Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
The G-8 protests came to nothing -- another victory for the U.S. crackdown on dissent.
Jun 11, 2004 | There was a military checkpoint on the way to the candlelight peace vigil on Georgia's St. Simons Island on Tuesday, manned by National Guard soldiers in an olive Humvee. It was the first day of the Group of Eight summit on Sea Island, and soldiers were all over coastal Georgia. Six or seven were parked on a street corner on Martin Luther King and L across from a housing project in Brunswick, a town of 15,000 that's more than 10 miles from Sea Island. Brunswick proved to be the nearest protesters could get to the international confab where George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Vladimir Putin and other world leaders were transacting the business of the planet, and during the summit, held from June 8 to June 10, it looked a lot like a police state.
A distant location in a conservative state; a massive police presence; the fact that many protesters were either disillusioned by mass actions or intimidated by the brutal tactics meted out in Miami: Add these together, and you get the reason why the expected big protests against the G-8 barely materialized. And Sea Island is not the exception but, increasingly, the rule. Police and politicians in America are cracking down hard on dissent, whether by smashing heads, declaring a state of emergency or denying permits. For those committed to the idea that nonviolent protest is a fundamental American right, Sea Island is not a triumph of law enforcement but a cautionary tale.
Georgia was able to mobilize unprecedented force by using the lawbooks. Ordinarily, thanks to the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, government is forbidden from using the military for domestic law enforcement. But Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, a Republican, found a way around this nuisance by declaring a state of emergency, citing danger from "unlawful assemblages" and other threats. The state of emergency allowed him to bring in the National Guard, flooding the streets with reservists in full camouflage. As the Associated Press reported, a week before the declaration, Brunswick amended its laws to give police authority to ban protests if the governor declared a state of emergency. The city also enacted an ordinance requiring permits for gatherings of more than five people.
Besides the soldiers, there were, according to Georgia authorities, around 20,000 police in the area. They cruised the streets in 30-vehicle convoys, lights flashing, with vans full of cops in riot gear bringing up the rear. The massive police presence was perhaps understandable on Sea Island, which was also protected by Secret Service personnel and Coast Guard gunboats. It was less clear why the police felt compelled to swarm over Brunswick, a largely poor, black community surrounded by long stretches of strip-malled American nowhere and the place where the few anti-G-8 protesters who showed up gathered. Every few minutes, a police car would drive slowly by St. John's Missionary Baptist Church, which the local Indymedia crew had turned into a headquarters. Others drove in and out of the parking lot at the community college where activists converged.
Maybe they were wondering where the protesters were. In the end, after the local media scared residents with tales of rampaging anarchists, after organizers fought for permits to accommodate thousands, after the police prepared for a violent showdown, hardly anyone showed up. "What if they gave a protest and nobody came?" joked Al Crespo, a Miami photographer who specializes in shooting demonstrators. Only a few hundred people made their way to Georgia to demonstrate against the G-8, meaning there were hundreds of cops for every activist.
Those who came spent much of their time discussing why so few had joined them. Some reluctantly concluded that the summit's planners and the police, who'd set out to thwart protests, had won.
In the past, G-8 summits, where leaders of the major industrial democracies and Russia meet to discuss trade and global policy, have been met by thousands of rowdy demonstrators. In Genoa, Italy, in 2001, riots broke out and one protester, 23-year-old Carlo Giuliani, was shot dead. To thwart these protests, international trade meetings are increasingly held in inaccessible places like Doha, Qatar, site of the 2001 World Trade Organization summit.
Authorities are also using other techniques for stifling dissenters, or rendering them invisible. Often, those wishing to demonstrate against George W. Bush are shunted into isolated "free-speech zones," while his supporters are permitted to get close to him -- and to TV cameras. In October of 2002, South Carolina activist Brett Bursey was arrested for trespassing when, refusing to be contained to a free-speech zone, he made his way into a crowd of several hundred Bush supporters waiting to greet the president as he arrived at Columbia Metropolitan Airport and held a "No War for Oil Sign."
Throughout the country, activist groups have been infiltrated by police, often working for Joint Terrorism Task Forces under the jurisdiction of the FBI. And police have been increasingly violent in response to peaceful protest. Last November in Miami, 2,500 police in riot gear unloaded fusillades of crowd-control weaponry against 10,000 or so overwhelmingly peaceful protesters.
A Miami-Dade County panel charged with investigating the debacle issued a scathing report on police misconduct during the FTAA. According to a draft of their executive summary posted on the panel's Web site, "The members of the Independent Review Panel strenuously condemn and deplore the unrestrained and disproportionate use of force observed in Miami during the FTAA. Nationally televised images of police violence against non-violent protestors stained our community. For a brief period in time, Miami lived under martial law. Civil rights were trampled and the sociopolitical values we hold most dear were undermined."
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