| Subject: "Anti-Occupation" Global Protests Planned after US invades Baghdad |
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Date Posted: 00:21:01 04/11/03 Fri
"Occupation Not Liberation" Global Protests Planned
"Only now the focus is, 'no' to colonial occupation," said Flounders
WASHINGTON, April 10 (Islamonline.net & News Agencies) - Far from celebrating the presumed quick end to the U.S.-led war on Iraq, American peace activists on Thursday, April 10, vocalized outrage at the prospect of a lengthy military occupation of the Arab country and were gearing up for "anti-occupation" marches.
Massive rallies had been planned for this weekend to call for an end to the U.S. and British-led war, across the United States and in major cities around the world, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Now organizers say the rallying cry of those protests will be an end to the impending occupation of Iraq by Anglo-American troops.
"It's more urgent and more important than ever that there be a mobilization" said Sara Flounders, co-director of the New York-based International Action Center who is helping to organize the demonstration.
She insisted that despite the fast-changing events in Iraq, this weekend's world-wide protest is absolutely going forward, with greater determination and greater clarity.
"Only now the focus is, 'no' to colonial occupation," said Flounders.
This weekend's protests are organized by ANSWER coalition, a confederation of anti-war and social action groups that was a key organizer of many massive demonstrations held in the weeks before the start of the war on March 20.
Protests are planned in San Francisco, Washington and several other U.S. cities as well as 40 countries including Britain, Italy, Japan and Korea, said Flounders.
Some groups say they are also pushing for the United Nations to take the lead in the post-war reconstruction of Iraq.
Pakistani journalists hold placards during an anti-war demonstration in Islamabad
Anti-war organizer Media Benjamin of the San-Francisco based group Global Exchange, said coming protests will lambaste U.S.-led efforts "to privatize humanitarian aid instead of using more traditional channels like the Red Cross and NGOs."
"We would like to see the U.N. take charge of the transition, which would strengthen the rule of law, not the rule of force," she stressed.
"If the Iraqi people are to have a chance for democracy and a better life, the model that the U.S. is trying to use is not going to lead them there," Benjamin charged.
Another group, the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC), this week launched the latest of numerous online petition drives, calling on their supporters to flood Congress with e-mails calling on legislators keep funding for Iraq humanitarian and reconstruction out of the hands the U.S. military.
"The State Department, in partnership with the U.N. and our allies, is the appropriate authority for U.S. funds related to post-war Iraq," EPIC said in an action email sent to supporters.
Anti-occupation activists have wasted no time launching salvos at the planned interim government to be headed by former U.S. general Jay Garner.
Their new website was up and running long before the Garner has even set foot in Iraq.
Garner, 64, who is awaiting confirmation of the Iraqi regime downfall to make his move to Baghdad, is a retired three-star general who has come under fire for his links to defense industry and his ardent pro-Israel stance.
He is also a former assistant deputy chief of staff during the 1991 Gulf War, has directed several major Defense Department programs including the Patriot anti-missile system, and is a personal friend of U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
But peace activists said none of those credentials qualify him to set up a peaceful Iraqi interim government.
"As a former Army General who until recently was building weapons systems now being used in the Iraq war, Jay Garner is no man of peace. In fact, he's just the man to inflame Iraq and the region," according activist’s site.
Worldwide Protest
Riot police protect a Barcelona stock market from students opposing the U.S.-led war on Iraq
Protests against the U.S.-led war on Iraq flared worldwide Thursday, a day after American tanks rolled into Baghdad.
In Spain, tens of thousands of people, mainly students, took to the streets to reinforce a nationwide trade union strike in protest at the war.
In the Mediterranean city of Barcelona alone, at least 30,000 people flooded the streets, chanting "Not a soldier, not a euro, not a bullet for this war."
The streets of Madrid were also jammed, with demonstrators waving banners that read "Against the imperialist war."
The Prado museum in the capital closed for two hours, with a reproduction of "Guernica," Picasso's famed anti-war painting, placed at its doors.
In Greece, nearly 600 journalists stopped work for two hours and marched to the U.S. embassy to protest the war and the casualties it has caused among their colleagues in the media.
"Americans, murderers of peoples", "Americans, murderers of reporters," chanted the demonstrators.
Eleven journalists and a Kurdish translator working for the BBC have been killed since the U.S.-led war began on March 20, and another two are missing.
In Athens, organizers have barred Britain from participating at a book fair where it was due to be the honored country, because of its participation in the "illegal U.S. invasion" of Iraq.
Instead, the fair, a popular annual event to be held on May 9-25, would be dedicated to anti-war books, the Athens Publishers' and Booksellers' Association said.
In Paris, a hundred demonstrators snuck into the building housing the American Express offices and hung an anti-war banner on the first floor, organizers said.
In Germany, a McDonald's party bus and an advertisement for the food chain on a motorway were set alight in apparent anti-war protests.
In Indonesia, some 150 protestors gathered outside the compound of the U.S. firm Caltex on Sumatra island, demanding the firm's U.S. employees condemn the war within 24 hours or face expulsion from the country.
In Britain, organizers vowed to go ahead with a weekend anti-war protest in London.
"We are organizing meeting in many parts of the country which are bigger than those which took place before the war started," said Andrew Murray, chairman of the Stop the War Coalition.
The group has called a march through London on Saturday, April 11, during which participants are to lay flowers outside Downing Street in memory of those who have died in the conflict.
On March 22, two days after U.S. and British troops invaded Iraq, between 200,000 and 700,000 people marched in the British capital against the war.
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