China/Tibet versus Canada/First Nations - are we looking in a mirror?

Like much of the world, I feel sadness and disappointment in China’s reaction to protests in Tibet, and applaud those who have the courage to stand up and voice their dissent publicly. My question however is this: would we create the same rousing protests if the Olympics were slated to be held in Los Angeles? Would the US government’s human rights violations in Guantanamo Bay compel us to stand up with equal vigour and call for a boycott of the Olympics being held on their soil? And the US occupation of Iraq, which has been found to be illegal and unwarranted, and which has resulted in uncountable human rights violations - would these human rights violations be sufficient to call for a boycott of a US Olympics, much as some are calling for in China?

I would hope so. Any other reaction would prove so inconsistent that we would need to step down from our self-appointed role of moral policing, and admit that we embrace a double standard in our view of global morality.

However in reality, the dwindling voices of dissent around these issues bear testimony to the realities of our world today: the level to which a nation is held morally accountable for their actions in inversely proportional to their global economic power. And while China’s economic power is sizeable enough for world leaders to hesitate upon overt condemnation; it does not yet have the superpower immunity the US enjoys that allows US leaders to unilaterally invade nations unprovoked, without fears of international calls for economic sanctions, and boycotts.

The same holds true for Canada. How many of us in Canada see ourselves as illegal occupiers of Aboriginal lands? The reality is, the lands upon which we now build our luxury suburbs were previously occupied by people who never actually ceded their land to us in any legal manner. We simply came in, slaughtered those who dissented, and planted our flags on their soil. Our continued occupation of this land, and the close to 1000 unsettled land claims which exist today here in Canada bears more resemblance to China’s occupation of Tibet than most of us would feel comfortable admitting. A closer look reveals that protests by First Nations people around legitimate land-claim issues have been dealt with by the Canadian government in a manner that also mirrors China’s response to Tibet.

Many of us will recall the Oka crisis of 1990 in which sacred burial ground rights came up against the private interests of a golf course’s expansion. The result was a bloody and violent confrontation that resulted in the use of military force by our government in an effort to suppress the protests. The world’s attention was called to the human rights violations committed by our government, and the deaths of Aboriginal protestors that were caused as a result. Similar struggles on a smaller scale continue across Canada even today.

Have we really done much better than China at dealing with dissent and uprising from our own occupied territories? Do we really have any moral authority with which to judge or condemn China given our own human rights violations where Aboriginal rights are concerned? How would we react if one-day people in say Rwanda decided to stand up and protest Canada’s treatment of our Aboriginal people? And if this protesting fervour spread through the rest of the African continent causing nations like Zimbabwe and Kenya to stand up and point accusing fingers at us citing human rights violations and calling for a boycott to the 2010 Vancouver Olympics - would we listen? Or would we laugh? How could we take these protests seriously in light of the human rights violations those countries themselves have participated in recently.

Similarly, we must ask ourselves this same question. Do we have a record of moral behaviour that is so pristine that it allows us to stand behind a pulpit of moral superiority and dictate to other nations how they should deal with internal dissent? Or should we instead focus our attentions first towards ourselves, and look critically at our own shortcomings in this area before we begin to interfere in the autonomy of other nations? The reality is that we in the West have the luxury of viewing the actions of other world nations through a lens that focuses on their flaws of governance, and focuses on the negative consequences of their human rights discretions. While at the same time, we view our own government’s actions in a way that minimizes our perception of our own human rights violations - legitimizing them, and normalizing them through utilitarian paradigms.

I admire the intentions of the activists who are standing up passionately for what they believe in, and I feel immense sadness for the suffering of the Tibetan people. However, I also recognize that like Canada and the US, China will as an autonomous nation likely make the mistake of continuing to deal with this uprising in a heavy-handed manner. The question that I have is whether we in Canada actually have any moral ground upon which to judge China’s actions, while we continue even today to suppress dissent from lands that we illegally occupy.

I would challenge each activist to look within him/herself and ask whether they will extend the same moral abhorrence toward their own country. Whether in Canada, or in the US, we all have reasons to ask difficult questions of our governments and to demand that they answer for their behaviour.

We can either take this opportunity to promote the usual rubric of western libertarian thought and point fingers at other nations; or we can embrace this opportunity to critically examine our own poor track record of human rights in Canada, and begin to move forward in a manner consistent with our outwardly preaching. Rather than resting on our heels, confident that our status as a developed and westernized society protects us from external scrutiny in the area of human rights, perhaps we should be aware that similar calls for boycotts thrown our way could be almost as legitimate as today’s calls for boycotts toward China. And with the 2010 Olympics around the corner, what better time to start asking than now?