OT-MARTIAL LAW DELCARED IN SEATTLE-CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO ASSEMBLE BANNED IN DOWNTOWN SEATTLE

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http://www.seattle-pi.com/dayart/19991201/noprotzone.gif

NO PROTEST ZONE

http://www.seattle-pi.com/dayart/19991201/curfewmap.gif

CURFEW ZONE

-- I Never (inevercheckmy@onebox.com), December 02, 1999

Answers

The PI mispoke - it is not a No Protest Zone, it's a "keep of the streets, and on the sidewalk, and don't block traffic and business and WTO meetings zone." Wanna bet that much of this is caused by that person in the White House being in our fair city (which a number of out of town vandals damaged yesterday and today).

-- james (jpeet@u.washington.edu), December 02, 1999.

I agree. Peaceful protesting is one thing but when people take advantage of a situation and start trashing the city and looting, that's over the line! Most of the ones creating the problems didn't have a clue what WTO was all about. They were merely opportunists out for some violen

-- Carol (ski@aol.com), December 02, 1999.

Watch the demonstrators on TV. Did you notice any of them doing anything violent? Did you see any kicking and screaming? The gov't probably started the violence just to test out their riot control before y2k.

-- Sky Marshall (clark@charm.net), December 02, 1999.

Anyone remotely familiar with the environmental movement will recognise Bill McKibben's name. Here's his report from Seattle.

http://www.gristmagazine.com/grist/maindish/mckibben113099.stm

Cutting Globalization Down to Size

Protestors make themselves heard in Seattle

by Bill McKibben, TomPaine.com 11.30.99 (fair use)

SEATTLE, Wash. The metaphor is irresistible. Between 8 and 10 this morning in downtown Seattle, the protesters owned the streets. Later in the day, they vied with police, back and forth; but as the day began the cops were back inside their perimeters, and the few thousand drumming, singing demonstrators were firmly in control. And so, as delegates began to arrive for the opening session of the WTO summit, they found the usual order of things completely reversed.

These people -- elites from almost every nation on the planet -- couldn't get through the cordon of linked-arm demonstrators blocking every intersection and entrance. When they tried, they were politely refused: "The WTO is closed today." A platinum card didn't help, nor an official title, nor the self-assured manner of those born to power. People beating on drums, people dressed like butterflies, simply turned them away.

The delegates huddled in small knots along the street, easy to pick out by their clothes: They were the ones in suits, ties, dresses, not the ones in ponchos, war paint, bandanas. They couldn't get where they were going, they couldn't do their work, and they couldn't quite believe it. A few of them panicked. "Protect us at once," a man demanded of a police officer at the edge of the crowd, and indeed he was hustled away in a police car. But most of them just stood, bewildered or bemused, and eventually drifted away.

They'll be back tomorrow, of course, and they'll eventually have their meeting. However, and it's a big however, the era when global trade decisions get made without anyone noticing is officially over. That's the metaphor this day provides: In just the same way that activists managed to shut down the work of this summit, so too activists around the globe are learning to use the Internet and many other tools to slow down and confuse the rush to globalization.

Late last week, American agricultural organizations warned U.S. farmers not to plant genetically modified crops next spring, for fear they'd have no markets; they have no markets because the very same people who were marching through Seattle today have managed to convince most Europeans to demand actual food. It's a different world. At least a little different, anyway.

At 10 a.m., the regular order tried to reassert its authority. The police had grown tired of people blocking the intersection of Union and 6th. And so they converged from two sides. From behind, looking Vaderish in black ponchos and gas masks, they shot tear gas and rubber bullets. From in front, looking storm trooperish in riot visors and full body armors, they wielded batons. People retreated before the charge -- one of the few uses of serious force against unarmed, peaceful civil disobedients in recent American history.

A small tank rolled in to claim the corner. But the police were left with an intersection and not much more. Delegates couldn't make it through the clouds of pepper spray which lingered in the air, burning eyes and filling lungs. And before long the protestors were back, this time with arms chained through PVC pipe. And that was just one intersection; there were half a dozen other corners where the same kind of battle was underway.

A few bands of balaclava-clad anarchists did circulate up and down the street, causing mild mayhem: broken windows here and there. But most of the crowd was peaceful, brave, and remarkably upbeat even after the police charges. There was little anger, and little fear -- and a wave of good feeling when word began to spread that indeed the few delegates who had gotten through to the convention center were packing up and going home for the day.

Posters and t-shirts celebrated a hundred related causes: The redwood groves of northern California, the people of Tibet, the sea turtles whose slaughter the WTO had officially condoned, the Zapatista rebels of Chiapas, the Industrial Workers of the World. "Eat Local Organic Food," "Stop Nigerian Genocide," "Visualize a World Full of Soul-Sucking Parasites," and best of all, "Wake Up, Muggles!"

Easy enough to dismiss them as a disparate group of unlikely campaigns, but easier still to see how they fit together -- to sense a celebration of the local, the particular, the magic, the democratic, here in the shadow of a giant Niketown, a glass headquarters for sweatshop wages and homogenized taste. As corporations and bureaucracies get bigger, they simultaneously get more powerful and more vulnerable. That's the gut feeling I'll take home from the pepper-sprayed streets of Seattle. Here's a way to understand what I mean: Ask yourself what city is going to volunteer to host the next meeting of the WTO.

I talked to a delegate from Jamaica early this morning, in the hours when the police had vanished, leaving them alone to face the demonstrators. He was on the steps of the Sheraton, where a line of singing young people had blocked his access. What do you make of it all, I asked him. He thought for a minute, thought hard, groped for a word, then for another. "I find it very interesting," he finally said. Exactly right, I thought. The world is a more interesting place than it was yesterday.

- - - - - - - - -

Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature and Maybe One, among other books. He is writing several columns this week from Seattle for TomPaine.com about the WTO.

-- (McKibben_Fan@WTO=.NWO), December 02, 1999.


"Visualize a World Full of Soul-Sucking Parasites". Such beautiful imagery! T-shirt slogans can define movements. I vote for this one. Thanks for the article.

-- counting down (the@days.now), December 02, 1999.


There's some hyperbole in this post, but the Seattle situation is disturbing. Look at the pictures. You'll see rioters attacking property. You'll see police using chemical irritants on subdued and kneeling people. You won't see police tackling rioters. There are two issues here, quite apart from the WTO itself.

-- Colin MacDonald (roborogerborg@yahoo.com), December 02, 1999.

This post is misinformed in more way than one, but the biggest problem is the title. Martial law was not declared in Seattle. You'd think we all knew this, but a public curfew is not the same thing.

-- Seattlite (me@seattle.com), December 02, 1999.

Martial law was not declared. OK, I'll grant you that point.

War wasn't declared in Korea, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Panama, Haiti, Serbia, or Kosovo either, as I recall. I may have missed a few, no big deal

By the way, what's the term for "undeclared martial war"?

-- Ron Schwarz (rs@clubvb.com.delete.this), December 02, 1999.


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