Lorenzo Komboa Ervin Denied Entry to Canada

February 12, 2001

Dear Canadian Friends:

I am very sorry that I cannot be there with you in Calgary or Lethbridge, to discuss issues of racism, police brutality, and capitalist globalization.  It is not due to my wishes, and totally out of my control for these events to occur. The US border officials have contacted Canadian immigration officials about the great \"threat\" that I represent, and as a result Canadian immigration authorities have seen fit to bar me from coming into the country until I can produce \"evidence\" that that I am a person of \"fit character\" and have no outstanding felony legal cases. Of course, since I left Canada, not even two weeks ago after a speaking engagement at Concordia University in Montreal, this is clealy nonsense.  Further, I have entered Canada at least 15 times in the last five years, and never been stopped before by border guards. They have no reason at all to assume that I constitute a \"clear and present danger\" to state security.  This is not to say that I am no longer a revolutionary Anarchist or that my message is a tame one reaching peace or non-violence, it\'s just that contrary to what the officials think, all Anarchists do not wear a long black cloak with a bomb underneath, and all Black people do not have a propensity to personal acts of violence.  Some of us Anarchists even get to wear nice sweaters and jackets, with our speaking notes underneath; and surprisingly some Black people have nice manners and even know how to speak fairly proper English. I am one. (:

But let us cut to the chase: the Canadian authorities did not like what I said when I was last there in January about resisting the Free Trade Area of the Americas meeting to be held in Quebec City, and how all activists in the Americas have a responsibility to attend and protest the meeting this coming April. They did not like me calling these FTAA \"statesmen\" what they really are, a *group of international gangsters*. They did not appreciate my accusation that the global capitalist entitities like the G8 (now G20) are responsible for all the suffering, murder, and oppression of poor people all over the world. That global capitaliam is responsible for mass exoduses to Europe, America, and Canada because of austerity policies forced upon various governments by the IMF, WTO, and other \"alphabet soup institutions\".  They did not like it when I said that these institutions are also responsible for all the police state regimes in Latin America, and starvation of peasants all over the hemisphere. They did not like it when I said that \"Baby Doc\", (George W. Bush) would be coming to Canada to shit all over the land and people of the Americas, and that that idiot Chretien would be trailing after him like a tame puppy dog.  They did not like it when I talked about the internal colonialism of native peoples in Canada, and they sure as hell didn\'t like it when I talked about homelessness, police brutality, and the rise of the prison-industrial complex  in the Americas being an integral part of the \"new\" global capitalism.  So that is why they did not want me there to speak to you.

Once before a government stopped me from freely travelling and speaking to its people because they saw me as \"a threat to national security\". In 1997, I was invited by a group of Australian Aborigines, Anarchists, and anti-colonial groups to come to OZ, and plan for an international boycott of the games and oppose anti-aboriginal racism and fascism by the One Nation Party of  the PM Pauline Hanson. Upon my arrival, Hanson created a hysterical racist press uproar, and demanded my expulsion from the country.  \"He\'s a terrorist and he\'s here to lead a Black revolution\"...he wants to kill whites\", and other nonsense.  I was jailed, beaten, and ultimately driven out of the country. I am banned from returning by the right-wing white racist regime ever again.  But the real moral to this story is that after I was jailed, my friends in Austrialia and the Black Autonomy International (the group I belonged to), began an international protest campaign against my jailing and denial of free speech.  They had protests within two days in over 17 countries, and all of the major cities in Australia. Finally, the Supreme Court ruled against the Prime Minister\'s position ,and ordered me released. Without the protest camapign, in front of AUS consulates all over the world, this would not have happened. I would be in jail there right now [some I met had been there for *years*], or even worse, may have been killed by jailers.

We need to protest what has happened to me now by the Canadian government, not just because it happened to a so-called \"prominent individual,\" but because we must fight for the principle of the right to speak and travel freely, and oppose militarized borders forbidding that. We cannot sit quietly around while they do their dirty work to ban political speakers coming to Canada (or the USA when you try to come over). The idea of banning someone on grounds of \"having a criminal record\" unless they are heads of state like Mandela, should be totally offensive to anyone who believes in civil liberties, not just Anarchists who reject the state.

  I am calling on you, who would have heard my talks, to go to the Canadian immigration service, and protest in front of [or inside] their building. I am asking you to write letters of complaint about their political censorship. I am asking you to get an attorney and sue the bastards. I am asking you to even pressure provincial politicians, as well as the Minister of Foreign Affairs/Immigration. I am asking you to take whatever action you find necessary to raise this issue publicly, and rescind their repressive policies. I hope that others in Europe and the USA will also protest this matter.  I am vulnerable due to the attempted frameup cases in the USA, and I really need your help to stop this political repression and censorship by Canadian authorities. I cannot do it all by myself, nor should I have to. STAND UP AND FIGHT!

I would have enjoyed speaking there before you, and meeting many of you and working together in the future, but our battle is not over, and I do not ever give up.  I hope that you will use this incident as fuel for even more attacks on the antiquated institution of the nation-state, which so fears one man and his message that they would ban me.  I hope that you will really give them hell at the FTAA meeting in Quebec City now, to make Bush squirm and even break for the exits! Don\'t let these criminals get comfortable at their $1,000 plate dinners, and conference confab. Give \'em hell, and say I sent you.

I am not the terrorist here: I have not killed, imprisoned, tortured, or detained anyone.  I have not discriminated against anyone because of their race, nor sought to censor them from speaking in a public forum.  It is the US and Canadian states, which should be on trial here, for their crimes and intolerance. I have merely sought to tell the truth, and it is that which they fear. 

Love and struggle,

Lorenzo Komboa Ervin