f

r 3 ) f

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