Police have plenty of anti-dissent models

By Warren Gamble

Jaggi Singh, a French-speaking Canadian activist, has a strong sense of deja vu as he heads to Auckland's Apec conference.

As one of the main organisers of the anti-Apec movement in Vancouver when Canada hosted the regional summit two years ago, the slightly built campaigner was cast in the unlikely role of police enemy number one.

He was kept under surveillance, had his photograph posted on Apec office walls and was eventually nabbed by undercover police on the University of British Columbia campus the day before the summit started.

Mr Singh, who arrives in Auckland today to speak at an anti-Apec conference this weekend, said he already had heard of parallels in the police tactics being used in Apec preparations here.

After being bundled into an unmarked car he was charged with assault over an incident three weeks earlier when he allegedly used a megaphone too close to a police officer, but the case was dropped before it went to court. It conveniently kept him in jail for four days while the leaders met.

Mr Singh said the confiscation of megaphones at the pre-Apec Auckland meeting of trade ministers in June was a disquieting trend.

The Apec police commander in Auckland, Detective Superintendent Peter Marshall, has said megaphones would not be taken off protesters as a matter of course, but if they insisted on using them within centimetres of a police officer's ear that was technically assault.

Mr Singh and other protesters clearly suspected being targeted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police but now they have ample material to illustrate the lengths the Mounties went to.

That has emerged during a year-long Public Complaints Commission hearing into the pepper-spraying of students who blocked a leaders' motorcade route during the forum. Women protesters have also complained about being strip-searched, and others have complained about police tactics.

The inquiry has become an embarrassment to the police and Prime Minister Jean Chretien, with documents pointing to a strong political desire to spare President Suharto of Indonesia from protest action.

It has not yet been decided whether Mr Chretien will be called to testify.

Mr Singh said he was not surprised by information given to the New Zealand Herald that an undercover officer was spotted dressed as a student at Auckland University gathering intelligence on Apec protesters.

Mr Singh said the Canadian inquiry showed at least one Mountie at the University of British Columbia infiltrated a student anti-Apec Hallowe'en parade by wearing an alien mask.

Other documents revealed Mr Singh was kept under police surveillance for at least five days - one report muses over the significance of his changing his trousers in the middle of the day.

He was also followed when donating books to an anarchist group looking after street people. In the Apec coordinating office he saw his photograph pinned to the wall, and a bomb sweep was conducted after he left.

Days before his arrest police documents showed he was to be arrested "quietly" in a remote area of the campus.

"I don't have a criminal record. I'm simply a person with ideas, but I was treated like a terrorist," Mr Singh said.

People opposed to freemarket ideology were deemed to be threats to the country's economic well-being, giving security agencies an excuse to trail them.

Mr Singh said the police precautions went beyond security into a politically inspired desire to have a sanitised environment, a "dissent-free zone."

He said Auckland protesters should not be scared or paranoid, but should stay vigilant and find creative ways of carrying on the "fine tradition of civil disobedience."

When he was arrested New Zealand activist Aziz Choudry was speaking at another part of the campus. He hopes his appearance at Mr Choudry's Apec Monitoring Group this weekend will not bring a reversal of roles.