IT IS A LONG MARCH

I don’t know why as children at school here in the l950s and ‘60s we were made to "march" every morning, with military precision, into assembly. Left, right, left, right, left, left. Left, right, left right, left, left..….. "Get those knees higher." " Swing your arms." I vaguely remember only once marching in a parade outside the school grounds so I don’t know what the point was. Enforced exercise? Discipline? But why so militaristic? It must have been a hangover from the war years.

A march implies that you set off from somewhere and get to somewhere else where you then do or achieve something. When Mao Tse-tung, the great Chinese communist leader, led his Red Army on the famous "long march" to North West China, it was to defeat both the Chinese General Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese invasion, and, finally, to proclaim there a People’s Republic, in 1949. Marching implies a grave determination to move forward, like a soldier.

A demo, on the other hand, is a public manifestation of a group’s opposition to the status quo. I think that is more what Trinidadians were doing in the two recent street processions.

My 84-year-old mother and I joined fellow St Ann’s residents last week in the civil show of our objection to the proposed UDeCOTT plan for the President’s Grounds, not because we necessarily believe that the plans will change but because we thought it important to have a say in how our environment is managed and because we believe the plan to be misguided.

I am personally very encouraged by both our demos as it shows us, in large numbers, acting as responsible citizens and contributing to our democracy. And we must not take this sort of public demonstration for granted. When so much is ailing in our society and things falling apart, having peaceful, unmolested demonstrations is still a prize.

Governments should not fear these protests, but view them as useful indicators of public mood. They must acknowledge that the demands of office distance them from us, the people who put them there to serve us.

We are now telling them what we want from them. And, furthermore, there is little evidence that a government’s prospects are affected by public demos.

Both US President, Mr Bush, and Mr Blair, British Prime Minister, were voted back into power after taking their countries into the very unpopular Iraq war. Millions of demonstrators around the world didn’t manage to deter them from their plan.

Demos do not often halt an unpopular decision because by the time it becomes public knowledge the wheels are irrevocably in motion. But, they do make governments take note of public opinion. The USA and UK didn’t dare undertake the Iraqi invasion until they had gone as far as possible in trying to legitimise it, having got all the war materials in place. The weight of public opinion delayed the action, although it did not stop it.

In any event, we in TT must focus our minds on what it is we are trying to achieve when we protest. The Keith Noel Committee organised a "march," so it should have had its demands to present to the government, together with the list of signatories, when the Death March arrived at the Red House, preferably while the House was sitting. The St Ann’s demo in front of the President’s Grounds was, obviously, not a march — as the organisers indicated, or we would have walked onto the UDeCOTT offices as an injunction was being served upon them.

Asking for things to be done, or not done, is unlikely to yield a successful outcome, but being in a position to negotiate is quite another matter. If we are going to have what are, in effect, demos then they should be part of an overall strategy that is implemented in stages, with a definable set out of outcomes expected at each stage. They should be viewed as part of a campaign, in a militaristic sense.

I remember the very effective and strategic 1980s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in Britain that had as its objective stopping Cruise missiles being sited on British soil. They organised a series of large peace demos, and heavily publicised sit-ins at all the military bases.

The "Greenham Common Women" pitched permanent tents outside that base to monitor traffic in and out and weren’t afraid of being regularly removed by the police.

Exercising our civic voice is a good thing, but, without a strategy, voices are easy to silence. So TT protestors should decide where they go from here on what it might be useful to think of as their own long march.