Peace conference organizers ignore Green leader's call to cancel over Iranian academics' participation
BY DON BUTLER, THE OTTAWA CITIZEN
OCTOBER 28, 2010
OTTAWA — A controversial conference on peace sponsored by four current and former Ottawa-area Green party candidates will proceed as scheduled Thursday night despite a call for its cancellation by Green party leader Elizabeth May.
“We have every intention of running it at this moment,” Paul Maillet, the Green candidate in Ottawa-Orléans, said Thursday.
The conference on “just and sustainable peace” at the Government Conference Centre includes three academics from Tehran University, including keynote speaker Saeid Ameli, dean of the faculty of global studies.
Another panelist is Davood Ameri, director general of the Islamic World Peace Forum, an Tehran-based NGO whose website postings closely mirror the views of the Iranian regime.
The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies weighed in on the issue Thursday, describing Ameri as “violently anti-Semitic.”
It said his organization “maintains Zionists are not only responsible for 9/11, but for all ‘criminal events’ happening in the Arab world today.”
Wednesday, May urged the organizers to call off the conference, which she said is not a sanctioned Green party event.
“If they’re not aware that they’ve put together a conference which is unbalanced, then they’re not paying attention,” she said.
If the Green party were to organize such a conference, May said, “we would not for a moment allow any potential for whitewashing of (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad or the Iranian regime.
“We’re right now in the midst of pressing Iran to stop barbaric practices and show trials,” she said. “This is hardly the time to be holding an event which in any way allows the Iranian regime to have any form of cover.”
Martin Rudner, former director of Carleton University's Centre of Intelligence and Security Studies, said the event is “merely a floor show, a one-sided propaganda forum for an Iranian perspective on international affairs.
“It’s very one-sided,” he said. “There’s no other side.”
The conference was organized by the “Ottawa Group of Four” — two current and two former Green candidates in Ottawa-area ridings.
The current candidates are Maillet and Qais Ghanem in Ottawa South. The other two, Akbar Manoussi and Sylvie Lemieux, ran in 2008.
Maillet, a former Canadian Forces colonel, said he was “disappointed” by May’s opposition to the conference.
“One of the principal Green party values in non-violence, and this is what we’re trying to practise,” he said. “Non-violence has to mean living these values somehow.”
He and May have exchanged a “flurry of e-mails” about the conference in the past 24 hours, he said. “Maybe in some areas, we agree to disagree.”
Organizers may reduce the number of Iranian speakers at tonight’s event if it’s determined they will say essentially the same thing, Maillet said, and may also increase opportunities for audience participation.
Maillet said it was a well-known peacekeeping tradition that participants don’t necessarily have to bring all sides to the table at the same time.
“When the time is right and the language is correct, then we can start having some joint meetings. But it’s going to require a little bit of courage here.”
The organizers had hoped to use Thursday night’s event to “create a space to talk,” Maillet said. “Many, many people are not comfortable with that.”
Maillet said the invitees were recruited by Manoussi, who attended a government-sponsored conference in Tehran in the past year.
The objective is to ask panel members and attendees to do what they can to advance the cause of peace through non-violent means, he said.
Though Maillet said he wasn’t “100 per cent sure” the Iranian participants are aligned with the regime, he agreed “they are under some constraints.”
Rudner said the Iranians “wouldn’t dare speak their minds. Their lives would be at risk.”
Just last week, Rudner said, the Ahmadinejad regime shut down every social science department in Iranian universities because they’re regarded as centres of Western influence.
“They’ve clamped down very strictly on freedom of thought, let alone freedom of expression,” he said. “I worry about four Iranians who cannot speak freely and, by definition, have to push an agenda.”
May said the organizers either allowed themselves to be manipulated or didn’t adequately consider the implications of their actions. “I can’t imagine what they were thinking.”
Their intentions “may have been good,” she said, noting that some other speakers are well-respected. “But the fatal failure is in having those particular supporters of the current Iranian regime without balance.”
But Maillet said he and his fellow organizers weren’t interested in having a “group hug."
“A professional peacekeeper does not choose to have conferences with his friends. He chooses to have dialogue and discussion with people with whom he has differences. That is the place you can make gains.”
However, said May, “You can’t have a dialogue if you don’t have balance. You can’t be naive about these things.”
Asked if the party might revoke Maillet and Ghanem’s nominations, May said there was “nothing at the moment” that suggested that would happen.
“If they’re duly nominated by their local riding association and if they recognize that they made a mistake and they didn’t have a balanced event, I don’t think we plan to punish them,” she said.
However, “if we have a candidate who puts forward unacceptable views or anti-Semitic views, they will not be a candidate. I can say that full stop. There’s a line you can’t cross.”
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