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Ajit Jain in Toronto
An Indo-Canadian professor of women's studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver created a stir when she publicly described US foreign policy as being "soaked in blood".
"From Chile to El Salvador to Nicaragua to Iraq, the path of US foreign policy is soaked in blood," Sunera Thobani, a migrant from Uganda, said in her keynote address at the three-day conference on 'Women's Resistance: From victimisation to criminalisation' in Ottawa.
Thobani is a former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, an umbrella organisation of feminist groups.
"September 11 has created a blank slate for global domination of the Bush agenda of militarism and global capitalism," agreed another speaker, Prof Julie Sudbury from Mills College in Poakland, California.
Canadian Secretary of State for Multiculturalism Hedy Fry was sitting on the podium when Thobani was given a standing ovation by 500 women delegates.
Though Fry didn't join in the applause, she did not formally protest, for which she was later questioned in the House of Commons. In fact her department of multiculuralism gave $80,000 for this conference.
Contending that Fry should have walked away immediately when those strong remarks against the United States were made by Thobani, the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, Joe Clark, described Fry as a "continuing running embarrassment" to the government and the country.
"For a minister of the Crown to sit on that stage and not disavow those remarks [at the time] was equally horrendous," added opposition leader Stockwell Day.
Fry argued that she had expected the women's conference to deal exclusively with the subject of violence against women.
But "people in this country are allowed to say what they want. I did not support it. I did not applaud it. I got up and left immediately following [her speech]. I stand in the House [of Commons] right now and say that I condemn the speech," she added.
"Mr Speaker, we have made it repeatedly plain that we view any kind of attempt to create moral equivalency between anyone's policies and what happened on September 11 to be utterly unthinkable, outrageous and indefensible," said Minister for Foreign Affairs John Manley.
But one of the conference organisers, Lee Lakeman of the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres, supported Thobani: "I can certainly assure you from the floor it was perfectly obvious that the majority of the room wants to call for peace and wants us to have supportive attitudes toward the Third World and the aspirations of the Third World."
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