imf/world bank protest
This past weekend I experienced the World Bank and IMF protests on several levels, all of which have deepened my beliefs and heightened my awareness. As an employee in the district, as a protester, and as the family member of someone whose constitutional rights were not only threatened, but blatantly denied, I have in three days witnessed the oppressive and arrogant way in which thousands of demonstrators voices were silenced by our government through intimidation, violence, and confinement.
Friday morning, leaving early for work in preparation of hordes of protesters, I encountered more heavily armed police officers than civilians. Large white vans filled with men dressed in riot gear lined every street corner, blocking commuters. Guards and police crowded store fronts and sidewalks across Northwest DC, and lingered outside tattoo parlors, music stores, and other places where your “typical” protester would hang out. A coworker was asked by police to get off a city Metro bus so that it could be used to detain arrested protesters at the World Bank. Besides feeling as if I lived in a Soviet police state, nothing unusual was occurring in Georgetown. Therefore, as I watched CNN’s coverage of the protest – teenage girls faces beaten by batons, boys being dragged on the ground by six officers – I assumed that only a massive riot could cause such deliberate violence from the police. Surely, the District would not uses such excessive force unless other people’s lives were in danger.
Across town from the IMF and World Bank, in an area no diplomat or corporate exec would dare to go, my mother and her Reclaiming group were engaging in a non-violent demonstration against globalization. Walking only on sidewalks and obeying all traffic laws, they chanted and sang as they circled the neighborhood. As the moved south, they noticed a line of white vans ahead of them and suddenly a group of police formed a line a few feet in front of my mother, cutting her off from the rest of her group. The line of police began forming a perimeter around the group ahead of her, pushing them closer and closer to the vans. My mother’s group had no desire to be arrested, nor to cause any trouble. They only wanted to exercise their right to public assembly, yet their begging did nothing to sway the police. They offered their names, they offered to leave immediately, but the police quickly bound their hands and feet with plastic ties and loaded them onto buses where they would sit for the next fifteen hours. Pre-emptive measures to protect the city? Protesting without a permit? Perhaps, but that would not explain why tourists and commuters who just happened to be walking in the vicinity were scooped up and arrested with the rest. The people arrested then spent the remainder of the day locked on city buses and the following day in holding tanks where they joined over six-hundred others who had been arrested across the District.
The next day I joined the parade of anti-globalization protesters in their march across the Capitol. I do not want to let the negativity of the government’s response to that event overshadow the intense and uplifting energy that came from hundreds of groups that came together under that same cause. I was amazed by the array of organizations and causes that joined to peacefully protest a common enemy. Through music, poetry, theater and meditation, they created a powerful and positive voice. However, I was also impacted by the enormous effort to control the protest, and I want touch on it briefly.
I have seen other marches, including ones by the KKK, and never have I seen such unneeded use of armed guards. Men and women stood almost shoulder to shoulder, lining the streets in full riot gear. Pepper spray? Batons? No, these guards had three foot wooden sticks held across their chest. The parade ended in Farragut Square, a small park surrounded by several tall buildings. As the crowd was pushed into the square, men in heavy riot gear with bullet proof shields blocked all exits and began moving in. My mother and our friends, fearing another unprovoked series of arrest, fled through the last remaining open block. As we stood behind the police barricade, we watched what I could only imagine ever seeing in a movie. Marching towards the unsuspecting crowd in a military fashion, were about fifty police armed with tear gas guns. Behind them marched another fifty, and behind them was a string of white vans. We watched in complete fear and disbelief. How could the government waste tax payers money on the deliberate intimidation of people using their first amendment rights? Could the government be manipulated so much by the media’s violent portrayal of previous protests that they would arrest non-violent people who have committed no crime? Sadly, the answer is yes.
And unfortunately, yet as expected, the media focused on the violence and arrests, leaving much of the movement’s message of justice and peace lost in the drama, which would not have occurred if the District had not hired so many out-of-jurisdiction police to arrest non-violent, law-abiding protesters. Many people asked me, why do this when you know things won’t change? And my first response is yes, things can change, and as the country that supports and profits from the World Bank and IMF, we owe it to the people and natural resources that suffer under their policies to make it change. My second response is, it is not about convincing the men inside the World Bank and IMF. And it is not about shutting down a city, or fighting authority. It is about educating, mobilizing, and becoming a voice that cannot be ignored. It is about experiencing the hundreds of issues that come to the table in cooperation and solidarity against globalization. And most of all it is about the people dying of AIDS, hunger, and lack of access to clean water so that the US can profit. And yes, it can change.