Skip to content or view mobile version

Home | Mobile | Editorial | Mission | Privacy | About | Contact | Help | Security | Support

A network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.

Statement of Martin Shaw on leaving hospital

Martin Shaw | 03.07.2003 07:28 | Evian G8 | Analysis | Repression

Today I am leaving hospital after two operations and a month recovering from injuries that I sustained as a result of police actions in response to direct action that we took on the Aubonne bridge on the 1st of June. In this statement I wish to elaborate our reasons for making this action, and show how the extreme response to this protest fits into a wider political context

Across Europe we are witnessing the legitimation of similar violent repression as a means of responding to broad, social dissent against the global injustices being perpetuated by the neo-liberal agenda of institutions like the G8.
For the past 50 years, global institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and more recently, the G8 and the World Trade Organisation have regularly convened in order to continue their mission of re-structuring and re-ordering the global economy.
Economic and social analysis has repeatedly shown that the policies being pursued by the G8 protect the advantages of global economic elites at the expense of the world's poor while wreaking widespread environmental damage.
In the last decade, across the world from Chiapas, to Seattle, to Prague, to Quito and now Evian, people have been calling the legitimacy of these institutions into question. The forms of protest and resistance have been rich and varied, encompassing broad cross-sections of society. The success and visibility of this resistance has partially depended upon a willingness to go beyond traditionally passive demonstrations to take more forceful and direct action against the global institutions. The recent imperialist invasion of Iraq provoked the largest demonstrations that the world has ever witnessed. Even when these globally coordinated demonstrations involve millions of people they are effectively ignored by the State. The petition of 17 million signatures collected by Jubilee 2000 urging the G8 leaders to alleviate the debt crisis of the “developing” world was similarly side-lined and ignored despite an obvious popular mandate from the people they are claiming to represent.
The failure of representative democracies to represent the wishes of their electorates means that traditional forms of political expression such as voting, demonstrations and petitions have become largely redundant. There is a need for groups and individuals to take more direct action on the root causes of the structural economic injustice being inflicted on the millions of poverty-stricken people around the world.
Throughout the last century, positive social change has depended upon the willingness of groups and individuals to go beyond legal limits in challenging existing regimes, from the suffragettes who risked their lives in the fight for the vote for women, to the anti-colonial struggles of Gandhi and Mandela. At the time these individuals and social movements have been portrayed as dangerous extremists and a menace to society. Under proposed EU legislation they and their supporters would almost certainly have been classified as “terrorists.” In retrospect history has shown them to be catalysts of progressive, emancipatory agendas. What liberties we enjoy today have been earned by actions of dissidents throughout history who have been inspired by the courage of their convictions and risked imprisonment and violent repression to challenge and disrupt the oppressive governments of their time.
It therefore comes as no surprise that the forces that wish to preserve economic and social injustice today seek to criminalise and marginalize the popular resistance that demands a more democratic and equitable world. One criteria for the effectiveness of what has been called “the anti-globalisation movement” is the level of repression that it is currently facing. This repression takes two forms. On the one hand, we have “emergency” legislation that aims to criminalise legitimate and democratic dissent. Since September the 11th at both the national and EU level, there has been an avalanche of increased powers of surveillance, restrictive border controls, punitive measures, databases and ad hoc unaccountable groups targeting protests and protestors as well as other marginal groups in society such as refugees, asylum seekers and resident migrant populations. The transformation of “activist” into “terrorist” in the eyes of the law is a calculated exploitation of the post 0911 political climate in order to justify some of the biggest erosions of civil liberties we have witnessed in Western “democracies” this century. This official policy is then reflected in the increased willingness to use violent force in the streets in a form of “arbitrary justice” against those who challenge the undemocratic and unaccountable nature of meetings like the G8.
The “war on terror” has turned into an ongoing “war on freedom and democracy” which is now setting new norms - where accountability, scrutiny and human rights protections are luxuries to be discarded in defence of “democracy.”
From the shootings in Gothenburg, the murder of Carlos Giuliani in Genoa, the near fatal incident of the Aubonne bridge incident and the attack on Guy Smallman with a concussion grenade in Geneva, and even more recently the horrific reports of police brutality in Thessaloniki, governments are clearly sending the message that they are prepared to kill and maim in order to silence legitimate dissent against oppressive global regimes. These are the handful of events that received some media attention, amidst hundreds of unreported incidents involving beatings on the street, malicious arrest and falsified evidence. The events that took place on the Aubonne bridge were not simply an isolated incident involving individual police officers, they are part of a wider political trend to attempt to intimidate those members of society who would use civil disobedience and direct action as a means of political articulation.
Underneath the empty rhetoric of development and poverty relief, the leaders of the G8 countries are deliberately increasing the disparity between the rich and poor of the world.
The neo-liberal agenda pursued by the G8 actually exacerbates rather than alleviates the problems such as poverty and environmental destruction that they claim to address.
For every one dollar in aid to developing countries, more than seven dollars comes back to rich countries in the form of debt servicing. The perpetuation of these global injustices is readily apparent to those who choose not to bury their heads in the sand. To ignore such injustice is to be effectively complicit in it. We intend to use the criminal court case being mounted against us as an opportunity to show that our actions as an affinity group in attempting to stop the delegates from reaching the summit were entirely legitimate in trying to limit the destructive impact of this meeting on the global South and the environment. The legal challenge we are pursuing against the Swiss authorities is also important to show that governments cannot use such violent repression with impunity.
The extent and force of the repression of institutions such as the EU and the G8 means that now more than ever we must show that these tactics of intimidation will not stop people from exposing the global violence and injustice that is being inflicted in the name of neo-liberalism. We can and will resist this repression, in the courts and in the media as well as in the streets.

Martin Shaw
- Homepage: http://www.aubonne.ch.vu

Comments

Display the following 5 comments

  1. Hypocrisy — Michael
  2. not hypocrisy, but self-defence — -
  3. no hypocrisy — rimrod
  4. reply — not Martin
  5. Globalisation — RicD
Upcoming Coverage
View and post events
Upcoming Events UK
24th October, London: 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair
2nd - 8th November: Wrexham, Wales, UK & Everywhere: Week of Action Against the North Wales Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex. Cymraeg: Wythnos o Weithredu yn Erbyn Carchar Gogledd Cymru

Ongoing UK
Every Tuesday 6pm-8pm, Yorkshire: Demo/vigil at NSA/NRO Menwith Hill US Spy Base More info: CAAB.

Every Tuesday, UK & worldwide: Counter Terror Tuesdays. Call the US Embassy nearest to you to protest Obama's Terror Tuesdays. More info here

Every day, London: Vigil for Julian Assange outside Ecuadorian Embassy

Parliament Sq Protest: see topic page
Ongoing Global
Rossport, Ireland: see topic page
Israel-Palestine: Israel Indymedia | Palestine Indymedia
Oaxaca: Chiapas Indymedia
Regions
All Regions
Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World
Other Local IMCs
Bristol/South West
Nottingham
Scotland
Social Media
You can follow @ukindymedia on indy.im and Twitter. We are working on a Twitter policy. We do not use Facebook, and advise you not to either.
Support Us
We need help paying the bills for hosting this site, please consider supporting us financially.
Other Media Projects
Schnews
Dissident Island Radio
Corporate Watch
Media Lens
VisionOnTV
Earth First! Action Update
Earth First! Action Reports
Topics
All Topics
Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista
Major Reports
NATO 2014
G8 2013
Workfare
2011 Census Resistance
Occupy Everywhere
August Riots
Dale Farm
J30 Strike
Flotilla to Gaza
Mayday 2010
Tar Sands
G20 London Summit
University Occupations for Gaza
Guantanamo
Indymedia Server Seizure
COP15 Climate Summit 2009
Carmel Agrexco
G8 Japan 2008
SHAC
Stop Sequani
Stop RWB
Climate Camp 2008
Oaxaca Uprising
Rossport Solidarity
Smash EDO
SOCPA
Past Major Reports
Encrypted Page
You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.
If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

Global IMC Network


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech