ilites of education and an increase in
voted — even in Nicaragua, which has
si Oted considerable energy to education
Nee its 1979 revolution.
lsewhere, the oppression of teachers

El Salvador junta, aldermen urge

accompanies the cutbacks on education,
said Kuehn. In Honduras, “‘all the teacher
leaders we met have arrest orders out for
them,” while in Guatemala, several have
simply “disappeared,” he related.

Kuehn related how in El Salvador, the
Canadian delegation had to go through
elaborate travel preparations to avoid
detection by government agents while tra-
velling to meet their counterparts.

The Canadian teachers also visited a
refugee camp in downtown San Salvador,
the nation’s capital, which Kuehn described
as “horribly” overcrowded and lacking in
so many basic amenities.

But, he said, Salvadoran refugees from
the bombing and “scorched earth” practi-
ces of the government army prefer the
camps run by the Catholic Church to the
camps run by the government.

The camps, which resemble the “model
villages” set up by the U.S. during the Viet-
nam War, are filled with villagers forced
from their lands by government troops in
areas in which the fighting is the thickest.
The idea is to set up government-controlled
areas which the fighters of the Faribundo
Marti National Liberation Front cannot
attack without injuring civilians.

Canadian aid, resumed after a period in
which aid was withheld because of jun-
ta’s world-condemned human rights viola-
tions, goes for agriculture in the government
camps.
“Tt’s called the ‘bombs and beans’ policy.
The American government supplies the
bombs, and the Canadian government pro-
vides the beans,” said Kuehn.

REV. JIM ROBERTS (r), EVERT HOOGERS and LARRY KUEHN..

The resumption of aid to the Salvadoran
junta by the Tory government “was
undoubtedly because of Reagan’s pres-
sure,” Hoogers said.

“Everything shows that the human rights
record in El Salvador has not gotten better.
If anything, it’s gotten worse,” Hoogers,
who recently visited with Salvadoran trade
unionists, charged.

He said the “savage repression of strikes”
and military assaults on striking workers
“has become almost a routine practice.”
Recently the Telecommunications Workers
Union and the Water and Sewage Workers
were declared illegal for strike activities, he
said.

“As a trade unionist, I object to taxes
paid by Canadian workers used by the
Canadian government against the workers
of El Salvador,” he declared.

(Hoogers and other Canadian trade
unionists have published a booklet, Hope,
on the Salvadoran trade union situation.)

Jim Roberts, the Catholic priest out-
spoken against social injustice and former
leader of the Solidarity Coalition, hit the
“criminal activities” of the U.S. government
in Central America and “Canadian com-
plicity” in those ativities.

He quoted Pope John Paul II who
rejected U.S. claims that “Communists” —
the Soviet Union and Cuba — were
responsible for Central America’s turmoil.

Roberts noted that San Salvador Arch-
bishop Arturo Rivera y Damas and other
Salvadoran church leaders had called on the

.“cancel $8-million aid package.”

United States to cease aid to the junta, and
that the Canadian Interchurch Committee
on Human Rights in Latin America is urg-
ing no aid from Canada until a political
settlement is reached in El Salvador.

He noted church leaders in Central
America often suffer repressions for their
stands, citing the words of Brazilian archbi-
shop Helder Camara: “I brought food to
the poor, and they called me a saint; I asked
why the people were hungry, and they
called me.a Communist.”

In their letter to Canadian External Rela-
tions Minister Monique Vezina, the COPE
aldermen criticized the $8-million aid pack-
age, stating it “will not improve the eco-
nomic and social conditions of the poor. It
allows the government to spend more on
war, and more importantly gives credibility
to a regime which does not deserve it.”

Salvadoran President Napoleon Duarte
is often touted as a “liberal”. But, said the
aldermen, Duarte’s power “is extremely
limited by the armed forces.”

The letter pointed out that despite claims
that the Salvadoran air force is reducing its
bombings, these have increased from 111 in
1982 and 227 in 1983 to 334 aerial bombings
last year. So far there have been 242 this
year, the letter stated.

“We don’t mind the $8 million from our
government going to El Savador for aid. It’s
who it goes to that we mind,” Rankin told
the press conference.

Rankin called for economic sanctions
against the Salvadoran regime.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE, NOVEMBER 20, 1985 e 3