Interview with political prisoner Lynne Stewart

Scan page 8

Ontario voters put Liberals on a short leash Attorney and political prisoner Lynne Stewart was interviewed by mail by Patricia Vickers, a founding member of the Human Rights Coalition (HRC) of Pennsylvania. Ms. Vickers is the co-founder/editor of The Movement magazine of the HRC. A former 1960s student activist, Ms. Vickers is an eco-feminist whose youngest son, Kerry “Shakaboona” Marshall, was a wrongly convicted juvenile serving life imprisonment in Pennsylvania prisons. Though incarcerated for 25 years, he is a political activist.

Human Rights Coalition: Hello. Welcome to The Movement, Sister Lynne. Thank you for granting me this interview with you. How are your health and spirits, and how are you being treated at FMC Carswell [Federal Prison]?

Lynne Stewart: My health is passable—the usual brushfires of aging, but good. My spirits are always high, especially with the mail I get to encourage me. I am being treated as well as can be expected. I receive heavy scrutiny—all mail, e-mail, and phone conversations.

Human Rights Coalition: There are people who aren’t aware of your unlawful confinement and the government’s repression of you for your legal representation of the Muslim Blind Sheik. Can you enlighten the people about your situation?

Lynne Stewart: There are two aspects to my “situation,” as you so gallantly described it. First, I was prosecuted for doing what I believe is the duty and work of an attorney—to represent the client zealously and conscientiously. In the case of the original trial (1995)

of the Blind Sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman, of Egypt, we wanted to keep his name alive so that we could eventually try to negotiate a return for him even if it meant jail in Egypt. In that spirit I made a press release public, and to Reuters, expressing his point of view on a unilateral cease fire then in effect in Egypt. I believed that this was part of salvaging him from the torture of his solitary confinement and also that it was part of the work I had sworn to do. I was tried and found By BARRY WEISLEDER protest.

In the lowest turn out in Ontario history, voters reduced the Liberal Party regime of Dalton McGuinty to a minority government in Canada’s most populous province on Oct. 6.

Broad social discontent with higher fees, tuitions and taxes put the Liberals on a short leash. So did anger over deteriorating public health services, transportation and prospects for youth employment. But the lack of inspiring alternatives led to a miserable participation rate of only 49 per cent of eligible voters and a ‘hung’ legislature.

Ironically, this is a better outcome for the working class than a majority of seats for any party committed to implementing the capitalist austerity drive. Minority governments are more vulnerable to 8 Socialist Action octoBER 2011 While Premier McGuinty crowed about the election of the third consecutive Liberal government in Ontario, the electoral rebuke his party suffered was clear: a loss of 19 seats, and a drop in popular support from 42 per cent in 2007, to 37 per cent in 2011.

The labour-based New Democratic Party gained 7 seats and rose 6 per cent in the votes cast to reach 23 per cent. This was largely due to enduring sympathy for recently deceased federal NDP Leader Jack Layton, and a spunky campaign performance by Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath. It was certainly despite an anaemic NDP platform that only modestly differentiated from that of the Liberal Party.

The Progressive Conservative Party led by Tim Hudack blew a 15 per cent PDX Film Fest guilty for materially aiding “terrorism.”

Then, after I received a sentence of two-and-onehalf-years, as opposed to the 30 years the government wanted, on appeal, the Second Circuit Court sent the case back for the judge to give me more time. Without much ado, he sentenced me then to 10 years, partially based upon statements I made after the sentencing and before I surrendered in November 2009. That sentencing is currently on appeal and will be argued in the fall in New York City.

Human Rights Coalition: In the people’s eyes, mine included for sure, you are our [s]hero and represent a long line of principled and committed warriors of the struggle. How do you take being a political prisoner of the American government?

Lynne Stewart: I believe I am one of an historical progression that maintains the struggle to change the perverted political landscape that is the U.S. It seems that being a political prisoner must be used as a means of focusing people’s attention on the continuing atrocities around them. Nothing seems to be too shocking or corrupt to blast the complacency. Like my client Richard Williams used to say, I might think I hadn’t been doing my utmost if they didn’t believe I was dangerous enough to be locked up!

Human Rights Coalition: In April, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death sentence is unconstitutional. However, I am sure there are forces working behind the scenes within the Criminal Injustice Syslead reported by pollsters in June. The PCs gained 12 seats and 3 per cent more votes than previously, but fell far short of victory.

Hudack, a member of the former hard-right wing Mike Harris Ontario Tory government of 1995-2003, let a little too much of his agenda out of the bag. His openly desultory remarks about “foreign workers”, his call for more prisons and compulsory chain-gang-type inmate labour, his appeal to anti-choice-on-abortion groups, and his defence of homophobic Tory campaign literature showed his true colours.

The Green Party plunged from 6 per cent to 2 per cent. It has yet to win a seat in the Ontario Legislature, which is based on the undemocratic first-past-the-post electoral system.

In bourgeois circles, there was plenty of disappointment to go around. Federal Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s sumtem—like what happened in your case—to manipulate another death penalty outcome on Mumia. What is your opinion of the current news surrounding our brother Mumia?

Lynne Stewart: Mumia’s case is our greatest challenge because he is the best and the brightest, and they know it too. We, the progressive revolutionary movement, and Mumia’s lawyers, must create the strategy that forces the District Attorney to elect to try the death penalty issue. Then we get a chance in public, in court, to clearly present the overwhelming proof of his innocence. The worst thing that could happen is that the DA elects to give him life without parole—a living death that deprives our movement of one of its true leaders. I just hope that the bloodthirsty Blue Line forces the issue and holds out for the death penalty so we are in the position to take advantage and advance our cause, and Mumia’s.

Human Rights Coalition: July 4th is widely celebrated as “Independence Day” in America, but the masses of people are experiencing their independence (freedom) taken away by the corporate American government, and by the big banks and mega-corporations that run them. Are the citizens of America truly free, or is their independence a grand illusion?

Lynne Stewart: I re-read Frederick Douglas’ great 4th of July speech every year to just remind myself of how little the ultimate issue has changed from the founding of the nation to today’s alleged “freedom.” Racism is at the core of the empire; and we can never be blinded by all the fireworks in the world.

Human Rights Coalition: Can you describe the difference between civil rights and human rights?

Lynne Stewart: For me the difference is the same as between the Constitution’s Bill of Rights and the UN Declaration of Human Rights. The Bill delineates the ways that government may not encroach on our ability to operate freely. It is a prohibition on the government limiting free speech, religion, the right to bear arms, and the right to free assembly. It delineates the rights within the legal system.

The Declaration guarantees fundamental human entitlements—freedom from hunger, freedom from fear, freedom to choose, freedom to live in an environment that doesn’t kill us, and our children.

We obviously fight for more than the political guarantee to be free of government interference—it is to be able to live an open and generous and contributing life toward the betterment of people on the entire planet.

Human Rights Coalition: Sister Lynne, What are human rights to you? What do you make of the growing human rights movement in the U.S.? And how can people advocate their human rights effectively?

Lynne Stewart: Advocating for human rights must always delineate that our struggle is not one of “self interest.” It is a fight for all of us. This raises the always-troubling question of the recognition that for some this may mean sacrificing their entitlements (i.e. skin privilege, class privilege) to better others’ lives. Nobody wants to give up what they feel that they have achieved legitimately, “within the system.” But without the recognition that one has benefited unfairly by the unwritten “code” that has favored certain groups over others, change cannot occur.

I also believe we have lost the sense that we enjoy the right of self-defense. Everyone is so busy announcing their “peacefulness” and willingness to be a victim for a cause, that we forget that a true measure of one’s seriousness is to defend oneself, and others—to live; Che’s observation that a revolutionary is moved (continued on page 10, in “Ontario NDP brass violate party democracy”)

mertime bluster about a hat-trick of Conservatives ruling in Ottawa, at Queen’s Park, and at Toronto City Hall, clearly fell flat. The Ontario election results refuted claims by some union leaders that the only way to stop the Tim Hudack Tories was to vote Liberal in a majority of ridings. Actually, discontent with Liberal policies went more to the NDP than to the Tories, and to the major category of non-voters.

A united front of labour and social protest movements, committed to a Workers’ Agenda, could have motivated more Ontarions to vote for their own class interests. The idea that the masses hunger for more right-wing government also took a bruising in Manitoba, where the NDP, led by Greg Salinger, split the vote with the Conservatives, but emerged with the fourth consecutive NDP majority government in that province, just west of Ontario. n

Scan page 9

As voters troop to the polls in six provincial and ter-

----- pull-quotes -----

‘ ... you can look in the mirror every morning and be at one with the person there because you made the difficult choice and decided to fight for the people against the evil empires. It is the best way to live ...’