'No Borders, No Frontiers' campaign to be launched

national | miscellaneous | news report Monday March 18, 2002 16:51 by Brian Cahill nigel_irritable at yahoo dot com

Globalise Resistance are talking about launching a "No Borders, No Frontiers" campaign against Aine Ni Chonnaill, an electoral candidate in Dublin South Central. Could somebody tell me a bit more about what exactly is being proposed?

Aine Ni Chonnaill will be running a racist campaign and she has to be opposed. It is to be welcomed that Globalise Resistance seem to be discussing taking the initiative on this.

I am living in London at the moment, so I can't help out, but I would be interested in hearing exactly what is being proposed.

The one note of caution I would sound is that anti-racist campaigns have to be handled with skill or they can backfire.

I was in Glasgow last year when an asylum seeker was murdered in Sighthill. Sighthill is one of the most impoverished areas in Britain. Glasgow Council had dumped hundreds of asylum seekers into the estate without handing over any extra resources to the local community or to the newcomers. Racial tension grew over a period and culminated in the murder of a young Kurdish man.

An anti-racist group (the ANL) responded by plastering the area in posters with the slogan "No return to Hitler and the Holocaust". To put it mildly, this did not have the desired effect. To some locals it just appeared that they were being called Nazis by a bunch of students and other outsiders.

The postering campaign came close to turning an already dreadful situation into a disaster.

Luckily for all concerned, the Scottish Socialist Party, along with some community leaders (both local and asylum seekers) managed to launch a more succesful campaign, uniting both sections of the estate under the slogan "Sighthill United Against Poverty And Racism". Much of the justifiable discontent on the estate was channelled against the Council and a huge part of the population of the estate went on a unified march to the Council headquarters, demanding better treatment for the whole area.

I don't tell this story to score points off the ANL or to cheerlead for the SSP, before anybody jumps on me. I just want to remind Comrades who are thinking of launching a campaign against Ni Chonnail and her lies to be sensitive. Anything which comes across as lecturing to local people will actually help the racists.

Anyway, note of caution sounded, question asked, all that remains to be said is good luck to all the Comrades involved.