‘No cruise’ rallies mark new drive against test pact A year ‘ago, Vancouver mayor Michael Harcourt stood in front of the memorial in the Japanese city of Nagasaki look- ing with pain at the photo of a three year old boy taken only moments after the world’s se- cond atomic bomb engulfed the city in a nuclear holocaust. His Japanese hosts watched him; but he couldn’t tell them, as he wanted to, that he was a Canadian, that he had had nothing to do with dropping the bomb. “But now we can say, ‘don’t drop the bomb,” he told a rally of more than 2,000 people in Vancouver’s Robson Square Saturday. ‘‘And that’s why we’re here today: to tell the prime minister — don’t test the cruise.” “We also tell the prime minister: we want you to work for disarmament so that we can avert World War III and get on with world peace I,”” Harcourt said to cheers. The spirited demonstration which filled the downtown street and spilled over into the plaza beyond, was organized by End the Arms Race as the first action in a renewed campaign to compel the federal cabinet to reconsider its decision and cancel the testing agreement. It coincided with demonstra- tions all across the country, in Regina, Saskatoon, Edmonton, . ~ Victoria, Montreal and in Toronto where some 4,000 peo- ple marched down the city’s ma- jorthoroughfare, Yonge Street despite a city bylaw against it. The country-wide protest was echoed in the U.S. with rallies outside U.S. consulates in more than a dozen U.S. cities. EAR chairman Frank Kennedy reada telegram from the People’s Test Ban Movement in the U.S. which named several U.S. cities and stated: ‘‘In these cities and others we are rallying and vigill- ing in solidarity with the Cana- dian peace movement. Together we can stop the cruise.”’ The demonstrations drew a belligerent response from defence minister Gilles Lamon- tagne who told an Ottawa radio station the sameday, . . ‘Slots of the people who demonstrate . . are strictly anti-American (and) others are acvitists, pro- bably members of .the Com- munist Party or something like that.”’ He also repeated the govern- ment’s claim that the decision to conduct the test was based on Canadian security. But speakers at Saturday’s rally put the lie to both those claims. “J am opposed to cruise testing — and I reject with con- tempt those who accuse me of anti-Americanism or of being a dupe or the Communists,” said Vancouver South Conservative MP John Fraser. Fraser, one of four Conser- vative MPs who voted with the NDP on its June 14 Commons motion to prohibit weapons testing, charged that Trudeau’s position that the cruise is a NATO commitment was “a deliberately dishonest state- ment.” But the strongest denunica- tion came from Vancouver East NDP MP Margaret Mitchell who charged that Trudeau “‘has sold Canada out.” She was greeted with a roar of ‘tyes’? when she asked the crowd: ‘‘Are we going to fight this right across Canada?’’ Mitchell said that Trudeau’s excuse — that the cruise test is a commitment to NATO — was “thogwash”’ and ‘‘garbage. “Right out of 12 NATO na- tions refuse nuclear weapons on their soil,’’ she said. ‘‘Why doesn’t Trudeau follow the lead of Norway or Holland or Belgium? “Or better still — why doesn’t he get out (of NATO) altogether,’’ she declared to cheers. Speaking on behalf of the trade union movement, Frank Kennedy also condemned the government for clinging to the NATO argument to justify a decision which is opposed by a majority of Canadians... “If cabinet says that the cruise testing is part of NATO commitment,’’ he said, ‘‘then the labor movement says: get out of NATO.” A resolution adopted by the crowd declared that the cruise “has nothing to do with the defence of Canada or NATO”’ and demanded that Trudeau “reverse this foolhardy deci- sion.” Clarke -MacDonald, moderator of the United Church of Canada, urged demonstrators: ‘‘Don’t take no for an answer.” ‘And EAR vice-president Gary Marchant called on par- ticipants “‘to make an agree- ment today that the cruise will not be tested, that we will work together to make sure it isn’t.” The protest has not diminish- ed in Europe despite NATO’s reiteration of plans to deploy the new missiles and, in fact, “millions will be marching against those missiles this fall,”’ he said. He urged people to take ‘“‘an active and vocal role stopping the cruise,’’ calling on them to take part in actions planned around Hiroshima Day in August and “‘to sign up by the thousands’’ for canvassing which is set to begin in September. Tht will be followed by a mass rally Oct. 22 which will be coordinated with protests all across the continent and Europe. Hiroshima Day Peace activists and local church members have been urg- ed to take part in the World Council of Churches-sponsored “peace and justice event’’ Aug. 5 called to commemorate Hiroshima Day. It begins at 7:30 p.m. at the Museum of An- thropology at the University of B.C. and will be followed by a torchlight procession and an all- night vigil in the WCC tent. PACIFIC TRIBUNE—JULY 29, 1983—Page 6 DIS ARMMAAERTT The first-ever over-the-pole Aeroflot jet flight to Vancouver Friday brought nearly 70 delegates to the World Council Churches Assembly from several countries including the Soviet Union, Poland, Ethiopia and Hungary and from a variety of faiths. Here, representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church talk with Canada-USSR Association president Hannah Poloy (1) at Vancouver airport. The WCC assembly opened July 24. French, Soviet CPs declare - ‘never again a war in Europe’ phasized that ‘‘countless forces A joint statement between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the French Communist Party declared that the two would work ‘‘with all forces willing to do so. . . so that Europe will never again become a battlefield, par- ticularly a battlefield in which nuclear weapons are used.”’ It warned that the year 1983 ‘‘is of great significance. If the deploy- ment of new American missiles by NATO in Europe is pushed. through, it will create a new and dangerous escalation of the arms race.”’ : A key part of the two parties’ joint declaration, signed July 12 by CPSU general secretary and Soviet president Yuri Andropov and FCP general secretary Georges Mar- chais, was the French proposal to include ‘‘all interested governments’? — European governments — in the intermediate range nuclear forces (INF) talks as a means of breaking the logjam at Geneva. The proposal is of considerable significance since the U.S. has refused to widen the scope of the INF talks to include other Euro- pean NATO powers even though they have nuclear weapons station- ed on their soil. The FCP emphasized in the joint declaration that since France is a a member of NATO with the ap- propriate commitments, its nuclear weapons should be included in the overall count. The French and British nuclear weapons, although part of NATO’s ‘‘deterrent force,”’ have been kept out of arms negotiations by the U.S. and NATO. The im- passe over that issue is considered to be the main stumbling block to an agreement on _in- termediate range nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union has proposed to reduce its own arsenal of SS-20s to a number equal to that in the British and French nuclear arsenals — and later proposed that the number of actual warheads be the basis of the count — in return for cancellation of the planned deploy- ment of 572 cruise and Pershing II missiles scheduled to begin at the end of 1983. But the U.S. and NATO have steadfastly refused to include the British and French missiles in assessing the nuclear balance in Europe. Just last month the seven leaders at the Williamsburg summit stated bluntly in their final docu- ment: ‘‘Consideration of these French and British systems has no place in the INF negotiations.”’ French president Francois Mit- terand, who