Nonviolent protestors caught in the middle

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A no-win situation

Nonviolent protesters get hit from both sides at the WTO conference in
Seattle.
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By L.A. Kauffman (Salon Online Magazine)

Dec. 2, 1999 | SEATTLE -- Tuesday's World Trade Organization riot can be
summed up by the story of Craig Webster, a friend I know from activist
circles in New York. First he was shot with rubber bullets when police
opened fire on peaceful demonstrators at the corner of Sixth Avenue and
Union Street, and he has nasty welts to show for it. Then later in the day,
he was slugged in the jaw by a rioter, while he and some other nonviolent
activists tried to prevent the Niketown store from being looted.

Craig's bad luck encapsulated the experience of nonviolent protesters who
came to Seattle to focus world attention on WTO -- they got upstaged by
violent anarchists and attacked by police, who did nothing until late in
the day to stop the rioting. While peaceful protesters vastly outnumbered
the hooligans, there were 300 to 400 hardcore anarchists intent on clashing
with police, most with scarves over their faces, some carrying hammers,
crowbars and spray paint in their bags.

On Wednesday, police arrested more than 300 people, most of them
non-violent demonstrators, in a change of tactics designed to clear the
streets for President Clinton's visit. Wednesday night, police used tear
gas again, to disperse a crowd that began to gather downtown.

But on Tuesday, police allowed the so-called revolutionaries bent on
violence to gain the upper hand. Early Tuesday morning, a few blocks away
from the nonviolent blockade, small roving groups of violent protesters
began tossing newspaper boxes into an intersection, dragging trash bins
into the street and trying -- without success at that point -- to smash the
windows of downtown stores.

The police pretty much let them do as they pleased. One squad of about a
dozen officers in riot gear briefly marched into the crowd at the
intersection of Fourth Avenue and Pike Street, but retreated almost
immediately, when it became clear that the protesters wouldn't disperse. A
little after 9 a.m., I saw two cops grab a demonstrator who was tipping
over a trash bin on Pike Street. But they didn't hold him for long: 20 of
the rioters rushed the police and brawled with them until they got their
comrade free.

But later, I watched as thousands of people blocked the western entrance to
the convention center and marveled at their defiant yet peaceful demeanor.
Linked arm-in-arm in a huge perimeter around the meeting site, or sitting
cross-legged in key intersections, the protesters were achieving their goal
of preventing the trade body's meeting, and in a spirit of complete
nonviolence. Soon, with no provocation, they were pepper-sprayed by police.

It was no secret -- not to me, and certainly not to the Seattle police --
that this conference would be met with violence in the streets. Rioting had
broken out at a "Reclaim the Streets" protest in Eugene, Ore., in June, and
in the intervening five months, anarchist militants had been circulating
apocalyptic manifestos promising more fights to come. A pre-WTO article in
a Eugene 'zine called the Black-Clad Messenger warned, "Tilting at the
excesses of the system never gets down to the rotten, death-culture
foundations of the system ... Anarchy says it is time to face reality and
destroy the global (and local) machine. Phony half-measures and
pseudo-critiques and submissive demos are no advance at all. SEE YOU IN
SEATTLE!"

And indeed, in Seattle, at a huge public meeting of people planning to
blockade the convention center, a young woman announced that 100 gas masks
had been ordered in preparation for Tuesday's protest and were available at
cost. (Tuesday, Seattle Mayor Paul Schell banned possession or use of gas
masks.)

But the police took no action to contain the mayhem that was obviously on
the agenda. Instead, they let the rioters run wild while assaulting
peaceful protesters with pepper spray, tear gas and rubber bullets. I was
at the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Union Street when the pepper
spraying began, and neither I nor three other witnesses I interviewed saw
any kind of provocation from the demonstrators. I've been told that some in
the crowd started throwing sticks at the police after the gassing started,
but I didn't see it. My eyes were burning so badly I couldn't keep them open.

The police could have used a different method to clear the area, by simply
arresting all of the blockaders. That's what most protesters expected to
happen, and they had undergone extensive training by the nonviolent Direct
Action Network to prepare themselves for jail.

But mass arrests of peaceful protesters are time-consuming and expensive,
and often bad for public relations. Gassing a crowd is a quick and
uncomplicated way to make it disperse. Of course, it's a controversial
method, but not if the police and media make it seem like a response to
rioting.

The splits on the streets in Seattle mirror divisions in direct action
groups throughout the Northwest

In Seattle, some activists from Humboldt County, Calif. -- mostly young,
many women -- engaged in what's called a "lock-down action," in which
protesters use bicycle locks or other devices to create a human blockade.
Lock-downs have been widely used by direct action movements throughout the
1990s, especially by Earth First and animal-rights groups. The devices
allow protesters to hold a space -- an intersection, a logging road, an
opponent's office -- for much longer than they otherwise could, because it
takes considerable time and effort to cut them apart.

Two years ago in Humboldt County, police developed a new way of handling
lock-downs: pepper spray. In the most widely publicized incident, four
Earth First activists who were blockading Rep. Frank Riggs' office in
Eureka had pepper spray applied directly to their eyes with cotton swabs.

At Tuesday's WTO protest, 20 demonstrators from Humboldt County used lock
boxes to link themselves in a circle. As supporters gathered around them,
you could see thick clouds of tear gas at the next intersection down the
hill, where police were dispersing a crowd. Calls went up for vinegar and
rags to cover the faces of the blockaders, who calmly sat and waited.

An hour or so later, the police arrived and asked the blockaders to leave.
When they refused, cops went around the circle, pepper-spraying the
activists in the face. They didn't unlock. The police sprayed again. Still
the blockaders stayed firm. After two more attempts, the police finally
gave up, ceding the intersection to the protesters.

Obviously it takes extraordinary endurance and dedication to take that kind
of punishment, and it's not clear that the gains exceed the costs. In
Humboldt County, Earth First has been moving away from lock-downs and
toward traditional Gandhi-style civil disobedience: sit-ins, human chains
and the like.

But in the Eugene area, the advent of pepper spray has had a radicalizing
effect. For about a year, activists have been questioning and abandoning
nonviolence. I think the property-destroying tactics used on Tuesday were
stupid and ineffective. It's not just testosterone-charged yahoos who are
rejecting nonviolent styles of protest, some are seasoned activists who
have several years of direct-action campaigning under their belts.

Among them are two young women I've had contact with in the past. I met one
in connection with the direct-action campaign to preserve New York's
community gardens, which I worked on for two years. I met the other at an
Earth First forest encampment while doing research for a book. I didn't see
either of them on Tuesday, but I thought about a manifesto that one passed
on to me last week.

It read, "Let's not train the thousands of people who gather in Seattle to
do no more than be herded by the police, hold signs and offer themselves up
as sacrificial lock-down lambs. I'm not advocating a riot. The ground
between violence and pacifism is wide, much larger than the ivory tower of
either. Meet me there."

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About the writer L.A. Kauffman is completing a history of American
radicalism since the 1960s.


Louis Proyect

(The Marxism mailing list: http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)