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Antiwar Around the World
Numbers varied by different press accounts, but an estimated million each marched in London, Rome and Barcelona, with hundreds of thousands reported in Paris, Berlin and Madrid. Marches were held in every European capital, as well as most major cities in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. (See “The Day the World Said No” for details.)
Protests
at Home In Colorado Springs, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at antiwar demonstrators and hit at least one with a rubber bullet when the rally spilled out of Palmer Park, where police were attempting to contain it. Thirteen were arrested as police re-took Academy Boulevard from the protesters. A second rally at nearby Peterson Air Force Base ended with 21 arrests. The Colorado Coalition Against War in Iraq chose Colorado Springs for the statewide mobilization due to the proximity of numerous high-level military bases.
Protests of several thousand each were also held in Philadelphia, St. Louis, Santa Fe and Missoula, MT. In California, thousands demonstrated in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose and Sacramento. San Francisco’s march was postponed until the 16th, so as not to interfere with the traditional Chinese New Year celebration. It brought out some 200,000, filling 12 blocks from City Hall to the waterfront and rivaling the numbers in New York. One group of San Francisco protesters sang John Lennon’s “Imagine” in Arabic. Significantly, the mobilization coincided with a public terrorism hysteria sparked by the “orange alert” declared by the Bush administration. Duct tape and plastic sheeting were moving quickly from shelves coast to coast following Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge’s warning that citizens should stock up to seal their homes in the event of biological attack. Streets
of New York In the weeks leading up to the event, the antiwar mobilization became a free-speech struggle as Mayor Michael Bloomberg refused to grant the sponsoring antiwar coalition, United for Peace and Justice, a permit to march on the United Nations. UPJ took the city to federal court, demanding the right to march under the First Amendment. But city attorneys argued that the “code orange” terrorist alert made the march a threat to public safety. The city refused a permit to march anywhere in Manhattan, offering instead a legal “stationary rally” at First Avenue and 49th Street, two blocks north of the United Nations. Chris Dunn, a staff attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union that represented the coalition, told reporters the city was using “a theoretical possibility something terrible is going to happen to cancel the right of people to participate in peaceful protest.” On February 10, U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones, citing “heightened security concerns,” ruled for the city. UPJ appealed, and on February 12 the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals again ruled for the city. The hand of federal pressure could be seen behind the city’s intransigence; the Bush administration even filed a brief urging the judges to uphold the denial of the permit, and assistant U.S. attorneys were in the courtroom to back up Bloomberg’s legal team. UPJ’s top organizer Leslie Cagan told this magazine on the eve of the protest, “It’s an outrageous shredding of the constitution, but it will not deter our massive mobilization for the legal and permitted rally at First Avenue and 49th Street.”
But with hundreds of busloads set to converge on the city from throughout the Northeast, it proved too late to deter even a march, despite the official ban. Protesters planned to form “feeder marches” from assembly points around the city and converge from there on the legal rally at 49th Street and First Avenue. A key gathering point was the main branch of the New York Public Library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, where a diverse array of groups came together, including a contingent of military veterans, a Palestinian contingent, a gay contingent, a marching samba band, a traditional Korean drum troupe and the War Resisters League. Other groups forming feeder marches at various Manhattan locations included New York City Labor Against War, representing several union locals, a contingent of anarchist labor dissidents, a Jewish contingent, a contingent from New York’s progressive WBAI Radio, Quaker, Buddhist and Colombian contingents and a Youth Bloc organized by the New York University Peace Coalition. Neighborhoods also launched their own feeder marches. Bronx Action for Justice & Peace gathered in front of Hostos Community College on the Grand Concourse, marched across a bridge into Manhattan and then caught the subway downtown. Upper West Side antiwar groups launched their own contingent that met up with the labor coalition’s feeder march. The Lower East Side contingent joined the Youth Bloc at Union Square. Many thousands of out-of-towners, including Vermont’s famed Bread and Puppet Theater, also formed their own contingents, of course. In what the New York-Long Island daily paper Newsday described as “a strategy of the stockyards applied to people,” police erected a bewildering maze of interlocking metal barricades throughout the streets of Midtown, forcing marchers through bottlenecks and into “pens,” where they were held until police allowed them to proceed. Police blocked egress as well as access through the pens, keeping the marchers temporarily captive. With most streets leading to First Avenue completely closed by police, marchers were forced onto a convoluted route, taking them up Third Avenue as far north as 71st Street. It was almost certainly a small minority of the marchers who ever made it to the official rally. Police also sought to keep the feeder marches confined to the sidewalks. Courts have ruled that protesters have the right to march on the sidewalks as long as they keep moving—but there were far too many to be contained, and at many points they overwhelmed the police through sheer numbers. At several points, the metal barricades were pushed aside to chants of “Whose streets? Our streets!” Third Avenue was taken lane by lane, until it was thick with protesters from sidewalk to sidewalk. When mounted police charged in to clear the avenue, brief scuffles ensued, resulting in several arrests and—according to police—several cops hurt. The National Lawyers Guild estimates that 350 were arrested throughout the day On First Avenue the crowd, penned in by police block by block, extended from the stage two blocks above 49th Street to north of 72nd Street, with two large video screens set up along the way to broadcast the proceedings. Legendary folk singer Richie Havens started off with a rendition of “Freedom,” the song he performed 34 years ago at the Woodstock Festival. Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa officiated over an ecumenical service, calling for “Peace! Peace! Peace!” He continued, “Let America listen to the rest of the world—and the rest of the world is saying, ‘Give the inspectors time.’” Other speakers and performers included singers Harry Belafonte and Pete Seeger, actors Danny Glover and Susan Sarandon and activists Martin Luther King III and Angela Davis. They were joined by representatives from numerous activist groups, including Military Families Speak Out and September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, who decried what Bush seeks to commit in their name. Disturbingly, just before the rally was about to begin, the phones at the UPJ coalition office, in the 42nd Street headquarters of Service Employees International Union Local 1199, mysteriously went dead. They came back up after WBAI announced the problem on the air, and then went down again shortly afterwards. The phone company told UPJ their lines might not be working until Tuesday—by which point they would have moved out of the office. UPJ reported in an e-mail alert that the phone company technician called the phones going down “odd” and said he had never seen another breakdown like it. State of
the Movement In November, UPJ joined the United Kingdom’s Stop the War coalition and other international groups at the European Social Forum in Florence. The worldwide coalition then chose February 15 as the international day of action against the war. Kafouri calls the fruit of that meeting “the largest worldwide antiwar mobilization in the history of civilization.” United for Peace and Justice—”the largest grassroots peace mobilization” in the country, in Kafouri’s term—brings together a wide spectrum of groups, ranging from traditional peace organizations and labor and clergy groups to new and culturally insurgent conglomerations. Representatives of a spectrum of activist sectors also describe a new breadth of opposition to war. Voices for peace in organized labor report a sudden resurgence from coast to coast. Says Michael Letwin of NYC Labor Against War, “I was in the antiwar movement in the Vietnam era, when I was a kid. We never got as far as we have already this time. Unions representing five million workers out of a total organized labor workforce of 15 million workers have taken an explicit antiwar stance. The last time we had this level of antiwar opposition in organized labor in this country, even on paper, must have been in World War I. [United Auto Workers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers] took antiwar positions in the ’60s, but the AFL-CIO was hawkish. This time around it’s an avalanche, comparatively. Even [AFL-CIO president John] Sweeney has written two letters now which expressed concern about the war—with some ambiguity, but on an antiwar theme.” Letwin, a member and former president of New York’s Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, was a key organizer of the labor contingent at the February 15 march, which brought together representatives from Transport Workers Union Local 100, Local 1199 hospital workers, and AFSCME District Council 37 city employees—which all endorsed the march. And Ibrahim Ramey, national disarmament coordinator for the faith-based pacifist organization Fellowship of Reconciliation, reports a mainstreaming of activism in the religious community. Ramey says that FOR—which arranged for Archbishop Tutu to speak in New York on the 15th—is now part of “a broad interfaith coalition against the war.” He went on to specify: “The National Council of Churches and the Catholic Bishops Conference have spoken out against war. National Episcopal, Methodist and Presbyterian leaders have clearly articulated a position challenging the war. The significant Muslim community in the United States is also solidly against the war, and the Islamic community internationally is a very strong and principled force against the war.” Since 1994, one of FOR’s member organizations has been the Muslim Peace Fellowship—like FOR itself, based in Nyack, NY. FOR has also worked with Pax Christi and the Quaker aid organization American Friends Service Committee in what Ramey calls a “faith witness” against the Iraq sanctions, sending water purification units to Baghdad in violation of U.S. law. FOR also coordinates the Iraq Peace Pledge, in which 35,000 have now signed up to work against the war. FOR has also signed on to another pledge drive, the Iraq Pledge of Resistance. (So has the War Resisters League.) The drive’s national coordinator Gordon Clark, formerly director of Peace Action, describes the campaign as an effort to “provide a greater resistance than simply going to rallies or writing a member of Congress.” Pledge of Resistance, based in Silver Spring, MD, was launched last October as a “nationally coordinated but locally organized nonviolent civil disobedience organization.” Since then, it has held some 20 CD actions, resulting in 400 arrests, including 100 December 10, International Human Rights Day, at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. On Martin Luther King Day, four people were arrested at New Hampshire’s New Boston Air Station, braving sub-zero temperatures. The day after the big January 18 antiwar march in Washington, DC, Pledge of Resistance held a smaller march in front of the White House, which is now a restricted area, resulting in 16 arrests. Clark says two protesters, one of them an 83-year-old woman, were hospitalized after being roughed up by police. Regional activists also report a high level of loosely coordinated grassroots antiwar activity across the country. Joanne Sheehan, who chairs the New England office of the War Resisters League in Norwich, CT, says, “There are weekly vigils all over eastern Connecticut. They are happening twice a week in New London; high school students are holding vigils in Norwich; 350 marched in Willimantic on Martin Luther King Day. And that’s just in a small corner of the most sparsely populated area of the state. I hear from other folks around that this kind of thing is happening in other states. And as a nonviolence trainer, I’m getting a lot of calls to help prepare for an action that would happen when Bush calls for war.” Sheehan reports that buses came down to the New York rally from throughout New England, and activists in New Haven even chartered a “peace train” from the Metro North commuter line. But she questions whether traditional protest will ultimately be enough. “We need to be looking at how can we stop the machine from continuing,” she says. “When we talk about the power of nonviolence, we need to ask where is the power?” Bill Sulzman in Colorado Springs works with the WRL local there, Citizens for Peace in Space, which focuses on the high-level military bases in the area. He also reports escalating antiwar activity, even in remote and rural parts of Colorado. “Any city of any size has got people publicly involved in antiwar expression,” he says. “Compared to six months ago it’s night and day. The notion of pre-emptive war is over the top. Even people who tend to support war see it in terms of defending the homeland, and common sense says that’s not what this is about. The economy in this state is really in the dumper, and people wonder why attention isn’t being paid to issues closer to home.” On January 27 in Denver, several protesters were arrested blockading the entrance to the local headquarters of petroleum-and-engineering giant the Halliburton Company, “tying together the oil issue and a prominent member of the administration,” Sulzman says. Twenty were charged with trespass, including three high-school students. Citizens for Peace in Space also works with the local Pikes Peak Justice & Peace Commission, which hosted the statewide mobilization on February 15. Sulzman says Colorado Springs was chosen for the statewide rally instead of the more liberal Denver to highlight the critical role of three local military bases—North American Aerospace Defense (known as NORAD) headquarters at Cheyenne Mountain, the space warfare center at Schriever Air Force Base, and the Space Command headquarters at Peterson AFB, which controls intercontinental ballistic missiles. The 9-11 disaster has proved a demarcation line for activist groups, with many having to re-orient. Some groups that originally came together to protest globalization are now making the transition to an antiwar footing. The Berkeley-based activist support group Ruckus Society, founded in 1995, originally emphasized environmental and global justice work; it is now providing activist training and logistical support in the antiwar effort. Last September 12, when Bush spoke for war at the United Nations, a Ruckus-chartered yacht sailed by on the East River, waving a 1500-square-foot banner reading “Earth to Bush: No Iraq War.” Says Ruckus Society executive director John Sellers, “The preferred name of the anti-globalization movement is the global justice movement. So it’s a natural leap to opposition to an imperial war for fossil resources. There are lots of corporate angles to this war.” Groups such as September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows—made up of some 60 family members of victims of the attacks—have been crucial in challenging the illusion of a pro-war consensus. The group was chosen to lead the February 15 march in New York before the march was banned by city authorities. The group’s co-founder David Potorti, whose oldest brother Jim was in the north tower of the World Trade Center, is especially incensed at the ban. “To be told we cannot protest actions being done in our families’ name because of a supposed terrorist threat is just absurd,” he says. “It is offensive to us as September 11 family members. It’s insulting. This issue really cuts to the core of our freedom.” The group shared the stage February 15 with Military Families Speak Out, made up of families whose kin in the service face imminent deployment to the Persian Gulf. Managing
Factionalism Jason Kafouri of UPJ says the coalition walked a fine line in its handling of International ANSWER, which endorsed the February 15 rally in New York without actually becoming a UPJ member. Jim Haber of WRL West in San Francisco says things played out differently in the Bay Area, where the big march was organized by a “coalition of coalitions” consisting of four major groups: Bay Area UPJ, Not in Our Name, ANSWER, and Bay Area United Against War. The four groups coordinated through a joint steering committee. Haber hailed the solution as a victory over destructive factionalism. “There is a more honest and upfront acknowledgment of philosophical differences than before, but also greater unity,” he says. “ANSWER is acknowledging that they are not the only game in town, and a consensus is emerging that we have to have some kind of united peace movement and not just a bunch of separate groups.” But the effort was not without friction. One of the ground rules in the San Francisco mobilization was that any suggested speaker could be blocked on the grounds that s/he had attacked any of the four member coalitions. Michael Lerner, publisher of the Jewish progressive magazine Tikkun was blocked from speaking at the rally because he had accused ANSWER of anti-Semitism. Lerner refused to accept the coalition’s ruling, and accused it of censoring him. The controversy was picked up by the local press. For some, it brought back bad memories of the movement to oppose the first attack on Iraq in 1991. On the eve of the Gulf War, Workers World’s refusal to condemn Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait resulted in two separate national marches on Washington, just one week apart—one by a WWP-led coalition, the other by a coalition consisting of WRL, FOR, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and other traditional peace and justice groups. Gordon Clark of Iraq Pledge of Resistance sees the question in terms of “peace organizations versus anti-imperialist groups. We are a peace organization; we want to bring about peace and justice on the planet, not defeat any particular empire, even the American. And we believe that you have to use peaceful means to achieve peaceful ends—there has to be a congruency.” But he emphasizes that movement factionalism “is a very, very small issue in the larger scheme.” WRL’s Joanne Sheehan sees this very reality as part of the dilemma. “International Action Center has created a coalition and doesn’t even let the discussion take place,” she says. “The people in the room aren’t going to challenge them on Milosevic. And the people on the outside feel that to do so would detract from the antiwar issue. So it’s a difficult question.” Greg Payton, a Black Vietnam veteran and former WRL board member, remains active in local antiwar activities in Newark, NJ. He warns that the traditional peace groups risk isolating themselves through their own elitism. “These groups are not racist by design, but it’s hard to think outside the box when you have no stimulus other than what you see. The movement has gravitated away from the grassroots initiatives it should be committed to. WRL is a hell of an organization, but it is not involved in community organizations that are confronting violence at the local level. When you organize the protest, none of the groups representing communities of color are involved—but then you expect them to march when the demonstration comes. That’s got to change.” Racial Justice
9-11 In New York City the night of February 10, several SLAM! activists held an overnight sit-in at the office of Hunter College president Jennifer Raab, demanding she take a stand against both war and tuition hikes. And SLAM! was among the groups that brought issues of racial justice to a broader discussion within the February 15 mobilization in New York. Reem Abu-Sbaih, co-chair of the New York-New Jersey chapter of Al-Awda, the Palestine Right of Return Coalition, was at the forefront of that effort—including getting the Palestinian struggle higher on the agenda in New York. “This war is about Iraq, but its also very connected to what’s going on Palestine,” says Abu-Sbaih. “There is more talk that Israel is planning to carry out ‘transfer’ in the fog of war, resulting in another Naqba [‘disaster,’ the Palestinian term for the mass expulsions of 1948]. And Iraq may have violated U.N. resolutions, but what is the country in the Middle East which is also out of compliance with U.N. resolutions, and [which] definitely has the most weapons of mass destruction?” The obvious answer is Israel, and it is becoming less controversial to say so.” NY-NJ Al-Awda is one of the member organizations of Racial Justice 9-11, which led the people of color contingent at the February 15 march and also includes Rock New York, Third World Within, Philippine Forum, Congress for Korean Unification, Sista II Sista, Black Against the War and the American Muslim Alliance. United for Peace & Justice had already agreed in principle to a diverse coalition, but, Abu-Sbaih says, Racial Justice 9-11 approached UPJ as a united front and suggested that speakers at the rally be 50 percent women and 75 percent people of color. “UPJ agreed,” she says. “We also lobbied for a Palestinian speaker and an Arabic cultural show at the rally. UPJ agreed, and Al-Awda endorsed the demo.” The February 15 mobilization was a strikingly hopeful example of globalization-from-below. With networking now planetary, decentralized and lightening-fast thanks to the Internet, worldwide coordinated protests are now possible—just as they are needed more than ever. But the same obstacles of factionalism, elitism and even racism that have held back antiwar organizing in the United States for more than a generation remain. If dire urgency has ever demanded the kind of honesty and courage necessary for the breakthrough to an effective and broad-based antiwar movement, that time is now. Bill Weinberg is a New York-based journalist and the author of Homage to Chiapas (Verso, 2000). Much of this material appeared in different form in his online weekly, World War III Report (www.WW3Report.com). |
WRL Homepage • WRL Programs • WRL Literature • WRL Actions • WRL Employment • About WRL
newly
vigorous global antiwar movement certified its presence February 15 when
millions of protesters in some 600 cities around the world challenged
the Bush administration’s plans for war on Iraq. It was the largest internationally
coordinated day of protest the world has ever seen, with the biggest mobilizations
by far in the European countries whose governments are allied with the
United States. 
