Michael Vonn, policy director of the BC Civil Liberties Association, is disappointed that rare instances of violence and vandalism have overshadowed many peaceful anti-Olympic demonstrations.

Credit: Doug Shanks

NEWS: Olympic critics divided over protest violence, vandalism

While Olympic officials have touted world-class sports venues and the injection of hundreds of millions of tourist dollars as two positive legacies of the 2010 Winter Games, Olympic critics hope to leave a different set of memories for Vancouver and future host cities. Their message, however, has become divided in recent weeks.

Several anti-Olympic demonstrations took place during the course of the Games and were executed peacefully. One rally, however, titled 2010 Heart Attack, turned violent when masked protesters used newspaper boxes to smash the window of the downtown Hudson’s Bay Company. The rally, which took place on the morning of February 13, became a defining and polarizing symbol of Olympic protest in the city. Property damage raised the ire of Olympic critics and supporters alike, many of whom were turned off by what they perceived to be unnecessarily aggressive action.

A February 16 communique from the Black Bloc, the ad-hoc organizing group behind 2010 Heart Attack, explained the events from the perspective of those involved: “Participants in the demonstration only undertook strategic attacks against corporations sponsoring the Olympics and did not harm or attack bystanders,” the release stated. “The media are now busy denouncing the political violence of property destruction, such as the smashing of a Hudson’s Bay Company window, as though it were the only act of violence happening in this city. They forget that economic violence goes on daily in Vancouver. People are suffering and dying from preventable causes because welfare doesn’t give enough to afford rent, food or medicine.”

“I don’t take a stand condemning what people have chosen to do,” says Derrick O’Keefe, a local anti-war activist involved in the Olympic protest movement. “I respect that there’s going to be a diverse choice of tactics.”

On the whole, O’Keefe says, protests around the 2010 Olympics have been successful. “I think the work that’s been done in Vancouver over the last six or seven years is going to have an impact on people who live in every city that the Olympics visits.”

O’Keefe was among a panel of local speakers at VIVO Media Arts Centre on February 17 discussing protest activity during the Games. The heated session, which started with audience members throwing a pie at the BC Civil Liberties Association’s (BCCLA) David Eby, illustrated the fissures that have developed among activist communities.

2010 Heart Attack was the only Olympic protest where representatives of the Legal Observers program were not present. A joint project of the BCCLA and Pivot Legal Society, Legal Observers deploys volunteers (250 have been active during the Olympics) to monitor Games-related activities in public spaces for civil-liberties infractions. The Black Bloc had asked the Legal Observers not to attend the rally, and the BCCLA respected the request, says BCCLA policy director Micheal Vonn.

“We’re disappointed in the ability of what happened [at 2010 Heart Attack] to have almost hijacked the real message of the Olympic demonstrations, which is thousands of people engaged in peaceful demonstration,” Vonn told WE. “This is an anomaly, and the anomaly has taken on the tone of a kind of defining factor.”

Aside from an already fractured local-activist community in the wake of the February 13 rally, tensions between Olympic supporters and Olympic protesters have grown. On the afternoon of February 18, an anti-Olympic student protester at Langara College became involved in an allegedly violent altercation with an Olympic supporter. That’s endemic of what Vonn calls a problematic us-versus-them mentality that has developed around the Games.

“We don’t want to see the kind of reductionist deflation of what are very, very complex issues,” Vonn says. “If we could stop the yelling at one another long enough to actually cock an ear to what is actually being said here, you would appreciate, or people would appreciate, that there’s a nuance of messages that have to do with a raft of different things.”

The $1-billion Olympic security budget, for example, has been a widely contested issue among Olympic critics for years. On February 19, the BCCLA publicly requested that the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) stop bringing semi-automatic weaponry to Vancouver demonstrations. The VPD immediately issued a media release by way of reply, which stated, “The VPD confirms that officers do carry weapons, both lethal and non-lethal. It likely wouldn’t come as a surprise to most people that police have different weapons and tools to help keep the public and officers safe.”

The VPD is also conducting two investigations involving members of 2010 Integrated Security Unit, a team of police, military, and security forces working together during the Games. At press time, no details of the investigation were available.