By Cynthia Cheponis
Centretown will be the site of a vigil for peace Thanksgiving weekend.
The Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT) is organizing a rally at Parliament Hill to protest the NATO Parliamentary Assembly meetings also being held that weekend.
The rally will be followed by a march to First United Church on Kent Street, where attendees will hear short speeches by peace activists and participate in a series of workshops designed to help people learn ways to promote non-violence.
The event was originally conceived as a festival to mock NATO. However, the recent terrorist attacks in Washington and New York prompted COAT co-ordinator Richard Sanders to change the festival into a more sombre event, and to urge NATO leaders to refrain from a violent response.
“There is a need for non-violence and calm, rational discussion,” Sanders says.
He says there is a large activist community in Ottawa and he is hoping several hundred people will attend.
He also hopes to draw in members of the general public who may be worried about a possibly violent American response to the attacks.
“A lot of the people who come to the event may think now, ‘part of me wants to go out and kill these terrorists,’ but they’ll learn that an eye for an eye doesn’t work,” Sanders says.
Former Ottawa mayor Marion Dewar is chairing the event.
She is active in the peace movement in Ottawa and also expects the vigil to attract many members of the general public.
“At all the memorial services (for the victims of the terrorist attacks) I’ve been to, people are talking about non-violence. We’re trying to show violence doesn’t solve any of the problems worldwide,” says Dewar.
“NATO is basically a military coalition and if we’re going to try to solve all our problems with military force, we’ll never change anything.”
Liberal MP Carolyn Parrish is the chair of the Canadian NATO Parliamentary Association and is vice-chair of the Parliamentary Assembly.
She says the focus of the meeting has changed from a discussion about which countries would next be invited to join NATO, to a discussion on anti-terrorism.
Rather than pushing for military intervention, Parrish believes delegates will have “recommendations of caution to the U.S.”
“I think we’ll tell them, ‘Don’t go off blowing things up’,” she says.
Parrish welcomes the COAT protest and says many people probably sympathize with them regarding their opposition to military retaliation on the part of NATO.
“Once the initial shock is over, most of us understand that conventional warfare won’t work in this situation,” she says.
“We have to look at the root of the problems of why there’s such hatred of Americans and of the western world in general.”
Ottawa Centre MP Mac Harb agrees that peaceful demonstrations such as the one COAT is planning are not a worry for the government. Protests are now expected at international gatherings of any type, he says.
“The minute we stop having people protesting and expressing their views is when we risk moving toward a closed, inward-looking society.”