Editorial Ottawa still waiting “T want them to know that the South Africa we want is the South Africa we are seeing today,” exclaimed the Rev. Frank Chikane, general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, Sept. 13, as the 100,000-strong crowd took three hours to pass through the core of Cape Town where, by law, non-whites are banned. “This city is in technicolour,” quipped Archbishop Desmond Tutu. “Today we have scored a great victory for justice and peace.” The unprecedented march was held to protest police killings of at least 22 people in this city on Sept. 6 during the “whites only” national vote. With banned African National Congress banners flying and fists clenched, the crowd sang songs of defiance and speakers condemned the continuation of apartheid and its accom- panying police brutality. There were several notable sides to this march: its size and unity; the fact that the newly-elected regime of F.W. de Klerk, in a deal with march organizers, promised to keep police away — in effect ignoring South Africa’s three year-old state of emergency law — and the fact that, without police, the march was without vio- lence. As well, in another dramatic sign of the rapidity of developments, Cape Town’s white mayor, Gordon Oliver, marched in the front ranks arm-in-arm with Archbishop Tutu. : The Cape Town protest is but the latest action in the defiance campaign whose aim is the complete destruction of the apartheid system. And, while Cape Town today still bans non-whites from the very streets tens of thousands yesterday took part in a multi-racial march, the fact that the overwhelming power of the demo- cratic forces in the country forced this small but significant retreat by de Klerk. One swallow, however, does not a summer make. State brutality, jailings, bannings go on daily. The racist right-wing, which took 30 per cent of the vote, is still powerful, especially in the police and military. Most people’s organizations are still illegal. The state of emergency which circumvents all civil rights is still in force. — Non-whites are still disenfranchised. All racist laws still apply. In short, apartheid still prevails in full force and it will require ever more pressure to bring it down. Today, one wonders just what it will take to convince the Tories in Ottawa that one day soon they will wake up to a new, multi-racial, democratic South Africa — and will have equivocated, hesitated, procrastinated, misled and stone- walled from start to finish. Tory drones will be writing up position papers against sanctions after it’s all over; Joe Clark will still be mumbling and Mulroney fumbling. .; Surely its time, past time, for Canada to impose total sanctions against the racist regime. It’s time to heed the call of South Africa’s democratic forces and add our country’s weight in the final push. | RRESISTIGLE EoRce GREETS ,MMOVABLE oGyect y$3 WARHEAD ZZ nc Necktie econ ccc etd & & TIRIBONE tila EDITOR Published weekly at Sean Griffin 2681 East Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C.,-V5K 1Z5 ASSOCIATE EDITOR Phone: (604) 251-1186 Dan Keeton Fax: (604) 251-4232 MANAG Subscription rate: BUSINESS & CIRCU LATION = ai Canada: @ $20 one year @ $35 Mike Proniuk two years ® Foreign $32 one year GRAPHICS Second class mail registration number 1560 Angela Kenyon e Be px Alberni resident Jack Gillbanks has been a Tribune reader for a good many of his 86 years — which probably makes him a fully-certified subversive as far the U.S. State Department is con- cerned. And apparently it did because U.S. immigration authorities tried to stop him from boarding a plane for San Fran- cisco last week. Jack was at Vancouver International Airport Friday, preparing to get on the plane for San Francisco where he was to embark on a holiday cruise through the Panama Canal. He was summoned out of the line and taken off to a separate room where he was told that his name appeared on the U.S. government’s notorious black- list. He was asked a number of questions about his past political affiliations and finally told that he wouldn’t be allowed to make the trip. It wasn’t the first time that the ghost of Joseph McCarthy has reached out to bar the border crossing — over the last’ few years, several people have found them- selves escorted from planes upon landing in Seattle, Hawaii and other locations. Many have been held overnight with an armed guard and then put on the first plane back to Canada. Farley Mowat’s recent experience was only one of the more celebrated incidents. But it didn’t make Jack any less angry about the cruise ship that looked like it was leaving without him. Fortunately, Vancouver Ald. Harry Rankin had himself been on the receiving end of the same State Department black- list and he knew how to get some action quickly when Jack came to see him. And this particular incident ended happily as Jack was able to obtain a five-year visa from the U.S. consulate in Vancouver and continue on to pick up his cruise. Rankin explains that the five-year visa, which Jack was able to secure after a trip to the consular office, is the U.S. immigra- tion authority’s way of getting around the blacklist. But the blacklist is still there, he adds, the names having been compiled during the years immediately after World War II when the Cold War had glaciated most of the continent. “Rather than burn the lists, they’re hanging on to them and then issuing these visas,” he says. Those on the U.S. blacklist, of course, are the members and supporters — both ‘present and former — of organizations accused by the U.S. of seeking to over- throw the government by force and vio- lence. And that’s where it is not only profoundly undemocratic, Rankin notes, but downright ludicrous. Jack is in “pretty good shape for 86,” he adds, “‘but I don’t think he could overthrow a chair.” 1 Ke ok Ms people will have noticed the sudden flurry of headlines about the numbers of jobs created in B.C. —a flurry that Premier Bill Vander Zalm turned into a snowstorm of propaganda in the Cariboo byelection — but they may not have seen some additional statistics that indicate that the “jobs, jobs, jobs” may not be worth too much to anybody. For example, a small note in the Statis- tics Canada report points out that the number of people holding down more than one job has grown to 574,000. “The growth in multiple job-holding or ‘moon- lighting’ in Canada in recent years has _ been very rapid,” it states. “Since the end of the recession, the number of Canadians holding down more than one job concur- People and Issues rently has risen by 64 per cent, compared with a 19 per cent growth in overall employment.” What those figures reveal is that much of the job creation in the past few years has been in low-wage and part-time employ- ment, which forces more and more people to hold down two jobs just to make ends meet. In fact, a study by Statistics Canada in November, 1988 found that of all the jobs created between 1981 and 1986, one- third paid $5.24 an hour or less. It’s also consistent with the decline in manufacturing employment and the shift to the service sector where wages are lower and part-time work is common. On that score, Richard Allen, the chief economist for the B.C. Central Credit Union, notes a more significant figure in a column for the weekly Business in Van- couver. “In the woods product manufac- turing industry, including sawmilling,” he writes, “ the same number of people were employed in 1988 as had been employed six years earlier in 1982. But output had increased by 54 per cent.” And despite the job creation, the fact is that unemployment in this province is still at 8.8 per cent, twice as high as in central Canada. That is particularly ominous when you consider that we’re in the “boom” part of the business cycle — and economists are predicting an economic downturn in the months ahead. Wie the Everywomen’s Health Centre’s “pledge-a-protester” cam- paign was launched last month, anti- choice representatives pooh-poohed it, claiming that supporters of the clinic were “too cheap” to make the pledge work. But if the results last month are any indication, every organization should have such “cheap” supporters. According to the centre’s pledge cam- paign co-ordinator, Ruth Houle, the centre was set to collect on more than $4,000 in pledges up to Sept. 6, with another 100 pledge commitments for the next 30 days. And the anti-choice groups probably know by now that one particular suppor- ter personally donated more than $300 in $20 and $10 amounts on separate days. As readers may recall, the pledge-a- protester campaign was launched in order to turn the appearances by anti-choice demonstrators outside the abortion clinic into donations for the clinic. Supporters pledge a certain amount for each protester and they are then billed at the end of the month accordng to how many protesters appear at the clinic and how frequently they appear. * * * Wi: remember him as a quiet, gentle man who often forgot the time, but never forgot his commitment to the Trib- une in the years he gave his help as a volunteer mailer. He had the same com- mitment to the peace movement to which he devoted much of his adult life. But that life came to an end for Hugh Pease and he passed away Sept. 13 in the Orion extended care hospital where he had been living for the last several years. He was 79. An office worker by trade, his clerical skills proved invaluable when he joined the B.C. Peace Council soon after it was founded here in 1947, and he served as its recording secretary throughout the 1950s and 1960s. He also joined the Communist Party of Canada and remained a member until declining ‘health compelled him to become inactive. There was no memorial by request. we 4 « Pacific Tribune, September 25, 1989