External resources relating to Racism and citizenship

While calls to defund the RCMP in the wake of widespread protests against police brutality have left some people incredulous, it’s worth considering a comparatively recent historical precedent.

After the murder of two Somali men by members of the Canadian Airborne Regiment in 1993, the federal government disbanded the unit. A public inquiry revealed widespread racism, brutal hazing rituals and a concerted effort to cover it all up. Defence officials argued a familiar line – a few bad apples – but it was hard to believe when weighed against the damning video and photographic evidence. Rex Murphy summarized it neatly when he said, “We promised them peacekeepers, and, in some cases, we sent them thugs.” Indeed, some of our supposedly elite soldiers were ill-tempered sadists, the unit a dumping ground for discipline cases and white supremacists. Public support for the military plummeted: What kind of Canadian soldiers keep a Confederate flag in their barracks?

More than 100 protesters, mainly Native Americans, blocked off a road leading to Mount Rushmore on Friday ahead of U.S. President Donald Trump's arrival for an Independence Day celebration event. At least 15 protesters were arrested.

Witnesses to an arrest in Brussels said they were “shocked” to see an officer kneel on top of a teenager for minutes, saying the gesture mimicked the one used by the US policeman who killed George Floyd.

Photos of the arrest on Sunday show two police officers in riot gear pinning a teen to the ground, with bystanders saying one was kneeling on the back of his neck and twisting his arm.

A group of UN experts* urged the Philippines government not to discriminate against indigenous peoples in favour of business interests and when enforcing anti-COVID19 measures. On 6 April, around 100 police forcibly dispersed some 30 indigenous and environment defenders who were blocking three fuel tankers from entering Oceanagold Didipio mining site in Nueva Vizcaya province.

Clashes have broken out on the Greek islands of Lesbos and Chios, where residents tried to prevent the arrival of riot police and excavating machines to be used to build new migrant detention camps. Police fired teargas to disperse the crowds that gathered early on Tuesday to try to prevent officers from disembarking from government-chartered ferries.

On Lesbos, protesters set fire to bins and used municipal rubbish trucks to try to block the port area. Police on Chios also used teargas and flash grenades. At least three people were treated in hospital for breathing difficulties caused by the extensive use of teargas, local officials said.

The Trump administration is reportedly sending armed and highly trained law enforcement units to sanctuary cities across the country to support US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in carrying out immigration raids.

As first reported by the New York Times, 100 US Customs and Border Protection officers, including those from the SWAT-like Border Patrol Tactical Unit, will be deployed from February through May across nine sanctuary cities: Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, Boston, New Orleans, and Newark, NJ.

The first sound was a snowmobile, somewhere in the distance. Then, with no warning, a dozen RCMP vehicles, including prisoner vans and RCMP-branded Suburbans, roared out of the pre-dawn darkness and stopped just short of the watch camp where Wet’suwet’en land defenders have been resisting a court-ordered evacuation of their northern B.C. lands. Backed up by tactical officers, dog teams, and drones with infrared sensors, dozens of RCMP officers began raiding Wet’suwet’en land defender camps shortly before 5 a.m.

At least 19 people have died in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in recent weeks amid violent protests over a controversial new citizenship law.

The police are accused of using excessive force, and Muslims say they fear losing their rights in the world's largest democracy.

Students in Delhi have condemned their “barbaric” treatment at the hands of police who stormed a peaceful protest against the new citizenship bill over the weekend, injuring dozens.

Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, students who were caught up in Sunday’s protest at Delhi’s predominately Muslim Jamia Millia Islamia University – which turned violent after police descended on the campus firing teargas and rubber bullets and beating demonstrators with batons – said it had turned into a “battlefield”.

Indigenous protesters in Canada have called a growing police presence near their makeshift checkpoint “an act of war”, as tensions mount over a stalled pipeline project in northern British Columbia.

In defiance of a court order, dozens of protesters have gathered on a logging road nearly 700km (430 miles) north-west of Vancouver, to block the construction of a natural gas pipeline.

Police in Jakarta have killed dozens of people as part of an escalating crackdown against petty criminals ahead of the Asian Games, in a campaign Amnesty International has described as “unnecessary and excessive”.

Based on monitoring from January to August this year, Amnesty International said 31 police killings were directly linked to the Games, which open in Jakarta and Palembang on Saturday.

The rights group said police shot dead 77 petty criminals across the whole of Indonesia during the same period, a 64% increase from 2017.

Chinese state media have defended the country’s “intense controls” in Xinjiang, a western territory where human rights advocates claim thousands of Muslim minorities are being routinely detained in mass internment camps.

On Friday, a UN human rights panel said it had received credible reports that as many as 1 million ethnic Uighurs were being held in camps, where they can be kept indefinitely, without due process.

A police operation in a Rio favela has left at least eight people dead amid allegations that some of the victims were innocent residents executed in a revenge mission after a police officer was killed there this week. Police said they were attacked by drug gangsters.

The bloody operation in the Rocinha favela, located near postcard beaches like Leblon, came six months after the army briefly occupied the favela following a week of gun battles between rival drug gangs, and five weeks after president Michel Temer put the military in charge of Rio security.

Police militarization and border militarization go hand-in-hand. It's important to recognize this connection in the wake of two decisions recently made by President Donald Trump: to restore a program that provides surplus military gear to local law enforcement agencies, and to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which protects young undocumented people who meet certain qualifications from being deported. Both decisions represent a reversing of course on policy enacted by President Barack Obama...

The world was stunned when rifle-toting police officers in masks and body armour rolled up in Ferguson, Missouri, in armoured vehicles, to stop the 2014 street protests over the police shooting of black teenager Michael Brown.

Following the public backlash, then-president Obama signed an executive order in 2015 limiting police access to equipment that belonged "on the battlefield".

Fast forward two years to Donald Trump. This week the US President promised to make it legal again for surplus military equipment, including grenade launchers and tanks, to be passed on to law enforcement agencies.

Paula Clarke and her family found themselves crawling half-naked on the floor of her Bronx home at 4:51 am on April 27, 2016, after multiple heavily armed men broke through her front door and demanded that she tell them where her son was.

Helicopters could be heard hovering right about her home. The loud flashbang grenades that initially woke Clarke up even left marks on the back of the house.

"I thought we were at war or something," she told Truthout. "Just being woken suddenly from your bed to all of this. It was like we were in a war zone."

In April 2016, European Council President Donald Tusk wrote that the EU needed a harsher plan to counter "uncontrolled migration".

The "unrestricted flow of people" reaching the European continent, Tusk argued, must be stopped through the implementation of "tougher policies" and a stricter control on "who crosses our borders, where and when"...

This week, activists across the world celebrated as the Army Corps of Engineers announced that it would not grant the permit for the Dakota Access pipeline to drill under the Missouri river. This followed campaigning efforts from local Standing Rock Sioux tribe and thousands of Native American supporters from across North America and further afield, who argued that if the pipeline was approved, their spiritual lands would be compromised and local waters would be contaminated, threatening their livelihood. With a message that resonated with indigenous rights activists and environmentalists everywhere, campaigners were successful in forcing officials to back down...

I crawl out of the back of the pickup with my rifle in hand. “Keep your weapons nice and tight,” Captain Pain orders. I am traveling light. Unlike the others, I don’t view southern Arizona as a war zone, so I didn’t put steel plates in my chest rig. Next to everyone else’s commando-style AR-15s, my Ruger Mini-14 with a wood stock is slightly out of place. But everything else is square—I’m wearing a MultiCam uniform, desert tan combat boots, and a radio on my shoulder. I fit in just fine.

Police tactics at the Dakota Access Pipeline protest grew dramatically more aggressive last week, with law enforcement using tear gas, rubber pellets, sound cannons, and other controversial methods to clear activists from a road and a nearby encampment. The latest clashes followed a complaint from Standing Rock Sioux Chairman David Archambault, who warned of an “overall militarization of law enforcement” at the pipeline protest and requested an investigation by the Department of Justice...

Morton County, ND – Over two hundred multi-state law enforcement and National Guard personnel attacked water protectors gathered on unceded 1851 Oceti Sakowin treaty land just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the late morning of Thursday, October 27th.

Video below shows police attacking Oceti Sakowin Treaty Camp with pepper spray, less-lethal rounds used at close range, batons, LRAD, and tasers (VIDEO).

From the Force Science Institute in Mankato, Minnesota to the ecological reserve outside Rio de Janeiro that houses Condor Non-Lethal Technologies’ police training center, the “use of force” industry has grown into a worldwide marketplace. Beginning on October 9, Hoffman Estates will host the five-day conference of the Illinois Tactical Officers Association, or ITOA. To greet them, a coalition of community groups and organizations from the Chicago area are assembling under the banner #StopITOA. These diverse groups, including AFSC-Chicago, CAIR-Chicago, Assata’s Daughters, Black Lives Matter-Chicago, the Arab American Action Network and War Resisters League, argue that government officials should prioritize spending for human needs not for militarization and violence.

North Dakota police with military-style equipment surrounded Native Americans gathered in prayer against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline on Wednesday, disrupting their plan to cross sacred and treaty-protected land in protest of a project they fear will destroy their livelihood.

This report analyses political developments and human rights violations in West Papua by the Indonesian state in response to the West Papuan people’s aspirations for self-determination.  It covers the period between January 2014, when a delegation of Melanesian Spearhead Group Foreign Ministers’ visited the territory, and 15 July 2016, the day after Melanesian Spearhead Group Special Leaders meet in Honiara and decided to defer a decision on the United Liberation Movement for West Papua’s application for full membership. That decision will now be made by MSG leaders in Port Vila, Vanuatu before September.