SAN FRANCISCO
Thousands rally against occupation
By LeiLani Dowell
and Brenda Sandburg
San Francisco
Some 8,000 to 10,000 people participated in a
spirited march and rally in San Francisco June 5 to demand an
end to the occupation of Iraq. Contingents of labor groups,
veterans, Haitian activists and youths marched from United
Nations Plaza in downtown San Francisco to the beginning of the
docks at Embarcadero Plaza. The protest was sponsored by the
ANSWER coalition.
A brass band played the "International" during the march. A
small counter-demonstration in support of the state of Israel
was drowned out by chants of "free, free Palestine."
Lara Kiswani of the Free Palestine Alli ance captured rally
participants' sentiments: "You can put us in prison, murder our
children, demolish our homes, but you will never crush the
spirit of the Intifada. You will never crush the resistance
that is rooted in our history of blood, sweat and tears.
Palestine will be free."
Henry Clark of the West County Toxics Coalition compared the
torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to the torture that goes on
in U.S. prisons. He cited the killing of Black Panther Party
member George Jackson by prison guards and prison officials'
refusal to provide medical treatment to Native activist Leonard
Peltier. "The torture of Iraqi prisoners is business as usual,"
Clark said.
Families of U.S. troops also spoke. Maritza Castillo, whose
son Camilo Mejia is a war resister, noted the irony of Mejia's
prison sentencing. "For refusing to torture and kill people in
Iraq, the Bush administration has condemned my son to one year
in prison, the same as those accused of torturing the prisoners
of Iraq," she said.
Fernando Suarez del Solar, whose son was one of the first
U.S. soldiers to die in the war, reiterated that supporting the
troops in Iraq means demanding their immediate return.
Pierre Labossiere of the Haiti Action Committee decried the
media's silence on the arrest of Lavalas leader and singer
Annete Auguste (So' Anne): "U.S. Marines went to her home and
blew up the gate to her house with military explosives,
arrested her and 12 people in her house, including her
grandchildren, handcuffed her and put a hood over her head, and
we've not heard about this. Where are the human rights
organizations?" He also pointed to the U.S. government's
attempt to paint the leaders of the Lavalas movement as drug
lords.
LeiLani Dowell, lesbian anti-war acti vist and Workers World
Party member run ning for Congress in San Francisco, urged the
crowd to continue building an independent, anti-imperialist,
revolutionary movement, especially in this election year.
"With so many pressures on us at this period in time, with
so many attacks on all fronts by the U.S. government, the most
important thing is for us to stay unified, to not let anything
divide us, to be strong like a fist," she said to cheers from
the crowd.
The Kabataang maka-Bayan (Pro-People Youth) Bay Area
Organization Com mittee issued a statement at the protest: "The
situation faced by many people here in the Bay Area, especially
poor and people of color, is not far removed from the
instability and insecurity faced by the Iraqi people in the
face of a U.S. occupation. We also see an unstable future for
our youth, with never-ending school budget cuts, and constant
assault of military recruiters in the campus ... exploiting the
youth's feeling of uncertainty to feed them into the
imperialist war machine. ...
"We call on all youth and students throughout the world to
expose, oppose, and resist U.S. imperialist intervention in
Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, the Philippines and elsewhere."
Others speaking at the rally included Richard Becker and
Nazila Bargshady for the ANSWER Coali tion and a representative
of Fast 4 Edu cation, a group that has successfully fasted for
the past 26 days at the Capitol Building in Sacramento,
resulting in an almost 500-percent reduction in the interest
rate on state bailout loans for suffering school districts in
California.
Reprinted from the June 17, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
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