Stopping the Fraud, Naming the Names:

Stopping the Fraud, Naming the Names:
Stopping the Fraud, Naming the Names:
A New Direction for Survivors of Church Violence

by Kevin D. Annett
www.hiddenfromhistory.org


"Lots of people didn't survive. That's what people have to know. And there's no genuine justice if we can't name our abusers."
Christine Buckley, Irish survivor of Catholic Sister of Mercy orphanage, Dublin, May 20, 2009

"The Commissioners shall not receive into evidence any allegation of wrongdoing, or shall allow the naming of names of alleged abusers ..."
from the mandate of Canada's "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" into Indian Residential Schools, 2008

This coming week, a lone aboriginal woman named Charlotte will face the media in Vancouver, Canada and will name the name of the church official who murdered her sister at a Canadian Indian residential school.

Charlotte is doing what her natural right and justice compels, which is to tell the truth and hold criminals accountable: a right that has been systematically denied to those who have survived institutionalized violence at the hands of Christian churches around the world.

That denial has been engineered by the very churches that killed and ruined innocent lives, in collusion with governments and police agencies. And this criminal conspiracy to obstruct and deny justice has spanned continents, repeating itself in the United States, in Canada, in Ireland, and wherever else Christian boarding schools and orphanages operated.

One would think that a crime so huge and systematic would arouse the world to anger and protest. Instead, the Catholic church and its lesser equivalents are allowed to protect themselves from prosecution and shield their rapists and murderers while feigning "regret and concern".

Perhaps because of its very enormity, and the stamp of approval on rape and murder tacitly placed on these crimes by compliant governments, this incredible miscarriage of justice has yet to be named for what it is. For in a system where Christian religious institutions are protected by law and bankrolled in the billions, one can indeed expect nothing different than the self-absolution and protection of the wrongdoer that presently poses as "healing and reconciliation".

There is an alternative, but it is a risky one, for it requires first of all that the rapists and murderers be directly named by those whom they violated. And yet this new step is the only way forward for survivors who have faced one roadblock after another in their struggle to secure real justice.

In the west coast Canadian networks of our Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared movement, we've begun a campaign called Naming the Names, to counter the government's bogus "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" and its policy of protecting abusers at residential schools by not allowing their names to be mentioned publicly.

Our campaign involves publishing the identities and names of documented abusers who have been identified by three or more of their victims, and establishing public tribunals to which the named abuser is summoned to answer charges against him or her. The proceedings and evidence will then be video recorded and posted on the internet on a special website.

This effort is solidly backed by common law and precedent, which allows citizens to make arrests and hold accountable known criminals when police forces and the courts refuse to do so.

It has been only such direct actions from below, by the survivors themselves, that have prompted government and church to respond at all. We must carry on such pressure at this critical moment, when the major Christian churches are working jointly with governments to forever avoid any responsibility for their own crimes against humanity.

So it's up to everyone reading this to carry this campaign to its next level, and name those responsible for genocide and murder, and bring them to direct justice.

I invite everyone to come and witness our first step in this campaign, at Charlotte's press conference, this Wednesday, May 27 at 10:00 am, in Classroom #2, on the third floor of the Carnegie Centre at Main and Hastings street in downtown Vancouver.

Naming the names is Charlotte's answer to the murder of her sister - and our response to religious wolves in sheep's clothing.

Stay tuned.

May 22, 2009
.......................................................................................................

Kevin D. Annett
260 Kennedy St.
Nanaimo, B.C. Canada V9R 2H8
250-753-3345 or 1-888-265-1007
www.hiddenfromhistory.org

Kevin Annett is a community minister, educator and film maker who works with aboriginal and low-income people in the downtown eastside of Vancouver, Canada. His award-winning documentary film on genocide in Camada, UNREPENTANT, can be viewed at: www.hiddenfromhistory.org




Read and Hear the truth of Genocide in Canada, past and present, at this website: www.hiddenfromhistory.org

“Kevin is more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than many who have received it in the past.”
- Dr. Noam Chomsky
Institute Professor Emeritus
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“A courageous and inspiring man." (referring to Kevin Annett)
- Mairead Corrigan-Maguire
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Belfast , Northern Ireland

The very lands we all along enjoyed
they ravished from the people they destroyed ...
All the long pretenses of descent
are shams of right to prop up government.
' Tis all invasion, usurpation all;
' Tis all by fraud and force that we possess,
and length of time can make no crime the less;
Religion's always on the strongest side.

Daniel Defoe, Jure Divino (England, 1706)

Read and Hear the truth of Genocide in Canada, past and present, at this website: www.hiddenfromhistory.org

“Kevin is more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than many who have received it in the past.”
- Dr. Noam Chomsky
Institute Professor Emeritus
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“A courageous and inspiring man." (referring to Kevin Annett)
- Mairead Corrigan-Maguire
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
Belfast , Northern Ireland

The very lands we all along enjoyed
they ravished from the people they destroyed ...
All the long pretenses of descent
are shams of right to prop up government.
' Tis all invasion, usurpation all;
' Tis all by fraud and force that we possess,
and length of time can make no crime the less;
Religion's always on the strongest side.

Daniel Defoe, Jure Divino (England, 1706)