BY STEVE PENNER AND BEVERLY BERNARDO
VANCOUVER, British Columbia - An April 27 meeting of some 200 people representing a broad range of anti-racist activists, defenders of democratic rights, and other organizations agreed to call a protest against the January 4 racist killing of Nirmal Singh Gill in Surrey, a suburb of Vancouver.

The 65- year-old caretaker of the Guru Nanak Sikh Temple was found badly beaten and bleeding in the temple's parking lot around 3:30 a.m. . He died soon after.

On April 22 Robert Kluch, 24; Radoslaw Synderek, 22; Daniel Miloszewski, 20; Nathan LeBlanc, 25; and an unnamed 17-year-old were charged with second-degree murder at the Surrey Court House. Police allege that the five suspects are members of a white supremacist skinhead group calling itself White Power, which is affiliated with other ultrarightist outfits. This contradicts the media's unsubstantiated claims that Gill's death was due to a clash among Sikhs.

Many Sikh residents at the Guru Nanak temple's senior center, where Gill lived and worked, crowded into the courtroom to hear the charges laid. Temple members are planning to attend the May 6 court hearing for the accused and are considering holding a public vigil in the parking lot where Nirmal Gill was killed. Charan Gill, president of the B.C. Intercultural Services Society, accused the police of not taking recent acts of vandalism seriously, including window-smashing at the Sikh temple where Nirmal Singh Gill worked.

The press has reported several other incidents of Surrey and Vancouver residents being attacked by racist groups.

Participants at the April 27 anti-racist meeting discussed a plan of action presented by Baljinder Sandhu, which included a protest march to Surrey city hall and a rally.

A number of those who spoke at the meeting also expressed support for the call by Surrey mayor Doug McCallum and B.C. Attorney General Ujjal Dosanjh for tougher so- called anti-hate laws, which would make possession of hate literature a crime. Dosanjh has called on the federal government in Ottawa "get off its collective rear...and give me a better law... give our police force better tools."

Mary Ellen Marus, a member of the International Association of Machinists, argued at the meeting that giving governments the power to ban ideas they consider to be racist was more of a threat to the democratic rights of all working people than a means of fighting racism.

Gov't promotes anti-Sikh campaign
For more than a decade since the bombing of an Air India plane in 1985, the Canadian government and the media have conducted a systematic campaign portraying Sikhs as terrorists. One of the most recent examples is the Dec. 23, 1997, deportation of Tejinder Pal Singh to India. About 200 Sikhs demonstrated in Vancouver against the deportation order.

Singh spent 14 years in prison after being convicted of taking part in the 1981 hijacking of an Indian Airlines jet while he was a participant in the fight to establish an independent Sikh nation in the Punjab area of India. Two weeks before the deportation order, Immigration Minister Lucienne Robillard had signed an order prohibiting Singh from seeking refugee status.

Singh's lawyers said the deportation order came despite a request from a United Nations committee on torture that wanted to look into the case.

In the two years prior to his deportation, the media reported that Singh had been living in Surrey's Khalsa School, a Sikh religious school in North Surrey. Then in mid- February on the basis of allegations that members of teh International Sikh Youth Federation had attended weekend meetings at the school, the provincial ministry of education launched a probe of the Khalsa school. Ministry official Karen Johnston said that if the school was found to have been in violation of the Independent School Act again, it could face stiff reprisals from the provincial government.

Earlier this year the federal government faced a wave of protest actions over proposed changes to the immigration laws that would require new immigrants to know either English or French prior to coming to Canada.

Fifty percent of the immigrants who came to British Columbia between 1991 and 1995 could not speak English. Most spoke Chinese languages. Under the proposed new rules, those 92,000 applicants would be rejected.

In another move to scapegoat immigrants, the new proposals include charging new immigrants for English as a Second Language (ESL) classes for children and spouses. In Vancouver ESL students make up half the school population. Under changes implemented several years ago new immigrants must now pay a $975 landing fee for each adult.

Beverly Bernardo is a member of Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees Local 178. Steve Penner is a member of the Canadian Auto Workers union.  
 
 
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