TO OUR SISTERS, WE ARE NOT TERRORISTS: A STATEMENT FROM PRISON BY ANN HANSEN & JULIET BELMAS
O
n January 20, 1983 while we were travelling along the Squamish highway, we were stopped by cops posing as highway flag persons. Seconds after the vehicle stopped, at least 30 men in camouflage fatigues, armed to the teeth with automatic rifles, shot-guns, large caliber handguns, in unison attacked the vehicle we were in. They all swarmed from positions in the surrounding hillside and from positions behind a large dump truck that blocked the highway. While stampeding the vehicle, they smashed a window and shot in tear gas. All the cops were screaming hysterically while they ripped us out of the truck and threw us on the ground. They kept shouting not to move or we’d be shot while they stuck their rifles into our backs and pressed their handguns to our heads. Our faces were forced down into the ground so that we couldn’t check on one another. We all thought that one of us had been shot when we heard a tear gas shell being fired. It was horrible having to lay passive to the whims of these crazed military extremists and their guns. We could imagine how other womyn felt in other countries especially being unarmed and having to survive and accept the horror and death of a military attack on their villages and homes. The feeling is too extreme to explain. It suddenly becomes very clear that these men with their guns are ready to kill you. They seemed very hyper and unpredictably insecure. The slightest movement could startle them, causing their fingers to spasmodically jerk and kill. What is happening in Canada today in reaction to the recent sabotage to the B.C. Hydro Cheekeye-Dunsmuir Line and the firebombings of the Red Hot Video porn outlets is not unconnected to the political repression used against people resisting in other parts of the world. In other countries where the liberation movements are strong and active enough to threaten the government and corporate interests, the counter-insurgency forces respond instantly with extreme violence. (The tools of repression are internationally devised and are used explicitly for political purposes. Every power structure in the world is paranoid of the people seeing through their façade and rebelling against their authority.) The ultimate weapon of the people has always been militant resistance and all police-states are constantly developing their violent repressive apparatus to use against the people (to protect their international status-quo). Being womyn identified, politically conscious, environmentalists and 46
