Worldwide
demonstrations against U.S. led Iraq assault
On Saturday, March 15th, two
days prior to the Bush administration’s “ultimatum” to
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, 100,000 people came out in San Francisco
for the “Stop the War Convergence” to display their opposition
to this latest threat of imperialist aggression by the United States.
Although there were very few
African people participating in the mobilization, the International Action
Center organizers chose a march route from the Civic Center through the
Fillmore District and into the Western Addition’s Jefferson Square
Park. These San Francisco neighborhoods represent a few of the last remaining
African communities in the city.
The African community in San
Francisco has faced years of vicious attacks by the police and the city,
as part of the U.S. government’s war on African people.
African students at Thurgood
Marshall High in San Francisco were recently attacked by the police following
an alleged fight between two students. Across the Bay, students at Oakland
High attempting to walk out of the school to oppose the war were locked
inside the high school in violation of their democratic rights and city
fire codes.
Speaking at the Civic Center
rally preceding the march, local African People’s Socialist Party
leader Bakari Olatunji called on the anti-war movement to oppose both
the United States’ war on the peoples of Iraq and the war on African
and other oppressed peoples inside U.S. borders.
Olatunji challenged the predominantly
white crowd to oppose the war on African and Mexican people carried out
under the public policy of police containment and through the California
prison system, known to be the fourth largest prison system in the world.
He cited examples of the San
Francisco Police Department’s notorious brutality. He also reminded
the crowd about the brutality of the Oakland Police Department, which
had to pay out money to the victims of the “Oakland Riders,”
four Oakland cops who beat, harassed and trampled on the rights of oppressed
African people in West Oakland.
Olatunji questioned a peace
movement based on upholding the status quo. He called for a movement based
on social justice and national liberation, representing the leadership
of African and oppressed peoples.
Henry Clark also addressed
the crowd at the Civic Center rally. Clark is an African community organizer
who leads the West Contra Costa County Toxics Coalition. This is an organization
that exposes the role of Chevron and other oil companies in the war on
African people from Richmond, California to Nigeria.
Other speakers included the
Bayan International, speaking on the U.S. war on the peoples of the Philippines,
and a representative of the Leonard Peltier Committee addressing the U.S.
war on the American Indian Movement waged under the U.S. government’s
COINTELPRO program. This is the same program that viciously attacked the
Black Panther Party and was responsible for the military defeat of the
Black Power Movement in the 1960s.
Worldwide protests attempt
to stop new U.S. assault
During the same weekend, massive demonstrations took place across the
globe, representing 2,000 cities in 98 countries according to wire service
reports.
For several weeks, protestors had camped outside the Royal Air Force Base
in Fairford, Gloucestershire where the U.S. recently sent its B-52 bombers
preparing for the attack on Iraq. In Germany, protestors exposed their
government’s complicity with U.S. war efforts by demonstrating at
the U.S. airbase near Frankfurt. A few hundred protesters blocked the
entry of the airbase for several hours.
Hundreds marched in Bucharest,
Romania, calling for the 3,000 to 4,000 U.S. troops stationed at an air
base in the Black Sea port of Constanta to leave.
Turkish protesters carried
anti-U.S. posters as they demonstrated against the deployment of U.S.
troops in Turkey. At the port city of Iskenderun, two dozen activists
chained themselves to the wheels of a truck and blocked a side entrance
of a Turkish port where U.S. forces were unloading military equipment.
Demonstrations in Egypt targeted
the use of the Suez Canal by U.S. warships moving from the Mediterranean
to the Red Sea. In Cairo, around 100 student demonstrators clashed with
police at the American University when they rallied in defiance of an
emergency law that bans street demonstrations.
Nearly half a million people
marched in Milan, Italy against the war and against the Berlusconi government’s
complicity with the Bush administration.
Spain saw more than half a
million people demonstrating in Madrid and 300,000 in Barcelona.
Protests took place in front
of the U.S. embassies in Greece and Nicosia, Cyprus. Thousands of marchers
demanded the closing of Britain’s Royal Air Force base in Akitori,
the largest British air base outside of the UK monitoring the air over
the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. Roughly 300 protestors
climbed to the snow-covered top of Mount Olympus, where military radar
is located, to demand that “the bases of death” be shut down
immediately.
Demonstrators confronted Australian
Prime Minister John Howard as he tried to conduct an election tour in
Adelaide and Sidney. Despite public opinion, Australia has several thousand
military personnel stationed alongside those from the U.S. and the UK
in the Persian Gulf.
In Tokyo, 10,000 people protested the Japanese government’s recent
decision to join the Bush-Blair coalition despite public opposition.
Thousands also demonstrated
in France, Belgium, Denmark, Hungary and the former Soviet Republic of
Kyrgyzstan, where 350 people marched to denounce U.S. use of their country’s
air space for the war against Iraq.
In Patna, India, protesters
chanted, “Vajpayee government, stop being agent of America.”
Major marches and rallies were also held in Hanoi, Viet Nam, in Seoul
and other South Korean cities, as well as in cities in Thailand, Indonesia,
Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Yemen, Guatemala and El Salvador.
Marches and rallies took place
in Auckland, New Zealand; Calcutta, India; Ankara, Turkey; Amman, Jordan;
Beirut, Lebanon; Mexico City, Mexico and in many Palestinian cities and
refugee camps. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, 10,000 rallied in front of
the American embassy. In Canada, thousands took to the streets of Montreal
and Toronto.
Demonstrations intensify
when U.S. led bombing begins
On March 19th, when George W. Bush announced the beginning of the genocidal
assault on the people of Iraq, peoples worldwide presented strong gestures
of dissent and disapproval.
Thousands of people demonstrated
across the United States. In San Francisco, protesters literally shut
down the financial district for the day. Over 1,400 people were arrested
in acts of civil disobedience.
In the Middle East, thousands
of people took to the streets. Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority issued
fierce denunciations of the U.S.-led attacks, while the Egyptian government
daily Al-Ahram declared that the war marked “the beginning of an
era of U.S. colonization that will benefit only Israel.” Syria’s
State radio accused the United States and its allies of wanting to get
their “hands on Iraq’s oil and wealth and impose their hegemony
on the world.”
Hundreds of students gathered
in Beirut, Lebanon calling for the assassinations of U.S. President George
W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
In Yemen, two protesters were killed after a crowd estimated at more than
30,000 attempted to storm the U.S. Embassy.
As the bombing continued, demonstrations
were staged relentlessly the world over with student walk-outs, traffic
stoppages, and protests at U.S. embassies amidst cries of “Bush killer!,”
“Yankee go home” and “Bush Blair — Stop killing the
babies!”
In Occupied Azania (South Africa)
demonstrations were held at the U.S. consulates and embassy in Pretoria,
Cape Town and Durban. The Landless Peoples Movement in Gauteng province
staged a march against the war on Iraq, combined with a protest against
the evictions by the South African government of African people on their
own land.
In Durban, an anti-war protest
held on the University of Natal campus characterized the U.S. war on Iraq
as a war against the international community. The Centre for Civil Society
exposed the subsidiaries of the U.S. company Halliburton’s role in
polluting the desperately poor communities of South Durban Basin. The
subsidiaries, including Engen and Kellogg, Brown and Root, have U.S. contracts
in post-war Iraq.
As of the writing of this article,
the United States is entering the third day of its brutal and murderous
bombardment of Baghdad that it has so grotesquely named its “shock
and awe” campaign.
As the days unfold, the chasm
continues to widen between the increasing militancy and intensity of the
global opposition to the United States’ massacre of the Iraqi people
and the arrogant disregard of the U.S. white ruling class to that opposition.
As African Internationalists,
we understand that this chasm is evidence of the ever-deepening crisis
of an imperialism that is fighting for its last breaths. It is clear that
the United States, Britain and a handful of puppet governments are carrying
out cold-blooded murder and terror against the will of the world’s
peoples.
We stand in solidarity with
the Iraqi people and their resistance to the U.S.’s vicious, bloody
and unfathomable attack on their livelihood as a people and a nation.
Stop the war
on Iraq!
Stop white power
and U.S. imperialism!
Stand with the
national liberation struggles of African, Arab and all oppressed peoples
of the world!
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