Sunday, May 6, 2001
By Lee Catterall
Star-Bulletin
Memories of last year's demonstration in the nation's capital and last month's melee in Quebec City were fresh in the minds of the police in Washington, D.C., as they prepared for thousands of protesters, some of them expected to be violent, to converge on the spring meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.Downtown streets were closed, metal barricades were erected and 1,400 officers were assigned to keep order and protect delegates to meetings of organizations that were seen as prime targets of anti-globalization groups.
As it turned out, no problem.
Only 150 demonstrators showed up last weekend to march and chant, while heavily armed police stood by sheepishly. At one point, when 100 protesters began to trod illegally through downtown Washington streets that had been closed off, police authorities chose not to confront them and instead sent officers on bikes to escort and monitor them.
Whether the high expectations and low turnout will be repeated at this week's Asian Development Bank meeting in Honolulu remains to be seen. On the eve of the gathering, the critical question is whether city, state and federal officials have prepared well enough that the meeting, which is expected to draw 3,000 to 4,000 delegates from 60 nations, can proceed in an orderly fashion while the constitutional rights of unknown numbers of protesters peaceably to assemble and express their grievances are protected.In the year and a half since Seattle authorities were overwhelmed by rampaging crowds of anti-globalization protesters, numerous venues for meetings of financial institutions in various parts of the world have been stormed by demonstrators. Televised reports of clashes between protesters and police at last month's Summit of the Americas in Quebec City were recent enough to cause concern about demonstrations planned against the ADB meeting at the Honolulu Convention Center.
In contrast, however, the experience in Washington shows how the size and nature of these demonstrations can be difficult to predict. It brings into particular question the intelligence network that law-enforcement agencies claim to have assembled to prepare for anti-globalization protests.
"Clearly," says spokesman John Gillies of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, "we've learned from what's occurred in other areas and, from the FBI standpoint, we're the lead agency for crisis management and counter-terrorism preparedness, so the FBI would have had people at most of these events, if not all of the events, in the states."Field agents from federal agencies on the mainland have been assigned to assist in the effort to deal with possible disturbances in Honolulu, but Gillies declined to say how many.
"We will be prepared to respond," Gillies said.
Gillies also would not say whether the FBI has exchanged information with law-enforcement agencies beyond American borders.
During the month preceding the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank in Prague last September, Czech officials reportedly stopped protesters at the border on the basis of a list of 300 activists who had been arrested in demonstrations a year earlier outside the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle or had been targeted as members of protest groups in Europe. Salon, a respected Internet magazine, reported that a list of activists allegedly had been provided to Czech police by the FBI.
The FBI denied supplying the list.
"There is no blacklist or watch list that the FBI gave to Czech police concerning American activists," U.S. press attaché Victoria Middleton told Salon. "Whatever lists (the Czech police) have came from publicly available documents." The FBI and police from Seattle and other U.S. cities "shared information with Czech police officials" about the role of activists in American demonstrations, Middleton added, but the information "is in the public domain."Brent White, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii, says American law-enforcement officials cannot lawfully arrest or detain people on the basis of their known activities in past demonstrations.
That is not to say that White, who has represented ADBwatch, the principle protest group, in gaining access to public areas, expects any of those protesters to show up in Honolulu.
Anti-globalization protesters who have shown their teeth outside world trade-related conferences are not likely to engage in protests at global banking conferences, he says.
"A lot of it has to do with the difference between a world trade organization as opposed to the Asian Development Bank, which is just a big international financial institution," White says. "The same kind of people don't come to protest."
Nor do those who protest at trade-related conferences travel great distances. Protests at conferences in Europe have been comprised mainly of Europeans arriving by bus or train. At last year's Asian Development Bank meeting in Thailand, the protesters were Thai activists, farmers and students. At last October's Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) in Seoul, the3,000 labor, environmental and human-rights activists were mostly Korean.
"The people who are most concerned about the Asian Development Bank are people from Asia, not people from the mainland," White says. "I don't think you can expect a lot of people from the mainland to really care about the Asian Development Bank, so that's why I don't expect them here."White attributes the large protest at the IMF/World Bank spring meeting in Washington, D.C., in April 2000 to the fact that it came on the momentum of the Seattle protest. Even then, while thousands of demonstrators triggered a traffic ban encompassing 90 downtown blocks in the District of Columbia, arrests were peacefully reminiscent of the demonstrations against the Vietnam War and violence was sporadic. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey called it "a piece of cake."
Ramsey, who is black, visited with protesters at the police lines and recalled that he had been on the other side of such lines during the civil rights protests during the 1960s. The only times those protests had turned violent, he told the International Herald-Tribune, was when the police overreacted.
1. World Trade Organization
Annual conference
Seattle, Wash., Nov. 29-Dec. 3, 1999Nearly 40,000 protesters converged on the city, blocking delegates from meetings. Police cleared the streets, creating confrontations with demonstrators that turned violent with the use of tear gas, pepper spray, bottles and rubber bullets. The city then created a 25-block, no-protest zone in the downtown area. The protest caused about $3 million in property damage. More than 500 protesters were arrested. The police chief resigned soon after the conference ended, and a deputy chief was fired the following April for having pepper-sprayed two women and kicking a third during the demonstration.
2. World Bank / International Monetary Fund
Spring meeting
Washington, D.C., April 16-17, 2000Ten thousand protesters concerned about issues ranging from the environment to worker rights tried to shut the meeting down. Police, who had watched videos of how Seattle police had lost control, fought back with pepper spray and arrested 1,200 demonstrators.
3. Asian Development Bank
Annual meeting
Chiang Mai, Thailand,
May 5-8, 2000About 4,000 demonstrators pushed through an outer perimeter of police barricades to protest outside the hotel where delegates met, but there was no violence. Firetrucks with water cannons were on standby with 2,000 riot police guarding the delegates. Most of the protesters were poor Thais who claimed that bank-funded projects like dams had ruined their lives.
4. World Bank / International Monetary Fund
Annual meeting
Prague, Czech Republic, Sept. 26-27, 2000A peaceful march by 12,000 people turned violent after Czech police blocked demonstrators from a bridge leading to the conference hall. Several hundred masked demonstrators threw cobblestones and Molotov cocktails and tried to storm the hall from other directions. Riot policemen responded with water cannon, tear gas and stun grenades.
5. Asia-Europe Meeting Biennial summit
Seoul, Korea
Oct. 20-21, 2000Three thousand labor, environ-mental and human rights activists rallied at a major intersection to protest. Some 400 stone-throwing protesters, some armed with sticks, fought 1,000 police armed with yard-long batons. Later, 10,000 protesters shouting anti-globalization slogans marched on the convention center but were blocked by police backed by two water cannons. Authorities held the protest in check with 30,000 riot and plainclothes police.
6. European Union
Summit conference
Nice, France, Dec. 6-9, 2000Most of the 60,000 anti-globalization protesters marched peacefully to a conference center where 15 European leaders met with 13 leaders of applicant countries to launch Europe's new Charter of Fundamental Rights. About 1,000 mostly French, Italian and Spanish protesters, many wearing gas masks, set fire to a bank one block from the summit, pelted firefighters who arrived to fight the blaze, trashed a real-estate agent's office and hurled rocks and bottles at police during a three-hour period on the first day of the conference. Hundreds of police fired tear gas volleys and lobbed stun grenades to quell the disturbance.
7. World Economic Forum
Annual meeting
Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 25-30, 2001About 500 environmentalists, anarchists and anti-biotechnology activists arriving by bus from Switzerland, France and Italy were joined by Kurds. Most protesters, wearing ski gear, were kept by hundreds of Swiss police at a barricade 500 yards from the building where the 2,500 delegates met. Security was increased during President Clinton's brief visit on the meeting's third day. Protesters smashed windows at a McDonald's restaurant and lit a bonfire in a street near a luxury hotel.
8. Summit of the Americas
Biennial meeting
Quebec City, April 20-21, 2001Most of the 20,000 people taking part in the protest against free trade and globalization were peaceful. However, violence broke out along a four-mile-long chain-link fence erected to keep protesters away from the conference, attended by President Bush. Protesters threw tear gas cannisters at police guarding the fence, and police pushed crowds back with water and tear gas. Police arrested about 150 protesters.
9. World Bank / International Monetary Fund
Spring meeting
Washington, D.C., April 28-29, 2001Recalling the previous year's protest, 1,400 police officers closed downtown streets and erected metal barricades, but only 150 peaceful demonstrators showed up to protest the world banking institutions. About 100 protesters decided to march illegally through downtown Washington, and police obligingly escorted and monitored them.
Asian Development Bank
