Boston City Councilor and Anarchist Youth Lead Unpermitted March--Four Unprovoked Arrest

Thousands Rally on Boston Common Against the Occupation of Iraq--Boston City Councilor and Anarchist Youth Lead Unpermitted March--Four Unprovoked Arrests
by Matthew Williams

Like many others across the world, on March 20--a global day of action--thousands of Bostonians gathered on the Boston Common to protest the continuing US occupation of Iraq in a rally organized by Boston Mobilization. The crowd size was large enough to make it difficult to estimate, with figures running between two and five thousand. Local activists, veterans of the invasion and occupation of Iraq and those with loved ones in the military spoke out powerfully against the war, mixed with a multicultural cast of musicians. The plan had been to close the rally with direct action, blockading the entrance to a near-by military recruiting station. In response, the military recruiting station simply shut down for the rest of the day. Instead, the final speaker, Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner, urged everyone still at the rally (a couple hundred people--the rally ran far over time) to join an unpermitted march originally planned by a group of young anarchists. The march snaked through the streets of downtown Boston before returning to Boston Common. There, some of the police began unprovoked attacks on activists, shoving people to the ground and arresting four. A stand-off ensued, with the police eventually pulling back. Plans are underway, with the support of Turner and Boston Mobilization, to support those arrested in court. The day’s actions managed to at least temporarily unite members of Boston progressive community across some of the racial, ideological and generational lines that often divide them.

I got to the Common around 12:30, a half-hour before the rally was scheduled to happen, to see what was going on with the group of young anarchists who had called for an unpermitted march at 12:30. One of them, Cameron Pond, explained, why they were not planning to go the large rally: “I would rather take to the streets. People won’t take us as seriously if we don’t take direct action. We can’t keep waiting for the right moment--nothing will happen. The right moment is now. We have to forcibly take our victory, by being out there and being loud.” He also, however, expressed a wish for greater unity among the various factions of the left: “Personally, I would rather have the rally and the march combined. The liberal and radical half of America hasn’t been able to oust Bush because we’re so divided. The conservatives have unity in their bloc, while we have disunity on the liberal side.”

As it turned out, Cameron got his wish. Seeing that there were only a dozen or so of them and learning that direct action against the recruiting station was planned after the rally, they joined the main rally, hoping to get people there to join their march afterward. One of the MCs announced the unpermitted march saying, “Boston Mobilization does not endorse this march, but we don’t want to stop anyone who wants to take part either.” This was the first of several refreshing changes from the divisions among various progressive groups one so often sees.

Boston Mobilization (http://www.bostonmobilization.org/ ), a local student-organizing group, did a good job in pulling together a diverse range of rally participants, speakers, and performers. Although many of the people at the rally were the usual older, white activists I generally see at such actions, there was also a strong turn out among young people and people of color, reflecting the diversity of Boston. A number of politically oriented musicians and spoken word performers did acts between speakers. They reflected a diversity of genres including punk, heavy metal, reggae and a lot of hip-hop. In addition to anti-war songs, they also spoke out on other issues such as poverty and sexism.

There were also two small groups of counter-protesters, at most a half-dozen each. One group consisted of young Republicans, another of young, openly avowed fascists, dressed up like jack-booted thugs. They generally remained at the margins of the rally.

A few of the early speakers were sort of off key, members of sectarian groups calling for Communist revolution. I’m not so much critiquing them for their ideas (though I don’t agree with those either), as their attempts to convey complex ideas to people through simple slogans. I had the sense that they simply lost much of the crowd with their simplistic, militant rhetoric.

Most of the speakers were strong though. The first speaker was Shalom Keller, a twenty-three year-old veteran who spent six months in Afghanistan and a year in Iraq, participating in the initial invasion. What he saw and experienced turned him against the war. Anguish and rage in his voice, he recalled how, during the invasion of Iraq, “I saw a four year old girl begging for food. I was told not give her any bread, because others would come after us to feed her. Well, it’s two years later and no one’s come to feed her yet!” He also said, “People I know personally are dead!” naming those in his unit who have died in this senseless war. Finally, he decried those in the military who have justified the war on Christian fundamentalist grounds as a crusade for Christ. Removing his hat to reveal a yarmulke, Keller shouted, “Do I look like I’m fighting a crusade for Christ here?! I’m kind of Jewish.”

Rose Gonzalez, of Military Families Speak Out (http://www.mfso.org/ ), told the gathered crowd about her mother: “Like many others, she joined the National Guard, thinking that they would help her by paying for an education and a mortgage for a house. Currently, at forty-seven years old, she is deployed in Iraq--deployed long after he have found no weapons of mass destruction, long after it’s been proved there is no connection between bin Laden and Hussein, long after Hussein has been captured, long after we were promised the war would be over. Why is she still there?” She also spoke of the importance of groups like Military Families Speak Out, a national network of over 2,000 families with loved ones serving in Iraq: “I thought I was alone in being someone with a loved one in the military and vehemently opposing the war, before I found Military Families Speak Out. We are an organization with a very simple message: Bring Them Home Now!”

Near the Bandstand was a wall with the names of photos of US soldiers who have died in Iraq, reinforcing the speakers’ message about the war’s grim toll. According to the Department of Defense’s website, 1,509 American soldiers have died in the invasion and occupation of Iraq and 5,871 have been seriously wounded.

Others besides the veteran Keller spoke about the devastation being visited on Iraqi civilians. According to a conservative estimate published, after extensive peer review, in the highly prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the invasion and occupation on Iraq--numbers that do not even account for the devastation wrought on the city of Fallujah, which was excluded from the study. Layla Hijab, a Palestinian activist living in Boston with family in Iraq as well as Palestine, spoke of what it is like to live under occupation. She spoke of the policy of collective punishment, where entire communities are punished for the actions of individuals; of doors broken down and people arrested without warrants and held without charges; of checkpoints making it impossible to get from one town to the next; and civilians killed in cold blood. She said, “The suffering is the same in both Palestine and Iraq and it is deep. The situation in Iraq is similar to Palestine because there are Israeli advisers telling the Americans what to do.” Hijab’s charges about American actions in Iraq have been documented by such groups as Iraq Occupation Watch (http://www.occupationwatch.org ).

The focus of the speeches was not simply on the grim realities of war. Others spoke of the efforts under way to force the US government to withdraw from Iraq. Among the most important of these efforts is counter-recruitment, the effort to expose the realities of military life to the young people the military targets and to kick military recruiters off high school and college campuses. The thinking behind the strategy is that if the military, which is already seeing falling recruitment levels, cannot get people to join, simple shortages of personnel will force the US government to withdraw from Iraq. Kai, a student at Northeastern University and a member of the Campus Anti-War Network (http://www.campusantiwar.net/), a national group, put it bluntly: “Anti-recruitment is very simple--it breaks the military at the ankles.”

Bill Sweet, a member of the American Friends Service Committee, who also does counter-recruitment work, noted the disturbing trend in which the military is increasingly focusing on trying to recruit high school students. He explained that counter-recruitment efforts “are based on providing information on alternative scholarship and work programs available for students. We also explain to students about things like the effects of being exposed to depleted uranium [a radioactive substance used to tip American missiles], being used as guinea pigs for experimental drugs, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and the high rates of sexual harassment and rape suffered by women in the military.” Many of the things Sweet mentioned have been documented by the group Citizen Soldier (http://www.citizen-soldier.org/ ), an advocacy group defending conscientious objectors and GI’s rights in general. Sweet noted that their efforts at counter-recruitment have lately been frustrated by the government, which is--even after the AFSC submitted requests under the Freedom of Information Act--refusing to tell counter-recruiters when and where the military will be engaging in recruitment efforts. The AFSC is currently suing the government to get it to release this information.

Renowned radical historian Howard Zinn put the current peace movement’s efforts in historical perspective, while lambasting the Bush administration’s claims that this is a war for democracy: “When Vietnam Veterans Against the War was formed, that was an important turning point in the struggle against the Vietnam War. Now that veterans are returning and speaking out against the Iraq War, more and more people are seeing the truth. Bush has stolen the wealth of this country and put into the war. Bush has said that the soldiers are fighting for liberty. That is not true. They are fighting for Bush, for Cheney, for Halliburton, and for Bechtel--and they are not worth dying for. You don’t bring liberty to a country with napalm and cluster bombs. You don’t bring democracy by breaking into houses and terrorizing civilians. Bush has said this is a war on terrorism. War is terrorism.”

The final speaker, City Councilor Turner, a respected, long-time civil rights activist and community organizer, highlighted the connection between poverty and war: “Our government is not acting in the interests of our people. It’s not just what’s happening overseas. It’s taking place in our communities as well. They’re taking money and giving it to the military-industrial-prison complex to protect American business, while cutting social services at home.”

Turner also showed that he had lost none of his taste for confrontational action simply because he has been elected to public office. Several times in his speech, he urged people to join the unpermitted march after the rally. Unfortunately, the rally had stretched well beyond its schedule end time of 3:00 to 4:20, so only a few hundred people remained. Most of these people proceeded to follow Turner on the march, resulting in much higher numbers than the anarchist youth (who followed shortly after Turner) could have gotten on their own. Indeed, this was my own reaction--thinking the unpermitted march would be small, I had not been planning to take part; when I and some other Indy Media reporters realized that Turner really was serious about taking part in the march, our reaction was, “Hell, if he’s going, so am I.” The gathering stopped briefly in front of the military recruiting center to celebrate the fact that it had shut down for the day in anticipation of the direct action, while an activist marching band played. Turner and the anarchists then proceeded to lead the group on a march through downtown Boston, snaking along various streets, including through the shopping district of Downtown Crossing, where hundred of people saw and heard the anti-war banners and chants. Some people simply looked on in puzzlement, a few flipped us off, while others made V-signs or honked in support (including a few folks trapped in the traffic by the march). Although at times, it looked as if Turner and some of the young anarchists wanted to take the march in different directions, it was nonetheless refreshing to see such a disparate group of progressive activists--in terms of race, generation and political beliefs--working together in a fairly militant action.

The original plan had been for the march to go from the Common to Harvard Square. Police blocked the way, eventually directing the crowd back to the Common. At first, the police seemed like they were nonetheless going to be relatively mellow, simply stopping traffic and steering the march by parking their motorcycles in various intersections. The police presence became increasingly heavy though, with police in paramilitary uniforms and giant batons appearing and walking alongside the march, with legal observers trailing them in turn. When the march returned to the Common at 4:45, there were paddy wagons parked there and the police were evidently trying to stop the march from further movement with their motorcycles. According to numerous witnesses, some of the cops than flipped out as some of the marchers tried to move forward, shoving numerous people to the ground (including two senior citizens) and arresting four people (including an Indy Media writer), in some cases violently piling on top of them, all without provocation. That it was the police that were out of line is clear in light of the fact of the behavior of the other cops, who sent some of the responsible officers away to cool off. A tense stand-off between the protesters and the police followed. It became clear exactly how unpopular the police already were with the predominantly student crowd, as people called out things, “You killed our classmate Victoria Snelgrove,” referring to a Emerson College student killed by riot police using “non-lethal” weapons as she peacefully celebrated the victory of the Red Sox in the World Series. (See Indy Media coverage at http://boston.indymedia.org/feature/display/29666/index.php , http://boston.indymedia.org/feature/display/30254/index.php and http://boston.indymedia.org/feature/display/33294/index.php .)

Turner worked to de-escalate the situation, using his standing as a City Councilor to negotiate with the police, while telling the other protesters over a bullhorn, “Your anger is justified, but the best way to support the arrested people is not for more of you to get arrested. The best way to support them is to appear in court tomorrow and help them with their legal defense.” The stand-off continued for a while. At 5:00, about thirty of the anarchists and other young protesters further de-escalated the situation by sitting down on the ground, adopting a less confrontational pose but also refusing to back down by going away. They sang the classic civil rights song, “We Shall Overcome” and “Give Peace a Chance,” effectively changing the atmosphere. Eventually, the police, realizing that their continued presence would only be a provocation, backed down and moved away from the protesters. Turner announced this victory to the other activists and reiterated the need to appear in court the next day. An organizer from Boston Mobilization also stressed the need for solidarity across their differences in beliefs and organizing tactics. A hat was passed around for bail for the four arrested activists. People gradually dispersed into smaller groups to talk, while some went to the fountain and held a drum circle. Despite some tensions between the various groups involved in the protest, it was great to see such different people as Chuck Turner and the anarchist youth working together. Hopefully, we can build on this not only to get any charges against the arrestees dismissed, but to build a stronger activist scene in Boston.

http://boston.indymedia.org/feature/display/34037/index.php