IRAQ: Occupation Is Not Liberation, Protesters Say

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Katherine Stapp

WASHINGTON, Oct 26 2003 (IPS) - The U.S. capital saw its first massive protest since the George W. Bush administration declared victory in Iraq, as 50,000 people marched to the White House and Justice Department on Saturday to call for withdrawal of the 130,000 U.S. troops stationed in the Middle Eastern nation.

"It’s a tremendous turnout," said Larry Holmes of ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), which organised the march with United For Peace and Justice. "This is confirmation that the anti-war movement is alive and well, and that Bush and the war-makers are in trouble."

More than 20,000 people also marched in San Francisco, according to organisers, and thousands turned out for smaller rallies in dozens of U.S. cities. An anti-war protest in Seoul, South Korea resulted in the arrests of 15 student activists.

Bush spent the weekend at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland. His recent trip to Australia was marked by street protests there, and two Green Party legislators were ejected from Parliament after heckling the U.S. president during a speech on Thursday.

In Washington, the dozens of speakers included civil rights leader and presidential candidate Reverend Al Sharpton, who slammed the expensive military operations and reconstruction package just approved by the U.S. Congress.

Opponents fear that much of the money will be squandered on lucrative sweetheart contracts to companies like Halliburton, of which Vice President Dick Cheney is a former top executive.

Marchers also lambasted the administration’s failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, carrying signs that read "Bush Lied, Thousands Died", "No War For Empire" and "Occupation is no Liberation". No arrests were reported.

Larry Syverson came to Washington from Richmond, Virginia, where he protests three times a week in front of the federal courthouse with a placard bearing photographs of his two sons – Branden, stationed with the Fourth Infantry Division in Tikrit, Iraq and Bryce, a gunner with the Bradley First Armoured Division in Baghdad. They will be deployed there for at least another year, he says.

"At first, people were very friendly to them, offering food, juice, homemade bread," Syverson said. "Now children throw rocks at them. From their letters, I’ve seen a real deterioration in the relationship between the populace and the troops."

His impressions are borne out by a poll released Thursday by the independent Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies in Baghdad, which found that 43 percent of Iraqis viewed the U.S. forces as liberators six months ago but only 14.8 percent feel the same way now.

Lawlessness remains a major problem in the Iraqi capital. Citing statistics from the Baghdad city morgue, a British group called Iraq Body Count has tallied 2,846 violent deaths of Iraqi civilians from Apr. 14 to Aug. 31 of this year. Human Rights Watch says the occupying authority has failed to properly investigate many of these cases.

Resistance to the occupation appears to be unrelenting. The Defence Department has so far confirmed 345 U.S. soldiers have died since the start of the war in April.

"Every day, the news talks about another soldier killed," Syverson said. "I’m afraid people will start to grow complacent. I’m here to put a face on these soldiers. I hope people will think twice about why we’re there.

"It took 50,000 dead before we pulled out of Vietnam," he added. "We don’t need to wait until we’re at 50,000. One is too much."

Michael McPhearson, a member of Veterans for Peace who served in the first Gulf War, angrily criticised the administration for exaggerating intelligence on Iraq’s military capabilities.

"The armed forces have our full support," McPhearson told the crowd. "But today I say to George Bush that ‘your administration has misled our nation’. We were told that Iraq was a threat to national security, but Iraq is not al-Qaeda, and Saddam Hussein is not Osama bin Laden."

These distinctions seemed lost on many U.S. citizens, with 70 percent saying they thought Saddam was directly involved in the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon. That poll was conducted in September.

As Bush’s approval ratings slip, this perception seems to be shifting. A ‘Newsweek’ poll released Saturday found that 42 percent of respondents now believe the administration "purposely misled the public about evidence that Iraq had banned weapons in order to build support for war".

The Washington march also fell on the second anniversary of the passage of the USA Patriot Act, which greatly expanded the government’s domestic spying powers and, rights activists say, created a discriminatory system of religious and racial profiling.

"America’s immigration policy is misguided," said Samar Shams of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, citing secret trials, the imprisonment of people indefinitely without charge or conviction, and the forced registration of more than 100,000 people from a list of mostly Arab or Muslim countries.

"If you think this doesn’t affect Americans you are misguided," she told the crowd gathered in front of the Washington Monument. "For what have we risked our very constitution? These measures are not counter-terrorism, they’re counterproductive."

According to Hallie Joyce, from Pensacola, Florida, the site of a huge naval air base, "I know right from wrong, and this is just wrong – even evil," she said.

"There are a lot of people in my hometown who are against the war and occupation, but we feel like we’ve been silenced. It’s fundamentalism versus fundamentalism."

Many labour and religious groups were in attendance Saturday. Terri Compton came from Brooklyn, New York on a bus sponsored by her union, District Council 1707.

"How dare Dick Cheney say there have to be a few casualties," she said. There’s so much poverty here in this country, people don’t have enough to eat, they can’t find a place to live."

While bringing the troops home was the major theme of the rally, speakers also called for more domestic spending on healthcare, education and job creation.

"People have to have reasonable expectations," cautioned Bob Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of the book ‘Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream’.

"We’re not going to end the war tomorrow," he noted in a telephone interview. "But there is a growing visceral disgust with this administration. The question now is how we can channel people’s energy into productive activities to make change."

Sam Husseini of the Institute for Public Accuracy agreed. "A central question is whether the peace movement’s sole function is to get Bush out, or crucially, whether it will evolve into an anti-empire movement that is global in perspective," he said.