By Nicole Haley
Hundreds of thousands of antiwar protestors claimed the streets of New York City Saturday to add their voices to the weekend’s worldwide chorus of dissent against the impending war with Iraq.
A sea of voices chanted, “One, two, three, four; we don’t want your racist war! Five, six, seven, eight; we will not cooperate!”
More than 40 Northeastern students were among the crowd of Bostonians who filled 30 buses in Boston Common in the frigid cold before the sun came out on Saturday morning. One of those students was not able to return that night.
Matt Boucher, a middler history major, was arrested within the first 15 minutes of the demonstration. After leading several antiwar chants with a bullhorn as a small crowd waited for police to allow them to cross the street, Boucher led the people in chanting, “This is not a police state. We have the right to demonstrate.”
Within seconds, police broke through the crowd and took Boucher away in plastic riot handcuffs. He was charged with the illegal operation of a bullhorn without a permit.
Boucher is a member of the two groups that organized Northeastern student participation in the protest: Northeastern University Campus Against War and Racism (NUCAWR) and the International Socialist Organization (ISO). Boucher said he was held in a police van for the duration of the protest — about six hours — before being taken to central processing where he and about 100 arrested protestors spent several hours waiting in jail cells.
Boucher criticized the way the police handled the protestors and compared the mass arrests to a far more tolerant and less aggressive police presence in last month’s Washington D.C. protest. Boucher remained confident of the protest’s success despite what he described as the “police tactics to try and intimidate us.”
Calling this weekend the largest internationally organized protest in history with more than 10 million people demonstrating against the war around the world, Boucher said of the New York City demonstration, “This was bigger than any protest during Vietnam, and this is before the war has even started.”
After participating in an impromptu poetry slam with his cellmates and a discussion of the role of police in society, Boucher was among the first to be released at 12:30 a.m. He has a court date on March 10 when the group will be tried together and he feels the charges will most likely be dropped.
The protest, organized by the antiwar group United for Peace and Justice, was denied a permit to march past the United Nations building and instead granted a stationary rally for about 10,000 with the excess of the crowd fenced off down First Avenue.
New York City Police, who were expecting around 100,000 protestors, were forced to put up barricades and reroute the different feeder marches, including students and labor unions, that were supposed to take different routes and meet at the main rally. For this reason, the Northeastern crowd didn’t make it to First Avenue and 51st Street where a stage was set up for the main rally.
Crowd size estimates range from the police guess of 100,000 to the protest organizers’ speculations of 500,000.
Northeastern student Joe Knott, a middler music major and a member of NUCAWR and president of Northeastern’s ISO chapter, feels that it is important for students to take a special interest in the antiwar movement.
“The money being spent on this war is coming out of social services and one of those is education budgets,” Knott said. “At Northeastern in particular, where tuition is going up every year, we need more state subsidized grants and scholarships that could make more opportunities for people, and yet those opportunities are being shredded.”
Knott said that today’s student ability to organize comes with an obligation to do so. He said that NUCAWR is interested in helping students do this and is organizing a teach-in with professors and students called “The Case Against War” to increase discussion and awareness about the war on campus.
“We want to give people the confidence to speak up. People are starting to question what this war is about and we want to give room and space for people to voice their concerns,” Knott said.
The protestors represented a segment of public opinion that distrusts the motives of a United States attack on Iraq. One protestor’s sign read, “How many lives per gallon?” Many protestors sported t-shirts with the popular slogan: “No blood for oil.”
One man met the eyes of police officers adorned with riot gear and lining the sidewalk to say, “I fought for you in Vietnam.” Another war veteran in a motorized chair held a sign that proclaimed “I am a World War II veteran against this war.”
There was a small presence of those for the war that stood on the sidelines to offer their views to protestors. One man held a sign near the sound system that broadcasted the rally on First Avenue that read “Lenin’s ‘Stupid Idiots’.”
Another man waved an American flag and held a sign that proclaimed, “Support U.S. Policy.” These voices were far and few between and did not seem to get actively involved in the day’s activity.
As New Yorkers in shop windows and on sidewalks exchanged peace signs with the protestors, the people yelled chants of solidarity such as, “The people united will never be defeated” and “The people united will stop the war.”
Ida Martenack, a finance campaign worker for United for Peace and Justice, handed out buttons and collected donations for the group’s antiwar efforts. Martenack was confident in the protest’s ability to bring attention to the rising movement.
“Public opinion has obviously already been swayed, it’s just a matter of getting the guys that matter to listen to us,” Martenack said. “And this is global; it’s so big that they can not stay indifferent.”
Many of the protestors clamored not just for a stop to a possible war in Iraq but also to lift the U.S. imposed sanctions that they point to as the cause for poverty and suffering of the Iraqi people.
“The number one thing that Bush needs to do now is to drop the sanction in Iraq which are in themselves an act of war because they’ve killed over a million Iraqis since the end of the last Gulf War,” Knott said. “The sanctions have been the number one barrier to the self-determination of the people in Iraq for the past ten years.”
Citing a United Nations estimate that the war could kill 500,000 people in Iraq, Boucher said that this war would be devastating in terms of “bringing suffering to an already suffering people”.
Despite a terror level heightened to orange and recent threats of more attacks, particularly in New York City, the demonstrators were not deterred. Many of the protestors expressed feelings that the terror alert was mostly hype and that the hysteria concerning heightened security in the city was meant to distract the antiwar movement.
A member of the ISO and student at UMass Boston, Mitch Lewis said that the code orange alert and talk of attacks in New York was an attempt by the government to “terrorize people into line.”
“They were trying to stop a very confident antiwar movement from stopping Bush’s plans to go to war in the Middle East for oil,” Lewis said.
Dafni Ioannou, Northeastern student and ISO member, said that the large turnout at the protest attests to a global dissent of Bush’s war policy.
“There’s only a few people that would benefit from the war, and it’s not the Iraqi people,” Ioannou said. “It’s Bush and his royal buddies.”
Elliott McGann, a sophomore political science major and treasurer of NUCAWR, felt the weekend of protest will have an impact but was doubtful about whether or not the war will actually be prevented, noting that Bush already has 150,000 troops stationed there and isn’t likely to retreat without invading.
“I think the problem is it puts Bush into a corner. He’s going to have to invade without the support of the American people or Europe,” McGann said.
If war does ensue, NUCAWR will be organizing an emergency protest against the war as soon as it starts. Knott said members would be in Krentzman Quadrangle the day after at noon trying to promote and draw people into the movement.
