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Canada

By PAUL OGRESKO

The federal government is secretly cam- paigning to undermine the leadership of the Lubicon Lake Indians, Bernard Ominayak, chief of the 754-member band has charged.

The Lubicon Lake nation, which has been embroiled in a long-standing land entitlement dispute with the _ federal government, has received reports of secret meetings be- tween representa- tives of the federal government and cer- tain aboriginal peo- x. ple in the area. t——— nd

In April, the OMINAYAK Department of Indian Affairs confirmed receiving a petition allegedly containing 150 names seeking a separate land claim settle- ment and band status along the lines of the

Memorial tribute paid Sam Carr

TORONTO — Over 300 friends and co- workers packed the Morris Winchevsky Centre here on May 14 to pay tribute to the life and work of Sam Carr, past secretary of the United Jewish People’s Order, who died on April 18 at the age of 83. The many speakers, some representing UJPO members. from Vancouver and Montreal, spoke warmly of Sam’s decades of service to the cause of working people.

Delivering the main eulogy, Dr. Ben Shek, UJPO secretary, described Sam Carr’s rich and difficult life of struggle, tell- ing his listeners that Sam was born on July 7, 1906 in the Ukrainian industrial centre of Kharkov where,in 1919, he saw his father murdered in a pogromist attack. Saved by Red Army cavalry, Sam and his family fled to Romania where he joined the under- ground Communist Party.

In 1924, he arrived in Canada, first work- ing in Saskatchewan as a farm labourer, then moving to Montreal where he joined the Young Communist League, becoming a full-time staff member in Toronto in 1927. In 1930, he became national organizer for the Communist Party which was declared illegal one year later.

With seven others, Carr was arrested and sentenced to five years in Kingston Peniten- tiary. The Communist leaders were freed in 1934 as a result of a massive public cam- paign and Carr later began to help organize the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion of the International Brigades to fight Franco and the fascists in Spain. With the outbreak of World War Two in 1939, the Communist Party was again outlawed and Carr and his family took shelter in the U.S. until 1942.

In 1946, while outside Canada attending a conference, the Gouzenko affair erupted, Dr. Shek recounted, and Sam was sought as an alleged “spymaster,” and thus remained outside the country and without contact with his family for two years. In 1946, he and his wife Julia were arrested in the U.S. and deported to Canada.

After 10 months in jail without bail, he was tried and convicted of a passport offence and, though the prosecutor asked for two years, a vindictive judge jailed him for six years, sending him for a second time to Kingston. There, Julia and their son, Ron, were allowed only one half-hour visit per month. He was released in 1954.

“Starting in 1955, Sam became an active member in the UJPO, soon taking on a leadership role he was not to relinquish until nearly the end of his life when Julia’s and his poor health forced him to stop,” said Dr. Shek, recounting the many posts and tasks Sam undertook as an organizer, writer, teacher and close friend to many.

“Self-taught and extremely widely read, Sam helped clarify many a complex prob- lem with his great talent for synthesizing

6 e Pacific Tribune, May 29, 1989

January federal offer. The federal govern- ment has refused to make the list public.

“What really seems to be happening is the federal government is working with and through a small group of aboriginal people from our area to try and subvert the duly elected government of the Lubicon people,” Ominayak said in a recently released state- ment.

“They told these individuals the federal government is prepared to provide them with land, treaty benefits like hunting rights, and off-reserve programs and services such as education and medical insurance — but couldn’t do so unless or until the Lubicon people accepted the federal government’s “take-it-or-leave-it offer.”

Federal officials admitted the petition was received two weeks after a meeting with federal representatives. Normally govern- ment representatives meet with people in response to such petitions, not to discuss the drafting of them, Ominayak pointed out.

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The arrested leaders of the Communist Party, charged under Section 98 in 1931.

Sam Carr is third from right.

large numbers of facts in order to get to the heart of the matter. His articles (in Cana- dian Jewish Outlook) covered Canadian economic and political issues, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the conflicts in the Middle East, in Central America and Southern Africa; the socialist world, Jews in the USSR, epic events in Jewish history like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the fights against neo-nazism and war criminals in Canada and, of course, UJPO organiza- tional matters,” said Dr. Shek.

“In his articles from 1982 to 1986 Sam Carr frequently wrote on the Middle East crisis and on Israel’s role in it,” the speaker continued, “‘stressing the need for policies that would assure Israel’s security and right to a tranquil existence, and the Palestinians’ _

-equal right to self-determination, including the choice of forming their own state along- side the Jewish one.”

“Sam Carr did not wait for glasnost and perestroika to arrive before denouncing cer- tain shocking distortions of Soviet law and socialist principles with regard to the Jewish community in the USSR over several decades,” Dr. Shek explained. “As early as 1964, in an Outlook article entitled ‘With Embellishments,’ he tore apart a virulent anti-Jewish pamphlet entitled Judaism Without Embellishments by one T.K. Kitchko, shamefully published under the auspices of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He continued to write likewise about other similar publications put out by Progress and Novosti publishers in the USSR during the period now described as that of ‘stagnation’. He raised the issue again as recently as January, 1984 and April, 1986, in the UJPO News.

“Early this year, the journal Sovietskaya Kultura (Soviet Culture), carried an article by two historians, members of the Academy of Sciences, who denounced the anti- Semitic nature of these same publications,” Dr. Shek reported. “This forthright text

_ Cree charge DIA ‘subversion’

Having no way of judging the extent of support for the petition and since no “spo- kesperson” for the group has come for- ward, the Lubicon Lake band has decided to call a free and open band election on May 31 to determine whether or not the current leadership has a mandate to eontinue representing the Lubicon people.

Ominayak, who has become one of the most respected and determined aboriginal leaders in the country, said the election, originally scheduled for October, is the necessary response to federal attempts to “subvert and overthrow the duly elected government of the Lubicon people.”

Ominayak expressed disgust but not sur- prise at the federal attempts to strike private deals with individuals and to undermine his leadership.

“It’s the kind of cheap and dirty political tactic we’ve come to expect from the government of Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney,” he said.

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vindicated the position of Sam Carr and his colleagues who, it must be stressed, never fell into the trap, as some did, of moving from denunciations of those gross and ugly distortions of socialism to a cold war, red- baiting position of total opposition to the socialist camp.

“Sam Carr had a life of much physical and psychological suffering,’ Dr. Shek concluded. “He sought no personal gain, no prestige, no honours, no facile acceptance at the expense of principles.

““When I last saw him, three days before his death, in spite of his depression over the state of Julia’s and his own health, he was still curious about what was going on in the world and in the organization. He remained true to the dream of his youth, expressed in these words, which he wrote in 1985:

“°We believe firmly in a world without exploitation... where poverty and want will be abolished, and where the motive force driving society ahead will not be that of individual acquisition of profits, but the col- lective advancement of humanity.”

Speaking on behalf of the Morris Win- chevsky Schools, executive member Muni Taub spoke of Sam Carr’s efforts during the last 35 years of his life, “to develop an inde- pendent position for the Jewish left, as a pro-socialist, secular force which, while considering itself an integral part of the Jew- ish community, made its unique contribu- tion to it through its social outlook.”

Moving tributes were paid by his son, Dr. Ronald Carr and by Sam’s granddaughter, Sheva, who recited a poem given to her by her grandfather, the same poem Sam had

sent to Ron while in Kingston Penitentiary

in the 1950s.

Noted historian, Stanley Ryerson, Cana- dian Jewish Outlook managing editor Syl- via Friedman and Dave Ship, representing the Montreal UJPO also spoke about Sam Carr’s life and work.

Province mobilizes to maintain SaskEnergy

Grant Devine has to go! That’s the demand from every corner of Saskat- chewan in the wake of Tory attempts to sell off SaskEnergy. The Saskatchewan Committee of the Communist Party has joined with many other democratic for- ces telling the premier: Call an election. Let the people of this province pass judgement on your policies.

The public rally called by the Saskat- chewan Federation of Labour and other groups, at the Legislature June 17, can become a focus for all those opposed to privatization of our heritage, and to the attack on our rights and social gains by the Devine Tories.

The SaskEnergy fiasco catalyzed

popular anger against the Conservatives. —

It drove home the reality, that this government has no concern for the

immediate needs of working people, or ©

for the long-term future of Saskatche- wan. Its privatization drive proves that the government’s only concern to

improve the profit picture for big busi-

ness interests. But this time the government’s cynical

calculations backfired. As the polls — show, over two-thirds of the population —

rejects the SaskEnergy sell-off. Tireless campaigns by the labour and social jus- tice movements against the Tory agenda

Kimball Cariou

FROM REGINA

in recent years did much to win public opinion on this issue, and to encourage

~the NDP opposition to block the legisla-

tion and take its case to the people. _

Although the NDP returned to the legislature before forcing an election or withdrawal of the SaskEnergy bills, it played a major part in delaying Sask- Energy’s privatization, at least until October and possibly for the rest of Devine’s term in office.

The Communist Party believes this victory, however significant, is only tem- porary. With the Legislature back in ses- sion, the Tories are turning to the rest of their agenda — more privatization plans, the “Employment Benefits Act,” con- tinued attacks on the poor, betrayal of promises to farmers, new restrictions on democracy.

June 17 should be a day for working people throughout Saskatchewan to put the government back on the defensive, to show we reject its entire neo-conservative push, not just some of its policies. By working together against the Tories we can make sure Devine stays low in the polls, and at the ballot box. We can build a united movement to defeat the Tories, and put the people’s needs, not corporate

profits, at the top of the priority list of a

new government. The last two years have shown that such unity is not always easy to achieve,

but that it can be won, and that it brings © results. This is a time for people’s move- —

ments in Saskatchewan to stand on the

sidelines debating history ... it is atime —

for all-out mobilization for June 17, a —

time to build unity in action.