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Title: N30: The Seattle WTO Protests Author: CrimethInc. Date: November 30, 2006 Language: en Topics: Seattle, protest, memoir, analysis Source: Retrieved on 8th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/zines/n30-the-seattle-wto-protests
Fourteen years ago, many of us didnât even know we were anarchists. We
made tentative steps to change our lives, without a clear idea of where
we were going or why. We joined environmental organizations and formed
punk rock bands. We experimented with cooperative living,
confrontational unemployment, and politically motivated crime. We
occupied trees; we traveled around the planet as witnesses and
volunteers; we developed new traditions and codes of ethics. In the
course of these adventures, we found each other, one by one; but we
still felt isolated, still doubted our own strength, still wondered how
to approach the revolution some of us dreamed of.
Seven years ago, some of us participated in a demonstration in Seattle
against the World Trade Organization. Seeing each other there, we
discovered that we were part of a worldwide movement. This infused us
with an incredible momentum and sense of purpose: suddenly, we knew we
were going to change the world, and we had a model for how to do so. The
events of that one week in Seattle were more real to us than all the
years that had led up to themâeven for those of us who were not there.
Over the years that followed, we rode that momentum like a wild horse,
pursuing the visions we had glimpsed in the streets of Seattle. We tried
again and again to recreate that moment, succeeding only in creating
other moments. We redefined what had happened, revisiting that point of
origin again and again, finding that each time it had changed. We fought
amongst ourselves. We ran into walls, ran out of steam, ran around and
around in circles. We renounced our visions like jilted lovers, and
along with them many of the tactics and strategies they had taught us.
We tried to forget the whole thing ever happened. Some of us finally
succeeded.
Today, it has been seven years since the WTO protests in Seattle. Rumor
has it that every seven years, every cell in our bodies regenerates:
every seven years, we are born anew and begin a new phase of life. If
this is true, then today we should finally be able to reflect on the WTO
protests without nostalgia, glorification, or defensiveness and derive
lessons from them to apply to our current efforts. Today, we are finally
free of this specter that has haunted us, and it can finally become our
own.
Here we present for posterity two texts that stand out in the veritable
ocean of material on the subject. They could not be more distinct: one
is an impassioned personal account of participation in direct action,
the other a dispassionate strategic analysis. It is our hope that
together they will provide a sense of what took place that week in
1999âand more importantly what is possible now, along with an inkling of
how to make it happen. To this purpose we also humbly append a brief
afterword of our own.
â CrimethInc. World Tirade Organization
This account was originally published in the thirteenth issue of Inside
Front, a now-defunct anarchist magazine covering underground music,
culture, and resistance.
I canât do it. I canât. I canât tell you what it felt like any more than
a bird could tell me what it feels like to fly. I can tell you my story,
but itâs only my head talking. My heart canât write, and my guts donât
have lips. I cannot truly explain how it felt to taste ecstasy in every
breath as the invincible forces of privilege and coercive power finally
lost control, how it felt to stare down the worldâs most ruinous and
abusive bullies and watch them blink, how it felt to fall in love with
tens of thousands of people at once, to not know what would happen next,
to become dangerous.
And that is a tragedy that haunts me as I write every one of these
words. Because if somehow I could share with you what I felt for ten
days in Seattle, you would never settle for anything less again. You
would kick in your TV, run outside buck naked, tear up the freeway with
your bare hands, flip tanks upside down, and dance with panda bears
through the streets. The barbarians would emerge from exile to knock
down heavenâs door and the dead would rise up from their coffins and
cubicles. And once you got a taste of the sublime joy of reclaiming
control of your life and your world, of regaining your lost kinship in a
human community of which you are an integral component, of realizing
your wildest dreams and desires, you would do whatever it takes to make
it happen again.
On Monday I leave for Seattle from Columbus, Georgia on a Greyhound bus,
alone, already hungry, with no money and nothing to eat. Six hours later
in Atlanta my bag is whisked away to a different bus, leaving me with no
warm clothes and nothing to read, either. I stare blankly out the window
at the bleak, diseased wasteland of concrete and smoke and cars, at the
trees and fields and hills and rivers, at all the cities Iâve never seen
beforeâChattanooga, Nashville, Louisville, Indianapolis, Gary, Chicago.
I scrounge what little food I can at bus stations, but by Tuesday night
I am hungry enough that Iâm starting to get mean. In Chicago a grizzled
old man gives me a sandwich, which I eat, and a dollar, which I give to
another grizzled old man. I stare and think and try to sleep. Milwaukee,
Madison, Eau Claire... Wednesday morning, Minneapolis. Haggard young
women with kids, disgruntled truckers, teenage runaways. Fargo,
Bismarck, Billings. The North Dakotan whose car broke down in Minnesota
who canât afford to fix it. Butte, Missoula, Coeur dâAlene, Spokane. The
grizzled young man who buys me a waffle in Montana because he hasnât
seen me eat in a day and a half. I fall asleep a few hours past Spokane
in the Cascades and wake up, Thursday November 25, at about midnight, in
Seattle.
I stagger off the bus, meet my mysterious liaison Ms. J, and am
miraculously reunited with my long lost bag. Fifteen minutes later I
stand outside of the 420 Denny Space, a nerve center of sorts where I
find dozens of people bustling around with saws and paint and
walkie-talkies, plotting and planning and building. This is a very good
sign, but after seventy-eight hours of Greyhound time itâs also pretty
jarring. Iâm utterly exhausted, ravenously hungry, and in no condition
to conspire yet. I catch a ride south from downtown to the Roasted
Filbert, a cavernous, dusty, unmarked warehouse with concrete floors, no
windows, and a purple door: which is serving as a refuge for everyone
who shows up at 420 with nowhere to stay. I find a space inside, curl up
in my bag, and pass out listening to warm bodies breathing all around
me.
At dawn I ride back up to Denny with four others from Filbert. None of
us know each other. Downtown the towers glitter in the distance like
decorated tombs, spectacular monuments to wealth and power that loom
overhead just as the institutions they embody loom over every aspect of
our lives. I know that we are flying under their radar, and that we are
not alone. For the first time in my life those almighty towers, and all
that they stand for, look vulnerable to me.
Up at Denny the bustle and activity of Thursday night has multiplied
exponentially. I help out with the kitchen and the dishwashing, finally
get some food, and spend most of the day getting my bearings. Around
dusk Critical Mass issues out of 420. I ride with somebody on the back
of her bike since I donât have one. Later I just run. We ride around and
around the upscale shopping districts downtown, taking over whatever
streets we want, whenever we want, without any authorization or
permission, singing, dancing, howling, and conversing with anyone who
will listen. Someone begins chanting âWeâre gonna win! Weâre gonna win!â
and for the first time in my life I believe it.
Much to my surprise and delight, I chance upon Mr. X in the midst of
Critical Mass. I have only seen him once since I spent much of the
summer of 1998 in a van with him. He is in Seattle with Ms. X and X-Dog.
Our reunion is cut short, however, when a psychopath in a fancy car
tries to run us over. Mr. X screams like a banshee, jumps onto the hood,
slips a piece of cardboard under the wipers and over the entire
windshield, pounds three big ass dents in the hood with his fist, and
disappears into the night.
Later we invade the Washington Trade and Convention Center, where the
WTO summit is supposed to be held, and ride in circles through the foyer
for quite some time before a security guard punches someone in the face
and the police finally manage to chase us away.
I spend all morning and early afternoon at Denny. The 420 Space is
serving as a welcome mat, training grounds, mess hall, and nerve center,
and it is turning into a complete madhouse. Countless meetings and
workshops, endless training and skill sharing, and ceaseless cooking,
cleaning, eating, and welding all rage perpetually and simultaneously
under Dennyâs roof. More and more people pour in throughout the day, and
it is beginning to get difficult to move around inside.
I leave late Saturday afternoon for the Hitco space to make lockboxes.
Hitco is every bit as wild as Denny. While others hammer away at mammoth
puppets and matching sea turtle suits we set up an assembly line and
build hundreds of lockboxes out of PVC pipe, chicken wire, framing
nails, tar, sand, yarn, and duct tape. We turn them out late into the
night. I ride to 420, walk to Filbert, and sleep covered with tar.
Sunday morning Denny is an utterly unfathomable zoo. I learn that
Saturday night banners were dropped all over downtown, one from the top
of a crane over I-5. At noon a parade complete with giant puppets,
street theater, radical cheerleading, and an anarchic marching band
rolls out of Seattle Central Community College (SCCC). The street party
is a roaring success, reclaiming downtown for hours and railing fiercely
at all manifestations of corporate dominance.
Unfortunately I miss it. I go back to Hitco around five to finish the
lockboxes, unaware that the festival is still bumping. I get back to 420
around eight and run across Ms. C. We are eating dinner when we hear
that a mass public squat is about to be opened on Virginia St. The word
is free shelter downtown for anyone who needs it during the protests,
and for Seattleâs homeless after. About forty of us steal through the
night to recover a fragment of the world that has been stolen from us.
913 Virginia Street. The door opens, and two masked heads emerge from
the darkness. âGET IN!â I run through the door, up the stairs, through a
wooden hatch, onto the second floor. The door closes behind me. The
building is enormous. This floor could harbor a horde of barbarians. The
power is running. Androgynous ninja elves scamper about everywhere
around me, hammering away furiously on a thousand different projects. I
board up windows at a breakneck pace with a tireless Danish carpenter.
Plywood, two-by-fours, chicken wire, black plastic, anything. Next room.
The cops are coming. Theyâre about to fire tear gas through all these
windows.
No theyâre not.
More rooms.
Yes they are. Cover all this up so they canât tell how many of us are in
here.
No theyâre not.
âWHO THE FUCK LET IN PHOTOGRAPHERS?â
âIâVE GOT FELONY WARRANTS IN WASHINGTON STATE!â
The cops are coming.
Two rooms left.
No theyâre not.
âKEEP THOSE FUCKING PHOTOGRAPHERS IN THAT FRONT ROOM!â
âSOMEBODY GO TALK TO THEM!â
Yes they are.
Weâre done.
No theyâre not...
There are two doors, one in front and one in back. The former can be
opened from inside by dismantling the contraption that braces it. The
latter, where Mr. N has constructed a virtually impregnable barricade
out of toilets, concrete, rebar, plywood, and an iron fire door, could
only be opened by a tank. The doors are adjacent to two stairwells, one
in front and one in back, which lead to either end of a long winding
hallway that connects about ten rooms. The rooms are vast and spacious,
with 25â ceilings, gigantic windows, and giant stages and lofts of
various shapes and sizes. One has been furnished with an ample supply of
food, water, and medical supplies. Someone runs out of another, arms
raised in triumph, a crescent wrench in one fist and a plunger in the
other. âTHE TOILET WORKS!â In yet another Ms. I and Ms. S arm a security
team with short wave radios. Every window on this floor is boarded up
except for those in the front roomâwhere earlier we gave a full fledged
press conference before banishing the blow-dried talking heads of the
corporate media altogetherâand nothing inside can be distinguished from
below. The third floor is essentially identical to the second, except
that none of the windows are boarded up and there is a ladder to the
roof in the back stairwell. There is no way to approach the building
that is not visible from the roof, where someone stands guard with a
short-wave radio, waiting for the inevitable. Here come the cops, this
time for real...
We assemble in The Spiral Room and send Mr. G outside to negotiate,
agreeing that he will not accept, refuse, offer, or request any proposal
before we have all consensed to do so. The cops say we need to let in a
fire inspector. They need to know if we are posing a fire hazard to
ourselves. After much discussion we consense that this is complete
bullshit. They donât know the layout of the building, they or how many
of us are inside, how sturdy our barricades are, or for that matter if
we all have machine guns or not. They want to inspect the building to
determine how difficult it will be to raid. When we refuse they cut the
water, then the power.
By this time a bizarre circus has gathered below. Reporters, feds, and
undercover agents film us, and our friends from 420 and the In-dependent
Media Center film them. We hang banners and signs from the roof and
windows. Mine says âRESISTANCE IS FERTILE.â Outside Mr. G wrangles with
the cops. Inside we are embroiled in an absolutely endless meeting
regarding their ever-changing promises and threats. As it gets later and
later we are left with less friends and more enemies, who make less
promises and more threats. The situation becomes increasingly tense, but
they never move in on us. Around four they finally leave, swearing that
they will return at eight with the landlord to chase us out. I sleep
with one eye open, and wake up four different times to false alarms.
The cops are coming.
No theyâre not.
Yes they are.
No theyâre not.
Throughout the morning a crowd from 420 and everywhere else gathers
outside, beating drums and singing. The cops return at eight with the
landlord, block the doors, and refuse to let anyone in or out. Around
noon we manage to get a lawyer inside. He tries to cut us a deal. We
will occupy the building until Friday, then hand it over to Share/Wheel,
a homeless advocacy group, who will convert it into a free shelter. The
landlord claims he will get sued if someone gets hurt in his building.
We write up a waiver clearing him of any liability for anything that
happens inside. He refuses to sign it. This all takes hours.
The negotiations break down completely by late afternoon. The landlord
wants us disposed of. The cops slaver in anticipation. Around 5:30 they
swear that in thirty minutes they will kick down the doors, beat ass,
break heads, and arrest everyone inside. They will let anyone who is
willing to leave out now. This is our âlast chance.â Nearly everyone
opts out at this point, understandably having no desire to spend the
30^(th) in jail. They promise to tear ass up to Denny and return with as
much backup as they can scrape together. I know that whether this is our
âlast chanceâ or not, there are nowhere near enough cops outside to
actually raid the building, and I cannot fathom why. Later I learn that
crowds have amassed all over downtown. Some have surrounded The Gap,
some the Westin Hotel so that the WTO delegates canât get in to sleep,
and some have attacked a McDonaldâs, breaking some windows.
About fifteen of us remain inside. There a lot of people out front, but
not enough. The situation looks bleak. At 6 p.m. the riot cops show up.
We decide that there is no longer any way to defend the building, and
that there is no point in making martyrs of ourselvesâexcept for Mr. B,
who says he will hide in the rafters and hold out alone if he has to. We
dismantle the barricade at the front door and run outside.
We are greeted with a wondrous sight. The cavalry has arrived from 420.
Somehow hordes of people have slid in between the cops and the door, and
more stream in from all around. Everyone goes berserk. We pound and bang
on everything we can get our hands on, howling and dancing and taking up
most of the block. Mr. B is up on the roof, roaring at the top of his
lungs with his arms raised to the sky as if all the indomitable power of
the avenging squatter demon is running through the marrow of his bones.
The cops are at a loss. Every time they try to give us an order or
command we just dance, but when they try to charge their van across the
block to disperse us we surround it and slow it down to a crawl, then
beat and kick and rock it while the couple inside squirms. It is all
they can do to limp their wounded warhorse through to the other side
before all the little elves flip the damn thing over. The cops leave.
Pandemonium reigns. Up on the roof Mr. B roars in triumph, and the walls
tremble at the tops of the tombs. I suspect that the cops are not
prepared to start a riot on Virginia Street when so much of their force
is downtown protecting the worldâs most ruinous and abusive corporations
and the delegates who represent them. A fragment of the world has been
recovered, and it is safe for now. About forty people run inside, and I
run back up to Denny. A few hours later, right before I leave 420 for
the night, I run into Ms. X and X-Dog. She tells me that Mr. X is in
jail. She is trying desperately to bail him out before the state
discovers exactly who he is and what he has done. I promise to keep in
contact with her and to do all I can to help. Before I fall asleep back
at the squat, beneath a window with the glittering banks looming over
me, I remember the time Mr. X told me that there were only two things
that he would never do. He would never hurt anyone, and he would never
take anyoneâs food. His captors do both, and some day they will suffer
the consequences. They have locked Mr. X in a cage, and tomorrow itâs
time for payback.
I wake up before dawn and walk to SCCC, where the festivities begin.
Before long I am surrounded by thousands of friends, and at 7 a.m. we
set out for the Washington Trade and Con-vention Center, where the
summit is supposed to be held. As we near it we fan out, taking over the
surrounding streets and blockading entrances to the building. Everything
you can imagine turns into a barricade. Bodies, puppets, lockboxes, a
fifty foot tripod, barrels full of concrete, dumpsters, cars. We begin
to form a human chain around the convention center.
In an amusing display of either arrogance or stupidity the delegates all
wear matching beige suits and big ID tags that say âDELEGATE.â Whenever
they try to approach the building we stop them and chase them off.
Without the protection of their armed servants they are as powerless as
a brain without a body, and their expressions are priceless as they run
away. Before long the chain is complete, and the only ways in are
through parking garages, hotels, and underground tunnels. We cut these
off one by one. I dart around by myself, patching up holes where
blockades need help and trailing delegates to their secret entrances. I
dog one for blocks, grinning malevolently at him as he searches in vain
for a way into the convention center. He finally gives up and asks a cop
for advice, and I listen in, rubbing my hands with glee. âHow do we get
inside?â
âWell, sir... right now there is no way to get inside.â
The opening ceremonies of the summit are postponed, then canceled
altogether. This is when the cops begin to riot. They have failed their
masters miserably and they are pissed.
I run up to the barricade at 5^(th) and Seneca, which I hear is about to
be attacked. The cops, sporting Darth Vader suits and unmarked
raincoats, have formed a line across Seneca. Behind them there are five
or six more on horses and a couple with big ass guns. We push a line of
dumpsters in front of them so that they canât trample us, and form an
enormous immovable knot so that they canât drag us away and arrest us.
The cops flip on gas masks and begin to fire tear gas into the crowd.
Others blast us with jumbo tanks of pepper spray. One throws a can of
gas into my lap. Ronald McDonald and his band of merry devils run amok
through my organs, burning plastic bonfires in my windpipe and hacking
at my lungs with chainsaws dipped in DDT. Vampire fangs sunk down to the
gums suck the soul from my skull, and all that remains in the hellish
wasteland between my ears is fear and hatred.
Everyone around me starts to run. While I am getting up a cop bucks me
in the face with pepper spray. Tony the Tiger is scouring my eyes with
his chemical claws, my nostrils are searing, and I canât see a damn
thing. I scramble down Seneca stone blind and finally collapse in the
street, gasping and convulsing. Someone pours water on my face and rubs
life back into my eyes. I am born again in their hands. We all tear ass
back up Seneca towards 5^(th) to make out what the cops are doing and
how to stop them. I realize that my friends are not all just going to
bail when things start to get ugly.
And here come the cops, storming through the sickly clouds, ejaculating
toxic gas as fast as they can stroke their triggers. They open up on us
with rubber bullets and concussion grenades, and we stampede back down
Seneca and around the corner. The stampede becomes a fairly orderly
retreat as we book down 4^(th) Avenue, hurling everything we can get our
hands on out into the street to protect ourselves from their cars and
horses. Trash cans, newspaper stands, concrete tree planters, dumpsters,
construction barricades, anything that will stop them or slow them down.
The gas is inescapable but we grab the cans and throw them back. The
rubber bullets are legitimately scary but we chuck sticks, stones, and
bottles and hope for the best. I find myself on top of a newspaper stand
in the middle of 4^(th) Avenue, unleashing a psychotic stream of
invective at the interchangeable bullies who are approaching through the
smoke. âFUCK YOU, COWARDS!, IâM INVINCIBLE!â
This is happening all over town. They can move us but they cannot
disperse us. At 4^(th) and Union the worm is beginning to turn. The
cops, facing thousands and thousands of us now, are a little less gung
ho than they were at 5^(th) and Seneca. They form a line across 4^(th)
and we come to another standoff. Only this time no one is going to sit
down for them. I find myself on top of another newspaper stand in the
middle of 4^(th) Avenue, roaring at the top of my lungs. âI canât TELL
you how THRILLED I am to BE here right now. I LOVE every ONE of you,
like a SISTER or a BROTHER. There is NOWHERE, in the WORLD, EVER, that I
would RATHER BE then WHERE I AM right now. There is NOTHING I would
RATHER BE DOING than WHAT I AM DOING right now. I would RATHER be OUT
HERE than spend another FUCKING SECOND in my CAR, or at my JOB, or
WATCHING TV. I DONâT think these cops can say that. I DONâT think those
delegates can say that. I would rather EAT MORE TEAR GAS than any more
of their FUCKING fast food. I would rather DRINK MORE PEPPER SPRAY than
any more of their FUCKING soft drinks. I would rather DEAL WITH THAT
than ACCEPT THIS SHIT for another FUCKING SECOND. And I would rather DIE
LIVING than continue to LIVE DYING...â
Somebody hugs me. It has been so long since anyone has touched me that I
nearly melt in their arms. Someone else jumps up and roars, and then
someone else, and then someone else. I rest for a minute while a stout
Chicano man recounts some interesting news. While the servants were busy
terrorizing us and the rest of the blockades, the wily and mobile Black
Bloc dealt with their masters in kind. Masked little elves armed with
slingshots, sledgehammers, mallets chains, and crowbars attacked The
Gap, McDonaldâs, Niketown, Bank of America, Starbucks, Leviâs, Fidelity
Investment, Old Navy, Key Bank, Washington Mutual, Nordstromâs, US
Bankcorp, Planet Hollywood, and other manifestations of corporate
dominance, smashing windows and redecorating facades. I am ecstatic.
Those glittering towers are not invincible after all. The greatest trick
the vampires ever played was convincing us that garlic did not exist.
Let their facade be torn to pieces, and may the walls come tumbling
down.
The stout Chicano man tells me that during the L.A. riot he and his
friends burned down police stations and nothing else. We freestyle from
the newspaper stand until my larynx is throbbing. Eventually the cops
get impatient and one of them bucks my man full in the face with pepper
spray. I kiss him on the head, they club me and everyone else they can
reach, and back down 4^(th) Avenue I go, a phalanx of crocodiles in
ankylosaurus suits at my heels wreaking havoc and pain.
Yet another standoff at 4^(th) and Pike. The cops form a line across
4^(th) Avenue. This is getting repetitive. I have inhaled so much tear
gas, ingested so much pepper spray, and ducked so many concussion
grenades and rubber bullets that running the bulls on 4^(th) Avenue is
no longer novel or fun. Itâs just frustrating. We outnumber them almost
immeasurably, yet they still attack us with impunity. They hold all the
cards, they make all the rules, and they cheat all the time. I am
terrified. We are in no way seriously prepared to defend ourselves. All
it would take would be for one dumb ass aggro cop to decide to get his
rocks off and open fire for all the rest to follow suit. It would be a
massacre. Kent State. Bonfires smolder behind my eyes, and the smoke
rises out of my mouth.
I choose oneâat random, for they all look exactly the same. Every inch
of his body is hidden under black cyborg armor. He is armed to the
teeth. His face is hidden under a gas mask, face shield, and full
helmet. âOâNeilâ is embroidered on his bulletproof vest. I plant myself
squarely in front of his face and I stare dead into his eyes. He wonât
look at me. He blinks constantly, looks down, left, up, right; anywhere
but at me. It infuriates me almost beyond words that this coward has the
impudence to attack me when I am unarmed but lacks the courage to even
look me in the eyes. âCan you look me in the eyes? CAN YOU LOOK ME IN
THE EYES? LOOK ME IN THE EYES, OâNEIL.â Nothing.
I know why he wonât look at me. When he was halter-broken he joined his
trainers in a companionship stimulated not by love, but by hatredâhatred
for the âenemyâ who has always been designated as a barbarian, savage,
communist, jap, criminal, gook, subhuman, drug dealer, terrorist, scum;
less than human and therefore legitimate prey. I try to make it
impossible for him to label me as a faceless protester, the enemy. I
pull off my ski mask and continue to stare into his eyes. I tell him
that I am from the south, about fixing houses and laying floors and
loading tractor trailer trucks, about nearly getting killed in a car
wreck in October, about carrying my dog around crying to all the bushes
that she loved to root around in the day she died of cancer. I tell him
that we all have our stories, that there are no faceless pro-testers
here. Nothing.
âCan you look me in the eyes, OâNeil? I am a human being, and I refuse
to let you evade that. I wonât let you label me as a protester, and I
donât want to have to label you as a cop. I refuse to accept that they
have broken you completely, that there is not something left in you
which is still capable of empathizing with me. I want to be able to
treat you as an equal, but only if you prove to me that you are willing
to do the same. And the only way you can do that is by joining us, or
walking away.â
I remain dead still, staring into his weak cow eyes. He is blinking
excessively and is visibly uncomfortable. âCan you look me in the eyes,
OâNeil? The difference between me and you is that I want to be here and
you donât. I know why I am here. I am enjoying myself. I am reveling in
this. I am rejoicing. I have been waiting for this to happen since I was
a little kid. There is nowhere, in the world that I would rather be than
where I am right now. There is nothing I would rather be doing than what
I am doing right now. It has never been so magnificent to feel the
sublime power of life running through the marrow of my bones. I know
that you donât want to be here. I know that you donât know why you are
here. I know that you are not enjoying yourself. I know that you donât
want to be doing this. And no one is holding a gun to your head and
forcing you to. Wherever you want to be, go there, now. Whatever you
want to be doing, do it, now. Go home and get out my way. Go make love
with your girlfriend or boyfriend, go snuggle with your kids or dog, go
watch TV if thatâs what you want, but stay out of my way because this is
a lot more important to me than it is to you.â
I have not moved my feet or my eyeballs at all. I have been trying to
blink as little as possible. OâNeilâs eyes are quivering and squirming
to avoid me beneath the mask.
âOâNEIL! CAN YOU LOOK ME IN THE EYES? CAN YOU DO THAT FOR ME, OâNEIL?
CAN YOU LOOK ME IN THE EYES. Basically this whole âBattle of Seattleâ
boils down to the relationship between you and me. And really, there are
only two kinds of relationships that we can have anymore. If you can
either join us or walk away then you will be my brother, and I will
embrace you. If you cannot then you will be my enemy, and I will fight
you. The relationship that we are not going to have is the one where you
are dominant and I am subservient. That is no longer an option. That
will never be an option again.
âWhich kind of relationship do you want to have with me, OâNeil? Look
around you. Look at all of these people singing and dancing and making
music. Donât you see how beautiful this is? Donât you see how much more
healthy and strong and fulfilling and desirable and fun relationships
that rest on mutual respect and consent and understanding and solidarity
and love are than ones that rest on force and fear and coercion and
violence and hatred? Donât you see that the life and the world that we
are beginning to create out here is superior to the one that you have
been trained to accept? Donât you see that we are going to win? Donât
you want to be a part of this? I know you do because you still canât
look me in eyes. If you want to remain my enemy then so be it. But if
you want to be my brother all you have to do is join us or walk away.â
At this exact moment the Infernal Noise Brigade appears. For the first
time since I began this surreal monologue I look behind me. A small man
wearing a gas mask and fatigues is prancing about in front, dancing
lustily with two oversized black and green flags. Behind him two women
wearing gas masks and fatigues march side by side, each bearing an
oversized black and green mock wooden rifle. Two columns of about
fifteen march behind the women with the guns. They are all wearing gas
masks and fatigues, and they are all playing drums and horns and all
sorts of other noisemakers. They are making the most glorious uproar
that I have ever heard.
The Infernal Noise Brigade marches all the way to the front where we are
standing. When they reach the line the columns transform into a whirling
circle. We form more circles around them, holding hands and leaping
through the air, dancing around and around in concentric rings like a
tribe of elves. We dance with absolute abandon, in possibly the most
unrestrained explosion of sheer fury and joy I have ever seen. On one
side of the line across 4^(th) Avenue there is a pulsating festival of
resistance and life. On the other side there is a blank wall of
obedience and death. The comparison is impossible to miss. It hits you
over the head with a hammer.
When the dance is over I return to my post up in OâNeilâs face. I stare
into his eyes and invoke all the love and rage I can muster to fashion
an auger to bore through his mask and into his brain. And Cow Eyes cries
crocodile tears. His eyes are brimming, with red veins throbbing. His
cheeks are moist. He wonât look at me. âOâNeil, I donât care if you cry
or not. I donât care what youâre thinking right now. I only care about
what you do. Before long you will get orders to attack us, or one of you
will get impatient and provoke another confrontation. What are you going
to do? When that happens I am going to be standing right here. If you
choose to remain our enemy then you are going to have to hit me first.
You are going to have to hurt me first. I dare you to look me in the
eyes when you do it. You may be able to hurt me and not look at me. You
may be able to look at me and not hurt me. But you wonât be able to look
me in the eyes while you hurt me, because you are afraid you will lose
your nerve. You are afraid of me, and you should be.
âOâNeil, you all have been terrorizing us all day. If this goes on all
night we will have to start fighting back. And you and I will be
standing right here in the middle of it. I have no illusions about what
that means. Neither should you. We may get killed. But I would rather
deal with that than accept this one second longer. I would rather die
than give in to you. I donât think you can say that, can you, OâNeil?
Would you rather die than be my brother? Who are you dying for? Where
are they? Whoever gives you orders is standing behind you, man. Whoever
gives them orders is relaxing down at the station, and whoever gives
them orders is safe in some high rise somewhere, laughing at your
foolish ass! Why isnât your boss, and their boss, out here with you,
OâNeil, risking their lives and crying in the middle of 4^(th) Avenue?
Why should they? You do it all for them! What are you thinking? I just
donât get it. They donât care about you, hell, I care about you more
than they do. Youâre getting used, hustled, played, man, and you will be
discarded the minute you become expend-able. Please look me in the eyes.
Iâm serious, OâNeil, come dance with me...â
Someone whispers in my ear that another cop is crying down the line to
my right. For a fleeting moment I can feel it coming, the fiery dragon
breath of the day that will come when the servants turn their backs on
their masters and dance...
...And then itâs gone. Because OâNeil is not dancing. He is completely
beaten. His lifeless eyes donât even quiver or squirm. And he wonât look
at me. I could whisper in his nightmares for a thousand years, I could
burn my face onto the backs of his eyelids, I could stare at him every
morning from the bathroom mirror, but he would never look me in the
eyes. He is too well-trained, too completely broken, too weak to feel
compassion for the enemy. His eyes are dead. There is nothing left. The
magic words that could pierce his armor and resurrect him elude me, if
they exist at all.
âOâNeil, I know that you have been broken and trained. So have I. I know
that you are just following orders and just doing your job. I have done
the same. But we are ultimately responsible for our actions, and their
consequences. There is a life and a world and a community waiting for
you on this side of the line that can make you wild and whole again, if
you want them. But if you prefer to lay it all to waste, if you prefer
death and despair to love and life, if all of these words bounce off of
your armor and you still choose to hurt me then FUCK you, because the
Nuremberg defense doesnât fly.â
I have nothing left to say. I sing the last verse of my beaten heroesâ
song, softly, over and over and over again, staring into OâNeilâs eyes
and waiting for the inevitable. â...In our hands is placed a power
greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might of armies
magnified a thousand foldâwe can bring to birth a new world from the
ashes of the old...â
Eventually a cop down to my right either gets impatient or gets orders.
He grabs a guy, completely randomly, pulls him across the line, and
starts beating him. The crowd surges to rescue our friend, and OâNeil
makes his choice. âLOOK ME IN THE EYES, OâNEIL!â He clubs the person
standing next to me, and the cop standing next to him clubs me. âLOOK ME
IN THE EYES, MOTHERFUCKER!â But he never does. I ram into him as hard as
I can, praying that the sea behind me will finally break through the
wall, drown the both of us, and carry my friend away to safety. But I am
not strong enough, and the wall of death beats us back once more. Over
my shoulder I watch one cop walk up to a very small older woman and
unload a tank of pepper spray into her eyes. Her indomitable and bitter
face is the last thing I see before I have to run away.
There are no words that are poisonous enough to convey the venom that I
hold for OâNeil and all of the rest of his kind. These wretched scabs,
these Uncle Toms, these despicable bullies, these hellish machines,
these dead bodies are utterly beneath contempt. I look at their faces
and I feel nothing but hatred. I run down 4^(th) Avenue, ducking gas and
grenades, my eyes brimming with red veins throbbing. Training has
dehumanized me in OâNeilâs eyes, and OâNeil in mine.
This report was published shortly after the WTO protests by the RAND
Corporation, a think tank that touts its âobjectivityâ and purports to
âimprove policy and decision-making through research and analysis.â Any
perspective advanced by such a dubious entity should obviously be taken
with a grain of salt. That said, this analysis is noteworthy for its
comprehensive scope. Aspiring revolutionaries will be hard-pressed to
find a better summary of what took place on the other side of the
barricades that week.
Seattle, like many American cities, has self-appointed nicknames. One of
Seattleâs nicknames is âThe Emerald City,â a reference to its
perpetually soggy evergreen vegetation and to the mythical Land of Oz.
On November 30, 1999, Seattle awoke to the reality of an emerging global
protest movement. This movement was not created in Seattle. Other
protests with similar motives, participants, and strategies had been
happening in the United States and around the world for a considerable
time. What made the âN30â protests remarkable was the shock that we,
like Dorothy and Toto, were no longer in Kansas.
The World Trade Organization protests in Seattle marked a turning point
in national and international trade policy. The biggest outcome of the
protests was the resurgence of the American Leftâs influence on the
international trade issue. All in all, it was a stunning surprise to
many of the parties involved: the Direct Action Network coordinating the
protests, the AFL-CIOâs new foray into grass-roots politics, the federal
administration trying to steer a new course in national and
multinational trade policies, the Seattle Police who found themselves
leaderless when the dust settled, and Seattle Mayor Paul Schell, who was
left standing alone amidst the political wreckage in the aftermath.
The central fact of the protests is the utter surprise and confusion
that occurred during the initial confrontation on Tuesday morning. âIt
was a classic example of two armies coming into contact and immediately
experiencing the total collapse their battle plans,â said Daniel Junas,
a Seattle political researcher.
What exactly happened during the crucial hours of the Battle in Seattle
is shrouded in confusion and controversy, but the broad outlines can be
discerned. The street action falls into three distinct phases: first,
the Direct Action Network (DAN) protesters seized and held a handful of
strategic intersections, immobilizing the police. Second, the police
strategy fragmented over two contradictory goals: suppressing the DAN
protests and allowing the labor parade. Third, the labor parade failed
in its goal of controlling and diverting the DAN protesters away from
the Convention Center. The influx of reinforcements who abandoned the
labor parade and joined the DAN protests left the streets more firmly in
control of the protesters, despite the use of tear gas by police since
around 10 a.m.. By approximately 3 p.m. Tuesday, the battle was decided
and the Direct Action Network had prevailed in their goal of shutting
down the conference.
After that time, the outcome was certain. The battle continued for
several days, spreading into other areas of the city. By Thursday, the
World Trade Organization had capitulated and the police ceased attacking
civilians, thereby recognizing a conclusion reached before darkness fell
on Tuesday.
The Direct Action Network (DAN) represented an emerging species of
political organization based on networks rather than institutions. The
primary networked organizations in the Direct Action Network were a
coalition of groups such as the Rainforest Action Network, Art &
Revolution, and the Ruckus Society. Through the Direct Action Network,
these groups coordinated non-violent protest training, communications,
and collective strategy and tactics through a de-centralized process of
consultation/consensus decision-making.
The strategy and tactics of these newâand primarily
information-basedânetworks of non-governmental organizations evolved
from trends represented by the ad hoc mobilization committees of the
Viet Nam protest era, the âalternative summitsâ at recent world
environmental and human rights conferences, and the loose coalitions
which formed in opposition to U.S. policy during the Gulf War. Networks,
as opposed to institutions, are shaped by de-centralized command and
control structures, are resistant to âdecapitationâ attacks targeting
leaders, and are amorphous enough to weld together coalitions with
significantly different agendas while concentrating forces on a single
symbolic target.
Conflicts involving networks blur the distinction between offensive and
defensive. The overall strategic goal of the Direct Action Network was
to âshut downâ the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. The
âshut downâ was accomplished by a variety of independent but
strategically congruent actions summing up to a street blockade in the
immediate vicinity of the WTO conference. Once the blockade came into
being, the emphasis would shift to defending the blockade for as long as
possible in the streets. In the spotlight of media attention created by
the blockade, DAN hoped to launch a variety of informational operations
emphasizing the anti-democratic, neo-colonial, and anti-environmental
tendencies of trans-national trade agreements.
The Direct Action Networkâs goal was sufficiently broad to join together
two major WTO opponents. The DAN factions can be distinguished by their
varying focus on environmental or human rights issues.
The second major WTO opponent was American organized labor, the AFL-CIO.
The AFL-CIO represents a hierarchical institution which emphasizes
unitary, top-down command. There is little participation by rank and
file in union decision-making, though ceremonial elections are sometimes
held to legitimize leadership decisions. Essentially nationalist in
outlook, the AFL-CIO policy goals are directed more at American politics
and less at international issues. Simply stated, the AFL-CIOâs strategic
target was supporting and legitimizing President Clintonâs actions at
the conference through purely symbolic displays by a loyal opposition.
As will be seen, Clinton indicated in an interview on Tuesday afternoon
that there was strategic coordination between his administration and the
AFL-CIO in regards to the parade and protests. In his remarks, President
Clinton reinforced and repeated the false distinction between the
AFL-CIO parade as âlegitimateâ and the DAN protests as âcriminal
dissent.â This false distinction underscores the very reason for the
protests in the first place: the exclusion of dissenting opinion from
trade policy decisions.
Overall, the advantage went to the Direct Action Network, since their
informational strategy effectively enclosed the coordinated strategy of
the AFL-CIO and the federal government. As will be seen, at the critical
moment in the street actions, the balance shifted to the Direct Action
Network as non-union protesters and a dissenting union members left the
AFL-CIO parade and joined the street protests, effectively sealing the
success of the Direct Action Networkâs day-long blockade.
On the other side of the conflict, the World Trade Organization and its
allies composed a much more divided picture. The purpose of the WTO
conference was to produce a new framework for the next round of
negotiations on international trade. If successful, the âSeattle roundâ
would resolve some of the disputes between industrialized nations. To a
lesser extent, the WTO deliberations would broaden the scope of existing
trade agreements to include developing countries. Prior to the Seattle
conference, the WTO was dominated by the three major trading blocs: the
western hemisphere block organized around the NAFTA treaties, the
European Economic Community (EEC), and the Asian industrialized nations.
The Seattle talks were the first which included developing countries.
The complex tensions inside the WTO were reflected in its structure: on
one side, the âgreen roomâ discussions dominated by the more powerful
WTO members; on the other, and the general meeting where the entire
bodyâincluding developing nationsâwould attempt to ratify the âgreen
roomâ decisions.
The tensions surrounding this meeting were considerably greater than
previous. The trade disagreements between the NAFTA nations (led by the
U.S.), the EEC (led by France) and the Asian nations (led by Japan)
promised to be major stumbling blocks. At the same time, the failure of
the WTO consensus process would maintain and extend the dominance of the
industrialized nations over the newer members. Even in the absence of
protests outside the meeting, the tensions inside made it very likely
that the Seattle round of negotiations would be off to a rocky start.
All in all, the American posture consisted of blocking agreements while
giving the appearance of support.
President Clintonâs strategy was concentrated around his appearance at
the conference, rather than the success of the conference itself. If the
talks failed to produce a new framework, then the existing agreements
(which heavily favored the shared interests of industrialized countries)
would continue to provide the basis for international negotiations. In
terms of the protests, the federal strategy and national prestige hinged
simply on getting Clinton into the conference.
Next on the list of WTO allies is the City of Seattle and Mayor Paul
Schell. The City of Seattle, as host of the conference and lead
jurisdiction, was the center of responsibility for containing the
demonstrations. Aside from this hospitality, Schellâs political concerns
were complex. First of all, the primary reason for Seattle hosting the
WTO conference was to promote regional trade interests: principally
timber and forest products, wheat, and a variety of high tech
industries, of which Microsoft and Boeing were the best known examples.
Secondly, Schell was a liberal Democrat and had strong ties to the
Democratic Party and its main source of financial support, the AFL-CIO.
Third and last, Schell was deeply beholden to the progressive Democrats
and environmentalists who were a key political constituency in Seattle,
though mostly excluded from the Democratic Party by the labor interests.
Schellâs attempts to satisfy all of these interests were so riddled with
contradictions that he became unable to control events and was
ultimately left to twist slowly in the wind, abandoned by nearly
everyone.
The direct point of contact between the Direct Action Network and the
WTO was the Seattle Police Department (SPD). Under the leadership of
Chief Norm Stamper, the SPD had become a national laboratory for a
progressive philosophy of law enforcement known as âcommunity policing.â
Recently, the relations between the police and Mayor Schellâs
administration had not been good. One of the outcomes of Chief Stamperâs
community policing initiative had been the formation of a police
accountability organization which reported separately to the Chief and
the City Council through two separate boards. The road to community
policing had been rough and rocky, particularly in light of the
resistance from rank and file cops. These frictions heightened the
tensions surrounding the contract negotiations between the City and the
police union.
The total size of the Seattle Police Department was roughly 1,800
officers, of whom about 850 were available for street duty throughout
the city. Of these, 400 were assigned to the WTO demonstrations. Seattle
had about the same ratio of police to population as Chicago, but
Seattleâs smaller size limited in the number of officers it could field
against the protestersâunless, of course, the SPD entered into some sort
of joint WTO operation with other police agencies in the region. By
Wednesday, the second day of the protests, more than 500 state and
regional police, plus some 200 National Guard would be deployed.
The largest two outside police forces available to Seattle were the King
County Sheriffâs department and the Washington State Patrol. Sheriff
Dave Reichert was a conservative Republican and political foe of Mayor
Schell. This reflected the long-standing division between Seattle and
the King County government. The suburban fringe surrounding Seattle was
the traditional political battleground in which statewide elections were
fought. The outlying areas went to the Republicans and the heavily
urbanized areas went to the Democrats. The suburbs swung back and forth
between the two. The State Patrol chief was responsible to Gov. Gary
Locke, a nominal Democrat who rose to the governorship through the King
County Council. The governor also controlled the National Guard,
although these forces couldnât be committed without the declaration of a
state of emergency by the governor and the request of the mayor. Neither
the King County police nor the State Patrol were supporters of community
policing policies, which meant that outside assistance would entail
Chief Stamper presiding over a joint command divided by fundamental
policy differences.
Mayor Schell decided that he and Chief Stamper would deal with the
demonstrations without the direct support of other law enforcement
agencies. Most critics have claimed that this decision was the reason
the protests succeeded. There are strong reasons to believe that this is
not so. The Tuesday protests would have succeeded in attaining their
goals (though in a less spectacular fashion) even if the police presence
had included the outside agencies.
One of the considerations which weighed against the employment of
outside police on Tuesday was the strong possibility that they would
attack the union parade and city residents. The deployment of outside
police reinforcements was delayed long enough to protect the union
parade. But the police attacks on city residents occurred on Capitol
Hill, on Tuesday and Wednesday night. This was an area in which Schellâs
political support was strongest and also where many of the protesters
were staying while in Seattle.
Two more players deserve examination, especially since one ended up
dominating the national media coverage. Neither of these two groups was
numerous nor strategically significant in terms of the overall outcome
of the WTO protests. However, both ended up effectively in control of
the informational conflict in which the media was both the battleground
and the prize.The first of these groups were the so-called âAnarchists
from Eugene,â more correctly known as the âBlack Blocs.â The total
number of Black Bloc participants numbered between one and two hundred
people. The appearance of Black Blocs at protests is a relatively recent
phenomenon. The purpose of Black Blocs is to show a visible presence of
the more radical anarchist factions. A Black Bloc consists of protesters
who wear black, carry anarchist flags and banners, and take a more
confrontational approach to protest.
In an interview in Active Transformation, an anarchist journal, one
participant in the Seattle Black Blocs explained it this way:
â...Anarchists were not isolated in the black bloc. There were
anarchists involved in every possible way. There were anarchist labor
activists, puppeteers, non-violent lockdown blockaders, marching
musicians, medics, communication people, media people, whateverâas well
as a group of about two hundred in black masks who had prepared, also in
affinity groups, to do as much symbolic physical damage to
multi-national capitalism as possible. I have seen black blocs used in
protests in the U.S. a lot but never so successfully. It is important to
note that the black bloc was not the result of some conspiracy. It too
happened quite spontaneously, with people who came from all over the
countryâwith similar desires.â
The mediaâs tag-line of âAnarchists from Eugeneâ was one of those lazy
half-truths which sums up to a conscious lie. The half-truth was that
people from Eugene participated in the Black Blocs. The other unreported
half of the truth was that people from Seattle and the surrounding
region committed much of the vandalism and nearly all of the looting.
These people were not part of the Black Blocs, nor were their actions
politically inspired. The lie was that the Black Bloc faction engaged in
property destructionâwhich numbered perhaps 40 people at mostâcaused the
police violence in the streets. The violence began hours before the
window-breaking spree.
When literature captures a concise image which accurately portrays a
larger whole, it is known as an archetype. When that process fails and
the dominant image obscures the truth, it is stereotyping. In the middle
of December, the Seattle Weekly and KPLU Radio sponsored a panel on
media coverage of the WTO. The consensus emerged that both local and
national media had succumbed to âlazy media shorthandâ and failed to
report the overall story in either a balanced or accurate way. The
message which still hasnât penetrated the media is that the Black Blocs
accomplished an international coup of âculture jammingâ by selectively
targeting a handful of retailers and banks for broken windows. In
committing this vandalism, they conformed to pre-established media
stereotypes of âviolent anarchistsâ and effectively hijacked several
weeks of coverage in a manner that served their propaganda goals
admirably.
The primary target of the Black Blocs was neither the WTO nor the
businesses whose windows were broken. The Black Blocs were in Seattle to
radicalize the WTO opponents. And that is precisely what they didâwith
the significant assistance of the media and second wild card group.
The other wild card group was that segment of the Seattle Police
Department which actively sought to disrupt the chain of command and
force the initial confrontation with demonstrators into chaos. To put it
bluntly, these officers comprised the faction within the police
department that had been most threatened by Chief Stamperâs reformsâthe
criminal element. âOrganized crime is the continuation of business by
criminal means,â says Dr. Phil Williams, international expert on
organized crime. And criminal business, just like legitimate business,
requires the active support and participation of law enforcement.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Seattle went through a series of
scandals involving organized crime and police corruption. The popular
view of organized crime as an âunder-worldâ operation, totally divorced
from everyday business and politics was seriously challenged by the work
of William J. Chamblis, a sociologist at the University of Washington.
Chamblisâ study of organized crime in Seattle, On the Take: From Petty
Crooks to Presidents, showed that âcrime is not a by-product of an
otherwise effectively working political economy, it a main product of
that economy. Crime is in fact a cornerstone on which the political and
economic relations of societies are constructed.â Rather than a âfew bad
apples,â corruption is the normal state of affairs. Chamblisâ work and
other research shows that âorganized crime really consists of a
coalition of politicians, law-enforcement people, businessmen, union
leaders and (in some ways least important of all) racketeers.â
Seattleâs police history has been as color-fully sordid as any other
American cityâs. The criminal economy of drugs, prostitution, gambling,
and the financial apparatus which such large-scale businesses require is
no different in Seattle than elsewhere. From Seattleâs beginnings around
the âSkid Roadâ at the Denny sawmill to the current flap over âpolice
misconduct,â police morale has been a reliable indicator of the level of
corruption. Recently, morale had been low, which meant that the crooked
cops were on the defensive. The focus of the criminal elementâs
displeasure had been Chief Stamper and his Senior Leader-ship Teamâor,
as the departmentâs rank and file pronounced it, the âsluts.â The
criminal element among the Seattle Police Department had only one goal:
embarrass Mayor Schell and Chief Stamper.
The initial approach by the opponents of police accountability was the
circulation of mutinous talk regarding the âsoftnessâ of the official
strategy for dealing with the demonstrators. During an October crowd
control training session, Assistant Chief Ed Joiner answered questions
about protester violence by saying that there was nothing to worry about
and the protests would be non-violent. SPD Officer Brett Smith and
others claim the FBI and Secret Service had briefed King County
Sheriffâs officers to âfully anticipate that five to six officers would
be lost during the protests, either seriously injured or killed,â as
Smith told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Dan Raley. When
Officer Smith and others spoke with their commander about the stories
coming from the King County police, they were told not to spread rumors.
It appears likely that statements predicting violent attacks were part
of the Sheriffâs training and it is certain that the predictions were
hysterical and provocative.
The success in undermining Chief Stamperâs command depended on the
breakdown of law and order in the streets. Whose law and what order was
the question. If the mayor and police chief could be maneuvered into
declaring a civil emergency, then the regional, state and federal
agencies would be able to enter the conflict and the hard-liners
strategy would prevail for a while.
The geography of the WTO conference site played a central role in
determining the success of the protests. The accompanying illustrations
show the field of battle and its significant features.
First and most importantly, the Washington Trade and Convention Center
is located on the edge of downtown. It is built over the I-5 freeway and
is accessible from only two sides. As a site for a blockade, it is
perfect. The area is triangular, with the freeway side inaccessible. The
Direct Action Network blockaded the area along the north and west
streets. The blockade was several blocks deep and concentrated on a
dozen intersections.
Secondly, the sites of two major skirmish-es which dominated media
attention, Capitol Hill and the Pike Place Market, had nothing to do
with conducting the conference or moving delegates between the
Convention Center, the Paramount Theatre or the downtown hotels.
Likewise, the area in which the Black Bloc vandalism occurred is outside
the blockade area and not part of the streets directly connecting the
Convention Center with the Westin Hotel or the Paramount Theatre.
Capitol Hill and the Pike Place Market form two poles along the major
axis of crowd mobility, the named streets which run northeast/southwest
through the downtown. The Market is built on a steep bluff which formed
Seattleâs original shoreline. The bluff forms a geographic barrier which
stops all movement towards the waterfront. Capitol Hill is a dense
residential neighborhoodâthe densest in the city. Broadway, the main
street which forms the backbone of the Capitol Hill commercial district,
runs north/south along the crest. There is a steep change in elevation
along Seattleâs east-west axis running from the crest of Capital hill to
the waterfront.
The area immediately to the north of the convention center is
predominantly open parking lots and small buildings, compared to the
more densely built-up downtown. To the west, the long blocks of the
downtown avenues (7^(th), 6^(th), 5^(th), ending in 1^(st) Ave) form a
barrier which channels movement into a few streets (Pike, Pine, Union,
and University). Blockades on these streets effectively shut off the
area. The east and south sides of the Convention Center are cut off by
the freeway.
To maintain effective control of the area, the police would have needed
a perimeter roughly on the order of Thursdayâs âno protest zone.â Given
the decision to rely on the Seattle Police alone, this lengthy perimeter
was impossible to control with 400 officers. The additional resources of
county, state, and federal forces would have been hard pressed to
maintain such a perimeter in the face of the approximately 40,000
protesters, demonstrators, and parade participants present on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, these additional police forces were available and the
number of protesters was approximately halved. Even with this sizable
shift in the numbers on opposing sides, the police were unable to
control downtown effectively.
Amidst all the criticismâmostly coming from law enforcement agencies
which failed even more disastrously than the Seattle Police Department
in maintaining orderâabout the policeâs âlack of preparednessâ for the
demonstrations, the larger perimeter, increased security troops, and
suspension of civil liberties which accompanied the mayorâs declaration
of civil emergency failed miserably in the face of much smaller numbers
of protesters on Wednesday.
The geography of Seattleâs downtown favors protesters. In the last
decade, two major civil disturbancesâaccompanying first the Gulf War
protests and the âRodney Kingâ riotsâfollowed much the same path over
the same streets, as did the numerous protests during the Vietnam War.
Given sufficient numbers and even the most hare-brained strategy,
protesters have the ability to dominate the streets of Seattle.
None of the strategies employed by the three major players in Tuesdayâs
conflict was particularly hare-brained, but the most unrealistic
belonged to the AFL-CIO, at least in the sense of the battle for control
of the streets. The AFL-CIO strategy was to hold a rally at the Seattle
Center and then march downtownâbut not too far. Central to the AFL-CIO
strategy was the notion that if they could contain the majority of the
demonstrators and keep them out of the downtown area, when Clinton
announced his pro-labor and protectionist policies, the AFL-CIO would be
able to claim credit. All the AFL-CIO had to do was prevent any
effective protests by groups not under their control and allow the media
to spin the tale of how labor caused a âsudden changeâ in national
policy. The AFL-CIO proved to be unequal to the task of rounding up all
the protesters and keeping them muzzled.
The Direct Action Network planned more effectively, and in the end more
realistically, with a âPeopleâs Convergenceâ consisting of three waves
of blockaders enclosing the WTO conference site. The first wave
consisted of âaffinity groupsâ who had opted for non-violent civil
disobedience and arrest. Their job was to penetrate the area close to
the conference site, seize the dozen strategic intersections which
controlled movement in the protest target, and hang on until
reinforcements arrived. The second wave comprised protesters who had
opted for non-violent demonstration and not being arrested. Their task
was to protect the first wave from police violence and plug up the
streets by sheer numbers and passive resistance. The third wave was a
march by the Peopleâs Assembly, composed mostly of environmental and
human rights groups who elected to participated in the street protests
instead of the labor parade. This group entered downtown from the south
at about 1 p.m. and marched to the Paramount Theatre inside the protest
zone. The first and second waves were loosely organized into a dozen
simultaneously con-verging affinity groups, swarming the protest target
from all directions. Each affinity group blockaded a specific
intersection. The blockade would be maintained as long as possible until
police had arrested sufficient demonstrators to regain control of the
streets.
The Direct Action Networkâs strategy is a classic example of ânetwarâ
conflict. Netwar is a concept introduced in the early 1990s by two
researchers at the RAND corporation, a government-funded think tank
which began under the auspices of the U.S. Air Force. In a now-seminal
paper titled âCyberwar is Coming!â, RAND analysts David Ronfeldt and
John Arquilla proposed a new framework for viewing conflict in the
information age. The essence of netwar is the emerging forms of conflict
in which one or more of the major participants consist of networks,
rather than institutions. The central feature of informational conflicts
is the struggle for understanding and knowledge, as opposed to more
traditional conflicts which focus on controlling territories or
resources.
Netwar is inherently less violent than other forms of conflict,
particularly when it involves non-governmental organizations dedicated
to human rights and peace causes. One of the first full-blown
manifestations of netwar was the Zapatista conflict in Chiapas. The
networked intervention of international groups placed very real limits
on the use of violence by the Mexican government in suppressing the
insurrection.
In the case of the Direct Action Network, the central prize consisted of
the understanding that the WTO multi-lateral trade agreements are
intensely corrosive to democracy, at least that form of democracy which
entails a knowledge-able public participating in policy formation in
meaningful ways.
Netwars are fought by networks; collections of groups and organizations
guided by non-hierarchical command structures which communicate through
âall-pointsâ communications channels of considerable bandwidth and
complexity. The DAN communications channels blanketed the Seattle area
and had global reach via the internet. Institutions, such as corporate
media, police and the AFL-CIO, tend to depend on narrow communications
channels which are highly centralized and hierarchical.
Networks operate by âswarmingâ their opponents like bees or white blood
cellsâmore like organisms than machines. They approach stealthily and
from many directions in offense. In defense, they can react like
anti-bodies moving towards points of attack. Netwarâs line between
offense and defense can be blurred, leaving opponents unclear about what
is occurring and how to respond. Throughout the protests, the Direct
Action Network were able to offensively swarm their opponents
repeatedly, as shown by the seizure of key intersections on Tuesday and
the easy penetration of the âno-protestâ zone on Wednesday. The
anti-body defense was shown when crowds moved towards police attacks or
mass arrests. The swarming action was also apparent when numerous groups
within the AFL-CIO rally and parade successfully resisted efforts by the
union leadership to keep them from supporting the DAN blockade of the
WTO convention site.
The network form of organization is particularly robust and resilient in
the face of adversity. The decentralized command and control structure
allows rapid shifts of strategic targeting. It is highly resistant to
âdecapitationâ (attacks which target leadership) and the disruption of
communication channels. All three of these features were present during
the WTO protests. The diffuse communications network allowed protesters
to continuously adapt to changing conditions. The consultative form of
decision-making enhanced the ability to coordinate large-scale actions.
The police attempts to arrest âringleadersâ on Wednesday were fruitless,
since leadership was widely shared throughout the network of protest
groups. The communications network was continuously being expanded and
modified. On Tuesday, police cut off many of the Direct Action Network
communications channels, but in a few hours a new and larger network
based on cell phones was functioning.
The competing strategies of the Direct Action Network and the AFL-CIO
put the police in the classically disastrous position of dividing their
forces and inviting defeat in detail. The AFL-CIO rally and parade was
planned in con-junction with the police. Although it would not require
much more in the way of security than any other parade, it still
demanded adequate coverage at the rally and along the parade route. The
security requirements at the WTO conference site were subject to
considerably more uncertainty. The DAN organizers had participated in
lengthy negotiations with the police and had made their blockade
strategy known, at least in general outline. DAN had repeatedly and
publicly stated that their goal was to âshut down the WTO.â Mayor Schell
and Chief Stamper were faced with the difficult decision of allocating
forces against two different opponents using markedly different
strategies.
The ultimate police decision was to rely on a âtripwireâ outer perimeter
which would trigger the arrests at the Convention Center, backed up with
an inner perimeter to prevent the Direct Action Network protesters from
entering the WTO conference. Working with the labor leaders, the police
would use the AFL-CIO rally as a means of containing the crowds and
keeping the majority of them away from the Convention Center. Much has
been made of the decision to rely on a close perimeter defense of the
Convention Center, but a larger perimeter and more police would have
simply moved the line of battle and dispersed the police, as occurred on
Wednesday.
The real question facing the police was whether they would be
confronting a protest or a parade. The police put their money on the
parade and lost. The labor parade as the dominant factor of the protests
was the least likely of all outcomes, but the only one which the police
had a chance of controlling.
The current theory of controlling protests usually revolves around the
willingness of pro-testers to be steered into some venue in which the
protest can be neutralized, marginalized, and trivialized. When this
agreement doesnât exist, the older police strategy is to treat a protest
as a riotâgas, baton charges, assault, and occasion-ally arrests. On
Tuesday, the first strategy failed and on Wednesday the second strategy
failed.
Underlying the failure of the police strategy for controlling the
demonstrations was a fundamental failure of intelligence. The picture
which law enforcement built of the developing protests was a catastrophe
of wishful thinking, breathing their own exhaust, and the most classic
of all blundersâmistaking tactics for strategy. The Seattle police and
all of the responsible federal law enforcement agencies had the
information necessary to appraise the situation. What was lacking was a
comprehensive understanding of the strategy of the protests. Without
that, all of the pieces of the intelligence puzzle were not going to fit
into an accurate assessment and strategic plan.
The wishful thinking centered on the alliance between the police and the
AFL-CIO. The plan for the labor parade to engulf the protests and steer
them into a marginal venue was never a real possibility. The Direct
Action Network and their allies had no intention of turning the protest
organizing over to the unions. On Sunday, November 28, Teamsters
president Hoffa was trumpeting Pat Buchanan as âthe only presidential
candidate who understands the trade issue.â This was hardly the sort of
analysis which would convince progressive activists to submit to the
unionsâ nationalist and protectionist agenda. The Left has had decades
of experience being sold down the river by organized labor and has
learned that lesson well. If there was going to be an alliance between
protesters and paraders, it was going to be on the protestersâ terms or
not at all. The city officials chose to believe the labor assurances of
controlling the protesters. This led the police to drastically
underestimate the number of protesters, who were at least as numerous as
the paraders. Neither the police nor the unions foresaw the Direct
Action Network being able to mount a successful protest. Once that
assumption became the basis for planning, any evidence to the contrary
was disregarded or misinterpreted.
The intelligence picture was further confused by the claims of federal
law enforcement officials that the protests would be violent. The
publicly released text of one FBI forecast was replete with hysterical
predictions: â...elements within the protest community are planning to
disrupt the conference... environmental or animal rights extremists or
anarchist-induced violence... computer-based attacks on WTO-related web
sites, as well as key corporate and financial sites... Corporate
sponsors... may be subject to surveillance efforts from these groups...
to identify the residences of key employees of sponsoring
corporations... These employees should remain alert for individuals who
may be targeting them in furtherance of anti-WTO activities...
Recipients should remain sensitive to threats made by anti-WTO groups.â
Buried within this froth was, âThe FBI assesses the potential threat of
violence, to include criminal acts of civil disturbance, as low to
medium for the Seattle area during the time frame of the WTO Meeting.â
Asked by reporters what âlow to mediumâ meant, FBI spokesman Ray Lauer
refused to answer, citing the âlaw-enforcement sensitiveâ nature of the
report and the âcontroversy concerning planning over WTO.â An anonymous
law enforcement source cited by the Seattle Times stated that âlow to
mediumâ covered anything from simple civil disobedience to an Oklahoma
City-style terrorist bombing.
Nowhere in the FBI âTerrorist Threat Advisoryâ was the slightest inkling
of what was going to be happening in the streets beyond the fact that
the conference was going to be âdisrupted.â The Direct Action Network
and AFL-CIO plans had been trumpeted loudly, widely, and in considerable
detail in the press by the organizers, summing up to non-violent civil
disobedience shutting down the conference and an ineffectual parade
designed to keep protesters away from the Convention Center. The city
officials at the top elected to pick and choose among information to
support their plans. The front-line officers did the same, if with
opposite results. The rumors within the police department (fantasy or
otherwise) about federal expectations of dead and wounded police added
to the unreality.
Netwar conflicts are struggles for understanding and information. The
FBI fantasies of violent terrorists directing the protests blinded and
disabled the police. The more inaccurate the assessment of opposing
forces, the greater the advantage to the side which possesses
âtopviewââcomprehensive and realistic understanding.
By Monday evening, November 30, the forces had aligned themselves. The
Direct Action Network planned to shut down the WTO conference by
swarming the streets. The AFL-CIO planned to hold a rally and parade in
an effort to influence national trade policyâand the upcoming
presidential elections. Police Chief Norm Stamper had decided the
protests could be peacefully controlled by his own forces without
outside assistance, knowing that the price of assistance could be the
peace. The mayor had decided to let the AFL-CIO control his actions on
Tuesday, hoping against all evidence that the unions would swallow and
control the protesters. The Seattle Police Department was tasked with
preventing the protests while allowing the labor parade. The outside law
enforcement agencies were champing at the bit to enter into the fray,
but as long as the SPD maintained order, they had to sit on the
sidelines. The FBI and Secret Service cried doom and gloomâwhile signing
off on Mayor Schell and Chief Stamperâs plan. The Black Blocs were
milling around the edges, fondling their crowbars and dreaming of
chaos.What would happen next was anybodyâs guess, but the best guessers
would win and the others would lose.
Itâs a hackneyed truism that no plan of battle survives contact with the
opposition. This is exactly what happened on the morning of November 30,
1999 in Seattle.
The Direct Action Network protesters expected to show up, cross the
âtripwiresâ of the flimsy police barriers and be arrested, probably with
a light seasoning of pepper spray. The police on the streets expected to
disperse the protesters before noon and maybe have a little tussle doing
it. In the meantime, they were going to maintain discipline, show
restraint, and ânot be the spark.â The mayor and the chief of police
expected a paltry handful of demonstrators to show up downtown and get
arrested in a mutual display of civility. The AFL-CIO expected to
dominate the media coverage with a colorful parade from the Seattle
Center towardsâbut not too close toâdowntown. The Black Bloc expected to
do a little graffiti and smash some carefully selected windows just as
soon as the police got too preoccupied with the demonstrators. The FBI,
if their âTerrorist Threat Advisoryâ can be believed, were preparing to
counter a terrorist onslaught in cyberspace while combating terrorist
home invasions or kidnap-pings. Actually, some of the FBI were dressing
up in black protester disguises, complete with masks, and getting ready
to join in the street party with the Black Bloc as close observers.
At 5 a.m. Tuesday morning, Washington State Patrol Chief Annette
Sandberg had coffee at the Starbucks near the Convention Center. Nobody
would be having coffee there that evening, as it would be smashed and
looted. Sandberg saw demonstrators moving into strategic positions
before any police had arrived. The converging columns of the Direct
Action Network began to shut down Seattle.
The first Direct Action Network âarrestâ affinity groups moved in on the
strategic intersections in the vicinity of the Convention Center.
Afterwards, these protesters said that they were surprised by the
absence of any police presence on the streets. In many locations, the
âarrestâ groups arrived earlier than the ânon-arrestâ groups which were
supposed to protect them from removal by the police. The news
photographs of these initial âlock-downâ groups have a surrealistic air
to them. In the empty streets after dawn, groups of protesters lock
themselves together with bicycle locks or tubes covering their linked
arms to prevent police from removing them individually.
King County Sheriff Dave Reichert says he got a telephone call at 8 a.m.
from a county detective. âHe said, âSheriff, weâre trapped... We have no
backup,ââ Reichert claimed. âI had officers barricaded in the hotel with
a mob literally pounding on the glass, and there was nobody to help
them. Nobody.â Reichert wasnât on the scene, but already he was seeing
âmobs.â KIRO-7 television crews were at the same location and show lines
of grinning demonstrators holding hands and blocking the streetâno âmob
literally pounding on the glass.â
By 8 a.m., most of the key intersections had been seized by the
protesters, now reinforced by their second wave. Meanwhile, at the
Memorial Stadium at the Seattle Center, the gates were opening for the
AFL-CIO rally scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. Chartered busses from around
the region have been on the road for some time, carrying a mixture of
union members and pro-testers to Seattle. The AFL-CIO had done a mass
mailing throughout Washington State, sending tasteful green postcards to
non-union supporters of a variety of liberal and progressive
organizations. âJoin the March of the Century,â the cards read. The
AFL-CIO strategy of parading without protesting dovetailed neatly with
the city plans for a minuscule protest and a media-genic parade.
As the number of protesters increased, the 400 police remained in their
lines around the Convention Center or at their positions at the Memorial
Stadium. The slow infiltration of demonstrators made it difficult for
the police to gauge the intentions of the crowd. Though the police
didnât realize it, the Direct Action Network had already swarmed them
and now shifting to a defensive strategy of holding on to the streets
that they now controlled. The flimsy rope and netting barriers, the
âtripwireâ at the Paramount Theatre, went down as protesters walked
towards the line of city busses next to the theater. The busses were a
second line of defense, separating the police from the crowd.
By 9:10 a.m., âcrowd-control efforts were en-countering difficulty,â
according to Washington State Patrol Chief Sandberg. She placed troopers
throughout Western Washington on alert. The day was barely started and
the police plan was already beginning to break down. The Secret Service,
responsible for the security of federal and visiting government
officials, discovered that the streets between the Convention Center,
the adjacent hotels and the Paramount Theaterâa distance of up to five
blocks along some routesâwere closed by protesters. âIt hadnât taken
long for things not to be working very well.â said Ronald Legan, the
special agent in charge of the Seattle office of the Secret Service.
Though the police didnât realize it, the Direct Action Network plan had
achieved its goal. They had blockaded the streets and shut down the WTO.
According to the agreed-upon script, the police would now arrest the
protesters. Unfortunately, the protesters had been so successful at
blockading the area around the convention center that police couldnât
move. It makes no sense to arrest someone if you canât remove them from
the area. The next phase of the protest plan was to hang on to the
streets as long as possible. Since the police remained stationary for
the most part, other than slowly moving single vehicles through the
crowds, there was little for the protesters to do but enjoy themselves
with chants, singing, and drumming. The overall mood was festive rather
than hostile. The protesters had won, though it was too early for anyone
to know that for sure. Until several hours after dark, the Direct Action
Network would control all movement in the triangle of streets under
blockade.
Strategic surprise doesnât occur in the field so much as in the mind of
the opponent. The longer itâs delayed, the more complete its effects. In
the case of Mayor Schell, the surprise and disbelief would dominate his
actions until late afternoon. By 9:30 a.m., the police command post was
being inundated by reports from the streets that control of the
situationâmeaning the ability to move police and delegates through the
streetsâhad been lost.
The divisions between the rival commanders began to widen as the morning
wore on. âThis was not an integrated command structure,â King County
Sheriff Dave Reichert said. âWhile everybody was at the table, it was
made clear that the rest of us were relegated to supporting roles.
Seattle was running the show.â
Shortly after 10 a.m., the Seattle Police Department got their show on
the road. The Seattle Police began using tear gas to clear the streets.
Itâs still not clear if the order was issued by Assistant Chief Ed
JoinerâChief Stamper had delegated control of the WTO operation to him
and did not arrive at the commandersâ meeting until late that
afternoonâor if was a spontaneous decision made by officers in the
street. The use of gas may have been an effort to open a pathway into
the protest area from outside, as the gas was fired at on Sixth Avenue,
between University and Union Streets. This is the extreme southern end
of the triangular area blockaded by the Direct Action Network. The
Seattle Times said âpolice used gas to disperse demonstrators massing.â
Police officials later explained that the gas was an attempt to expand
and re-connect their now isolated perimeters inside the crowds. None of
these explanations makes much sense.
The events surrounding the decision to use gas continue to be cloaked in
confusion and controversy. Later claims that the police resorted to gas
in response to widespread violent attacks and vandalism are now known to
be absolutely untrue. The counter-claims that police were unprovoked and
that the crowds were non-confrontational are equally untrue. The more
aggressive demonstrators had moved towards the police positions and
videotapes clearly show that there was no buffer space between the
opposing sides in many areas. One segment aired on KIRO TV shows members
of the Black Bloc confronting police and being extremely provocative,
but not attacking anyone or committing vandalism. The police view of the
crowd was framed by these more aggressive demonstrators, while the vast
majority of the crowd was unable to see the police and was in a giddy,
triumphant mood.
After the first canisters were fired, the use of tear gas and pepper
spray spread rapidly throughout the protest area.
With the release of the gas, mood in the streets rapidly changed. The
police were successful in advancing against the crowd. There were no
instances where police charges were repulsed, or where the crowds
counter-attacked and cut off police. One major effort to re-open the
street connecting the Paramount Theatre to the hotels moved the crowds
back until running out of steam. In short, the police tactics were of
limited success and ineffective.
The net effect of the use of gas and the police charges was to cause the
crowds to surge from one point to another without allowing police to
gain control of the streets. In the midst of the melee, the âlock-downâ
affinity groups remained in place, blocking intersections and anchoring
the protest to the area around the convention center. Police gassed and
pepper-sprayed the immobile groups, but could not arrest them and remove
them from the area due to the continued blockade. These tactics were
both ineffective in getting the blockaders to move and successful in
infuriating the crowds who saw their main mission as the protection of
these groups. The crowds were now frightened and angry, but determined
to maintain control of the streets.
The overall strategic situation remained unchanged, despite the tactical
chaos. The protesters numbers were sufficient to keep the blockade
intact, though it was now a blockade of continuous movement. The police
remained isolated inside the protest area without an open avenue to the
outside through which arrestees could be removed. Both sides remained
under the overall command of their respective strategies, regardless of
the excitement. The area involved in the disorderâas it clearly was
after an hour of tear gas and chaosâspread down Pike and Pine Streets.
The protests remained centered on the Convention Center. Although the
crowds expanded into the surrounding blocks under the police attacks,
they kept surging back to protect the âlock-downâ affinity groups
holding the key intersections.
The cohesion of the Direct Action Network was partly due to their
improvised communications network assembled out of cell phones, radios,
police scanners, and portable computers. Protesters in the street with
wireless Palm Pilots were able to link into continuously updated web
pages giving reports from the streets. Police scanners monitored
transmissions and provided some warning of changing police tactics. Cell
phones were widely used.
Kelly Quirke, Executive Director of the Rainforest Action Network,
reports that early Tuesday, âthe authorities had successfully squashed
DANâs communications system.â The solution to the infrastructure attack
was quickly resolved by purchasing new Nextel cell phones. According to
Han Shan, the Ruckus Societyâs WTO action coordinator, his organization
and other protest groups that formed the Direct Action Network used the
Nextel system to create a cellular grid over the city. They broke into
talk groups of eight people each. One of the eight overlapped with
another talk group, helping to quickly communicate through the ranks.
In addition to the organizersâ all-points network, protest
communications were leavened with individual protesters using cell
phones, direct transmissions from roving independent media feeding
directly onto the internet, personal computers with wireless modems
broadcasting live video, and a variety of other networked
communications. Floating above the tear gas was a pulsing infosphere of
enormous bandwidth, reaching around the planet via the internet.
By 11 a.m., the rally at Memorial Stadium had been under way for an
hour. Roughly 20,000 people half-filled the stadium. The union numbers
were swelled by the anti-WTO organizations that had accepted the labor
invitation to protest the WTO. These groups were a mixture of
environmental, social justice, and human rights groups. Over the next
two hours, the joint planning by the labor leaders and police to break
the DAN blockade would irretrievably split the brief alliance between
labor and the progressive left.
The disorder spreading through the streets downtown was instantly
communicated to the crowd at the rally through cell phones, radios, and
the rest of the infosphere. Behind the scenes, furious activity was
taking place to prevent the parade from being canceled by city
authorities. Meanwhile, back at the police command center, Assistant
Chief Ed Joiner was turning down demands from his field commanders to
declare a state of civil emergency which would cancel the parade.
Joiner said he overruled a recommendation by Assistant Chief John Pirak
to declare a state of emergency Tuesday about 11 a.m. The veto, Joiner
said, was made in consideration of plans for the AFL-CIO march towards
downtown. âI felt declaring a state of emergency at that time, before
the march ever got under way, was going to send a very strong public
message that we already had major difficulties as a city,â Joiner said.
Joinerâs statement underscores the wide-spread fantasy on the part of
city officials that the uproar which followed the 10 a.m. deployment of
tear gas was somehow a secret which they could keep. This air of
unreality was demonstrated by Seattleâs KOMO TV, which tried to
implement a censorship policy by not covering the news as it unfolded in
the streets. KOMO has received richly deserved ridicule for their
censorship of âillegal demonstrations,â but the attitude was not theirs
alone. Anyone with an internet connection could plug into live video and
audio feeds from the street battles from the alternative media. The
commercial media struggled to keep up, but was continuously hampered by
their inability to understand what was going on. Editorial attempts to
reframe the protests as illegitimate and marginal confused the issue
further.
The whereabouts and activities of Mayor Schell and Chief Stamper during
this period remain somewhat mysterious. Given the intense concern
centering on the AFL-CIO parade on the part of law enforcement
officials, it is a reasonable guess that much of the mayor and chiefâs
time between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. was devoted to negotiations with the
labor leaders.
The final decision was to allow the AFL-CIO parade from the Seattle
Center to downtown. This sealed the fate of the street actions as a
victory for the Direct Action Network. If the march had been canceled
and the additional protesters had been prevented from joining in the
chaos downtown, the city stood a better chance of restoring order.
Instead, the strategy of using the AFL-CIO to contain and neutralize the
Direct Action Network protests was drastically modified. The cityâs
capitulation to the protests was underscored at 1 p.m. by the
announcement from the WTO that it was canceling the opening ceremonies.
The decision by Mayor Schell and Chief Stamper to allow the march was so
bizarre that it is worth quoting the December 16 story by Seattle Times
reporters Mike Carter and David Postman:
About 11 a.m., SPD Assistant Chief Pirakâwatching events unfold from the
cityâs emergency operation centerâcalled Joiner at the MACC
[Multi-Agency Command Center] and âasked whether we wanted to ask the
mayor if we wanted to declare a state of emergency,â Joiner said.
Despite the fact âwe were getting hit with much larger numbers of
protesters than we had anticipated,â Joiner refused.
Instead, he opted to let the AFL-CIO march proceed, a move that aimed as
many as 20,000 more people toward downtown as skirmishes between police,
demonstrators and anarchist vandals were escalating.
Joiner believed the march would actually work in favor of his stretched
police lines. The strategy, he said, was for the peaceful march to sweep
the other demonstrators into its ranks and deposit them several blocks
away.
The march was supposed to wheel away from the Washington State
Convention and Trade Center at Fourth Avenue and Pine Street [several
blocks from the Convention Center] and turn north and west toward a
âdispersal pointâ near Republican Avenue [back near the Memorial
Stadium]. The police intended to move in behind the demonstrators and
expand the perimeter around the hotels and convention center.
Instead, thousands of the demonstrators turned into town and chaos
ensued.
âI still believe we could have controlled what we were dealing with at
that time had the march turned,â Joiner said. âIt was not going to be
clean. It would have been messy. But I think we would have been able to
open a corridor to get delegates in and out.â
In other words, the Direct Action Network protesters were expected to
abandon the streets and leave downtown when they saw their
reinforcements arrive. Assistant Chief Joinerâs explanation is simply
not credible, as the WTO ceremonies had been canceled before the parade
began. Whatever the level of chaos and unreality at the command center,
it is unlikely that anyone thought a column of twenty thousand people
would march downtown and then âsweep the other demonstrators into its
ranks.â
Several factors affected the decision to allow the AFL-CIO parade to
proceed. First of all, the police were running short of tear gas and
needed time to obtain new supplies and deliver them downtown. Second,
they were not prepared to arrest marchers at the Seattle Centerâdue to
both political and logistical reasons. If the police tried and failed to
prevent the march, things would clearly take a turn for the worse.
Third, if the parade was canceled, the AFL-CIO would be denied any
credit for the outcome of the protests. Finally, whoever was going to be
gassed or pepper-sprayed in Seattle, it wasnât going to be the labor
leaders.
Greta Gaard had ridden to the rally on a labor bus from Bellingham, one
hundred miles to the north of Seattle. She reports in Belling-hamâs
Every Other Weekly that the ârainbow flagâ (non-union) participants at
the rally decided around noon that they were going to leave the stadium
and march downtown. The word of the street battles had reached the
stadium only minutes after the first gas was released at 10 a.m.. It
took an hour before the crowd was lined up in the streets, chanting âWe
want to march!â The walk towards downtown was oddly quiet. âThere were
no police, media, or crowd-watchers in sight,â wrote Gaard. âThen the
answer hit me: we werenât a threat.â
A sheet-metal union member, Mike Ottoloino, got into a confrontation
with the AFL-CIO marshals, saying, âThis isnât a march, this is a
parade!â
As the parade arrived at 5^(th) Avenue and Pike Street, AFL-CIO marshals
began blocking progress towards the convention center, saying âThe route
has been changed. Circle around here.â Police were massing several
blocks away, but were not visible to the people arriving from the
Seattle Center. Gaard and several thousand others turned away from the
march, just in time to run into the renewed police push to move people
away from the convention center. The momentum of the thousands leaving
the march and moving towards the Convention Center carried several
blocks beyond the paradeâs pivot at 5^(th) and Pike. Gaard and her
friends found themselves at 6^(th) and Pike, one of the most fiercely
contested intersections of the battle, but temporarily an island of
relative calm due to the absence of police. Behind them, the labor
parade moved away from downtown and back towards the Seattle Center,
unmolested by police.
Though Gaard didnât know it, the unsuccessful police push was timed to
herd people into the parade. However, as had been the case all day, the
size of the crowds blocked movement and the police ceased advancing when
the now-expanded and enlarged crowd could not fall back any further. As
shown by Gaardâs relatively easy progress to within a block of the
Convention Center, the reinforcements strengthened the moving blockade
ringing the WTO conference.
The AFL-CIO parade delivered crucial reinforcements to the protesters
instead of sweeping them out of downtown. As marchers left the parade,
this completely crushed any police fantasies that the demonstrators
would abandon the downtown and return control of the streets to the
police.
The police plan to reorganize for an attempt to force the Direct Action
Network protesters out of the downtown area and into the AFL-CIO parade
set in motion several different actions which had a dramatic effect on
perceptions of the Battle in Seattle. In order to understand how these
actions converged it is necessary to step back in time to around noon,
when Assistant Chief Joiner was turning down requests to declare a civil
emergency and cancel the AFL-CIO parade.
The repeated attempts by police to establish a perimeter connecting the
hotels, the Convention Center and the Paramount Theatre were blocked all
day by the size of the protest. The police command retained strategic
cohesion, despite the discord at the top and the chaos in the streets.
Tactical orders from the command continued to be executed by the
officers in the front lineâthey charged when ordered and reformed after
each charge. Much attention has been given to excessive violence by
officers, including repeated attacks on reporters. These incidents were
relatively commonplace, but did not involve loss of control by the upper
command. Seattle political researcher Dan Junas cites the police ability
to regulate the tempo of the street battles as strong evidence that the
political leadership remained in control. âAs the labor marchers
approached, the police got off the gas,â said Junas.
From about noon on, the Multi-Agency Command Center in the Public Safety
Building began filling with top-ranking officials from government and
law enforcement. Federal officials were speaking loudly about the
conse-quences of not regaining control of the streets. State Patrol
Chief Annette Sandberg described the federal officials as in a âkind of
panicky mode.â
The decisionânever seriously questioned by those in chargeâto guarantee
the AFL-CIO parade took place had several requirements attached to it.
First of all, the declaration of civil emergency was already in motion.
There wasnât really a question of whether it was going to happen, but
only if the crackdown would catch the AFL-CIO parade before it withdrew
from downtown.
At 12:45 p.m., Governor Gary Locke authorized his chief of staff to
begin preparing to call up the National Guard. An hour earlier, State
Patrol Chief Annette Sandberg had ordered State Patrol troopers in
Eastern Washington on higher alert and dispatched a 22-member Civil
Disturbance Team from Spokane to drive the 400 miles to Seattle.
Traveling at top speed, they would not arrive before dark.
Shortly after Locke set the National Guard in motion, his office in
Olympia received a telephone call from a furious Secretary of State
Madeline Albright. Albright demanded the Governor immediately take
action to release her from her hotel where she was trapped by the
demonstrators. The Governor would later get strong pressure from
Attorney General Janet Reno to crack down on the protests.
Governor Locke was able to claim that he was taking actionâpreparing to
call up the National Guard, moving State Patrol troops over long
distances, and pressuring Mayor Schell to declare a civil emergencyâbut
all of these things would take time. What he did not do was accept full
responsibility and declare a state of emergency. That was reserved for
Mayor Schell. Lockeâs staff counsel, Everett Billingslea, began
compiling a chronology of the Governorâs actions for the now-inevitable
inquest.
SPD Assistant Chief Joiner prepared more immediate action. The police
attacks on the pro-testers reached a peak shortly before the parade
departed from the Seattle Center. According to police sources, nearly
all of the available tear gas was expended before the parade approached
downtown. In the preparations for the protest, Mayor Schell and Chief
Stamper had laid in stocks of about $20,000 worth of gas. This was
one-fifth the amount recommended by federal officials. According to the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, police officers âtook matters into their own
handsâ to obtain new supplies of gas and pepper spray. Later reports
suggest that the new supplies were part of Joinerâs âmessyâ post-parade
attack plans.
Things quieted down while the police organized new supplies of gas and
pepper spray. Officers sped to Auburn, Renton, and Tukwila police
departments, as well as the King County Jail and Department of
Corrections, emptying munitions stores and ferrying the supplies back to
downtown. Other officers bought additional chemical agents from a local
law enforcement supply business. Meanwhile, a police captain flew to
Casper, Wyoming to pick up a large quantity of gas, âstinger shells,â
and other paraphernalia from Defense Technology Corp., a subsidiary of
Armor Holdings. The locally-obtained gas and pepper spray were driven as
close to the street action as possible. The munitions were transferred
into gym bags and knapsacks which were then run through the streets by
plain-clothes detectives.
Other preparations did not go as well as the deliveries of tear gas and
pepper spray. The declaration of civil emergency was delayed until 3:24
p.m., preventing police reinforcements from other law enforcement
agencies and the National Guard from being legally deployed until long
after the AFL-CIO march had withdrawn. Assistant Chief Ed Joinerâs
âmessyâ plan was also thwarted by the flat refusal of the Seattle Fire
Department to turn fire hoses on demonstrators, a detail which was not
reported in the press until long after the protests were over.
While the police were regrouping and preparing to force the Direct
Action Network protesters to join the AFL-CIO parade, several groups
took advantage of the lull in the battle. Theyâve all been lumped
together into a nameless anarchist horde, but the fact remains there
were two distinct groups acting out different agendas, not one
âorganizedâ anarchist conspiracy as the myth would have it.
At approximately 1 p.m., the police temporarily stopped trying to push
corridors through the protest area. The âBlack Blocâ anarchists had
entered into an understanding with the Direct Action Network that they
would refrain from vandalism at least as long as the protests remained
peaceful. This is another way of saying that they were loosely following
the lead of the DAN organizers. How loosely is shown by the fact the
Black Bloc arrived downtown armed with hammers, crowbars, spray paint,
M-80 firecrackers, and paint bombs. Their goal was a âpropaganda of the
deedâ centering around vandalizing chosen storesâNike, Starbucks, the
Gap, Old Navy and othersâwhich they saw as fitting targets.
The Black Bloc were simply biding their time and waiting for an
opportunity to vandalize these stores and then get away. They had been
closely monitored by the police and FBI since the preceding day. Early
Tuesday morning, the FBI had briefed Seattle Police on the Black Blocâs
whereabouts and activities. The close observation of the Black Bloc
included undercover FBI agents dressed to blend in with the anarchists,
right down to wearing masks to hide their faces. Also present in the
streets were members of the Armyâs Delta Force, a paramilitary
counter-terrorist group, also dressed to blend in with the protesters.
According to KIRO TV, The Black Bloc rampage started on 6^(th) Avenue
between Pine Street and Olive Way. Vandals smashed the windows of a
Starbucks coffee shop in the middle of the block, then moved north
towards Olive Way. Turning west on Olive Way, they attacked the SeaFirst
bank, then turned south on 5^(th) Avenue. Two or three stores along this
block were vandalized. Emerging onto Pine Street, the Black Bloc turned
again, moving west and attacking three or four more stores in the next
two blocks. Reaching Third Avenue, the Black Bloc turned south and
dispersed.
The Seattle Times reported that the vandalism centered mainly along Pike
Street, between Third and Sixth Avenue. A map showing the location of
vandalized and looted stores published in the Times overlaps the route
of the Black Bloc only at the beginning and end. The majority of the
vandalism occurred around 4^(th) and Pike, a corner that the Black Bloc
avoided while being videotaped by KIRO TV. It is possible that the TV
news crews missed the early stages of the vandalism and erroneously
reported the vandalism as beginning later than was actually the case.
The discrepancy between reports is partly due to the chaos which gripped
the downtown, but is also due to the fact that large numbers of
teenagers who were not part of the Black Bloc took advantage of the
situation and likewise engaged in vandalism.
It was this second group, estimated to number at least one hundred or
more, who engaged in looting some of the broken store windows, as well
as occupying the awning over the Nike store. In addition to the damage
to commercial property, police cars and limousines were vandalized with
spray paint and by having their tires slashed.
Jeff Boscole, an eyewitness who was on Sixth Avenue, described how the
two groups could be distinguished by their dress and the different
slogans which they spray-painted on buildings and windows. According to
Boscole, the Black Bloc graffiti consisted of legible political slogans,
while the âwilding teenagersâ were âtaggingâ with illegible
individualized symbols which were not slogans.
Three of the âwilding teenagersâ are clearly shown in two photographs
published in the December 1 Seattle Times. One picture shows a lone
teenager, standing on a deserted sidewalk and reaching through a broken
window. Under one arm, he is holding a skateboard. The windows and front
of the store are defaced with graffiti, some of which are anarchist
slogans and others, particularly the one center-left which dominates the
picture, are âtaggingâ signatures, the incomprehensible glyphs common
throughout urban areas. The other photo shows two teenagers and the
right foot of a third, as one breaks off the âTâ in the Nike Town sign.
None of the teenagers are masked and all three wear light-colored
clothing.
The Black Bloc engaged in property destruction numbered no more than
thirty to forty people, all dressed similarly in black and hooded or
masked to prevent their identification. They moved at a brisk pace,
occasionally stopping in small groups to break windows or spray-paint
anarchist and anti-corporate slogans. Early in the raid, they twice
attacked KIRO TV news crews, spraying the camera lenses with paint to
stop the crews from taking pictures. After these attacks, news crews
withdrew half a block to avoid further attacks. The Black Bloc
maintained cohesion and moved along their route in a determined manner,
several times scuffling with the non-violent protesters from the Direct
Action Network. A handful of plainclothes police and FBI shadowed the
group, reporting their movements. Police made no effort to halt the
vandalism, but in several instances Direct Action Network protesters
stopped or interfered with members of the Black Bloc, while others
chanted âno violenceâ to little avail.
One anarchist described the action in the following terms: âWhen the
large-scale window breaking began it was quite awe-inspiring. All of a
sudden people we were walking with pulled out all sorts of tools: nail
pullers, hammers, crowbars. They then proceeded to very quickly knock
windows out of every bank, upper class, or multi-national clothing
store. I even saw a woman smashing an ATM machine with a sledge hammer.
I was afraid at any moment a police tactical team would break through
the crowd and violently assault the Black Bloc.â
This same source was very clear that the âAnarchists from Eugeneâ were
only one faction among the Black Blocs: âWhile I know they were there,
the black bloc had a few hundred people in it. I know there were people
there from all over the country. The Eugene people have just been very
open about violent demo tactics. The 60 Minutes episode really does
disfavor to revolutionary anarchism, in that it portrays all anarchists
through the eyes and mouths of the primitivistsâwho in my mind make up a
small minority of anarchist activists. The primitivists put
anti-technology and environmentalism at the forefront of their politics,
and downplay, in my opinion, the real social and class struggle that has
to take place.â
Much has been made of the connection between the Black Bloc and Eugene,
Oregon. Of the eleven people charged with felony crimes in connection
with the protests, only one is from Eugene. Five are from Seattle, one
from Olympia, Washington, one from Portland, Oregon, one from Maryland,
and two places of residence are not reported. All of the five people
charged with looting are from Seattle.
The vandalism and looting occurred in the area evacuated by police to
create a buffer zone between the Direct Action Network pro-testers and
the AFL-CIO parade. The center of the vandalized area coincides with the
turning point of the parade, the corner of 5^(th) and Pike. As the
parade entered downtown, the protesters who left the march for the
street protest were immediately confronted by the results of anarchist
property destruction. This led some of the participants in the parade
who joined the protests downtown to assume that the entire area looked
like the three blocks in which the vandalism occurred.
Later, news reports echoed police claims that the tear gas and
subsequent disorder followed, rather than preceded, the Black Bloc
attack. The âAnarchists from Eugeneâ became a convenient, if totally
misleading, media hook on which to hang the distinction between the
âpeaceful paradeâ and the âviolent protests.â In fact, the mediaâs
distinction between the two hinged entirely on whom the police attacked,
not who attacked the police.
Before noon, security officials had been re-questing the mayor issue a
declaration of civil emergency. Seattleâs civil emergency ordinance,
officially titled Seattle Municipal Code 10.02, dates from 1973, when it
was passed in response to Viet Nam war protests. After the Gulf War
protests in 1992, some sections were revised. It is a sweepingly broad
ordinance, which authorizes âextraordinary measures,â including
declaration of curfew, commandeering of property, closure of businesses,
prohibition of alcoholic beverages, bans on the carrying or possession
of firearms, and âany other measuresâ the mayor deems necessary. Under
the ordinance, the mayor may issue orders ârequesting federal and/or
state assistance in combating such civil emergencyâ and âclosing to the
public any or all public places including streets, alleys, public ways,
schools, parks, beaches, amusement areas, and public buildings.â
The power of declaring a civil emergency rests entirely with the mayor.
The City Council is directed to meet at the âearliest practicable timeâ
for âratification and confirmation, modification, or rejection.â The
council avoided meeting until Thursday, by which time the street
protests had ceased to disrupt the city and protest marches were being
escorted by police instead of being attacked by them. Even so, the
council meeting was canceled because of âsecurityâ concerns. The press
reports are not clear, but suggest that the council never ratified the
emergency ordinance before it was rescinded by the mayor.
Mayor Schell spent most of the day at the WTO conference site, waiting
for the opening ceremonies to begin. He did not arrive at the
Multi-Agency Command Center in the Public Safety Building until about 3
p.m., two hours after the ceremonies had been canceled.
Beginning around 1 p.m., Governor Gary Locke had set in motion a series
of unilateral actions including starting the call-up of the National
Guard and authorizing the movement of Washington State Patrol units from
around the state to Seattle. He arrived at the MACC at 2:50 p.m., about
ten minutes ahead of the mayor. âAlmost immediately upon arriving at the
command center, there was no doubt in my mind that we needed to call up
the National Guard,â Locke said.
Upon Schellâs arrival, officials from the SPD, Secret Service, FBI,
State Patrol, Department of Justice, State Department, King County, the
governorâs office, and the White House moved into a back room and
engaged in a heated discussion. While the argument continued, U.S.
Attorney General Janet Reno called the governor and insisted that the
National Guard be called up.
After speaking with Reno, Locke met with the mayor. Schell then spoke
with Assistant Police Chiefs Joiner and Pirak. âBy that time, we had a
chance to look at what was happening. The mayor immediately agreed and
authorized [the emergency declaration],â said Joiner. âThere was never
any hesitation.â The period between the mayorâs arrival at the MACC and
issuing the proclamation of civil emergency was less than half an hour.
At 3:24 p.m., the mayor issued the emergency declaration.
What the declaration of civil emergency meant became a source of
constant confusion during the period it was in effect. The mayor banned
the possession of gas masks, but it continues to be unclear what law was
violated by their possession. The âno protestâ zone was open to some
people and closed to others. Police took to enforcing an informal dress
code, arresting people based on their appearance. In one case, an arrest
was made for possession of an anti-WTO button. Conflicting statements
were made by police officials about what was or was not allowed in the
downtown area. Protesters had signs taken away from them in areas
outside the âno protestâ zone, but were not arrested. Others were
arrested both inside and outside the zone. On Wednesday afternoon, the
governor made a statement on television that order had been restored to
downtown and invited people to come shopping, implying that the downtown
was open and the curfew was lifted. Wednesday night, residents of
Capitol Hill were arrested on their doorsteps when they asked police
what was going on. The ACLU went to federal court and was turned down on
the first of several legal challenges to the emergency ordinance.
By 3 p.m., the belated attempt by police to push the protesters away
from the triangle of key intersections surrounding the Convention Center
was in full motion. The Direct Action Network blockade was still intact,
immobilizing the police and preventing movement through the strategic
triangle northeast of the AFL-CIO parade route and the downtown shopping
district. As a result, most of the police action took place south and
west of the Convention Center. Starting from the south along Union and
University Streets, the police moved north along Third to Seventh Avenue
to sweep the demonstrators north into the route along which the parade
had retreated.
The police sweep northwards compressed the crowds into the east-west
corridor running along Pike and Pine Streets. Here, the police again
stalled against the large size of the crowds. The compression halted the
police movement for several hours, as dumpsters which had been pushed
into the streets to block the center of intersections began to burn.
These bonfires slowly spread in an irregular way as the crowds withdrew
west, not north as the police wished, and moved up into Capitol Hill in
the early evening.
The Mayorâs declaration of civil emergency at 3:25 p.m. set in motion
the reinforcements from the King County Sheriffâs Department, the
Washington State Patrol, and local police departments from surrounding
cities and towns. The arrival of the reinforcements in the streets
occurred relatively slowly over the next three hours, impeded by the
discord which dominated the relations between the Seattle Police and the
King County Sheriff Dave Reichert.
By 5:30 p.m., the police linesânow increased by the arrival of Sheriffâs
deputiesâhad reached the corner of Fourth and Pike. The protesters began
withdrawing west along Pike and Pine Streets, towards Capitol Hill,
followed by police firing tear gas and rubber and wooden projectiles,
and accompanied in some instances by vehicles. The police did not
maintain close contact with the crowds and followedânot droveâthem into
Capitol Hill. The turning movement of the policeâfrom a northern push to
an eastern oneâwas not according to the plan outlined by Assistant Chief
Ed Joiner. According to political researcher Daniel Junas, the Direct
Action Network overheard police radio messages in which units in the
East Precinct on Capitol Hill frantically demanded that the police
downtown cease pushing demonstrators up the hill. The central command
replied that they were pushing the crowds north (i.e., along the route
of the AFL-CIO retreat from downtown), not east.
The loose contact between police and demonstrators permitted the last
act of serious vandalism of the day. Police were not con-trolling the
intersection at Sixth Avenue and Stewart Street, near the Westin Hotel.
Protesters had built a bonfire in the center of the inter-section. At
approximately 7:15 p.m., a group of vandals smashed the window of the
Starbucks coffee shop. This was the same coffee shop from which
Washington State Patrol Chief Annette Sandberg saw the Direct Action
Network affinity groups at 5:30 a.m., as they moved into position and
seized the strategic intersections surrounding the WTO conference site.
Events had come full circle.
As in the morning, the police presence was not visible to the
protesters, although the evening response was quicker. Prosecutors
alleged that Danny Babcock and an unidentified accomplice took a USA
Today vending machine and hurled it through a window of the Starbucks
store. âDefendant Babcock then kicked and pulled away the glass from the
window, enabling others to enter and destroy the inside of the
Starbucks,â according to a police report. âBabcock entered the store and
was arrested as he emerged from the crowd carrying several bags of
coffee from the display inside of the store,â the report said. The
criminal complaint against Babcock states that he handed a one-pound bag
of coffee to a police detective outside the store. Of the four people
arrested at the coffee shop and charged with felonies, none were
âAnarchists from Eugene.â One was from Seattle, two appeared to be from
Portland (although they gave the address of a Seattle homeless shelter),
and Babcockâs residence was not disclosed in news reports.
The process of the protestersâ withdrawal from downtown coincided with
the arrival of additional police reinforcements, the declaration of a 7
p.m. curfew, and the fall of darkness. The WTO had announced the
cancellation of activities around 1 p.m., although word of the
cancellation did not become widespread until late afternoon. Based on
the videos and photo-graphs of the move up Pine Street, the protesters
appear to have decided to leave downtown and were followed, not âswept,â
by police. The police decision to follow up the hill, firing tear gas
and rubber bullets, is inexplicable in terms of clearing downtown. Of
all the police actions during Tuesday, only the initial deployment of
tear gas at 6^(th) and University and the pursuit up Capitol Hill
suggest a breakdown in command. The police decision not to disengage
continued the disturbance late into the night. The clashes with police
at the top of Capitol Hill were simply echoes of the earlier police
defeat in the day-long âBattle in Seattle.â
With the departure of the AFL-CIO parade participants, the Direct Action
Network assumed total control of the protests in Seattle. With their one
brief appearance, the Black Bloc presence in the streets subsided. The
media, however, directed considerable attention to the Eugene
contingent. The media coup for the Black Bloc created an unprecedented
amount of attention for the philosophy of âautonomistâ anarchism.
The Direct Action Network strategy of non-violent civil disobedience
clearly had succeeded against the AFL-CIOâs strategy of controlling and
marginalizing protests in favor of a symbolic parade, the attempts of
the Seattle police to clear the streets with tear gas, and the media
effort to frame the issue in terms of âviolent protesters.â The DAN plan
remained one of direct action by civil disobedience and deep,
multi-layered support for autonomous affinity groups. The DAN strategy
to emphasize the failure of the WTO to allow democratic participation in
international trade discussions would now be tested against the
hard-line strategies advocated by federal security officials.
Mayor Paul Schellâs declaration of civil emergency dramatically altered
the police strategy for suppressing the protests. As the hard-liners
inside and outside the Seattle Police Department had wished, law
enforcement was now âprepared.â For the entire month of December, the
wail went up from law enforcement âwe werenât prepared.â On Wednesday,
the police were prepared with more troops, more gas, more barricades, a
declaration of civil emergency complete with a âno protest zoneâ
enclosing downtown, a curfew, and the suspension of civil liberties. The
AFL-CIO parade was over and done with and the âday-tripâ protesters who
rode to town on union busses were gone. The conditions on Wednesday were
far more favorable to the police than anything which could possibly have
been arranged on Tuesday.
Assistant Chief Ed Joiner said Seattle police and their law enforcement
partners initially looked hard at a plan based on preparations for the
NATO conference in Washington, D.C. This plan was similar to the
strategy which was put in place after the declaration of civil
emergency: âWe considered it and basically rejected it as something
that, in a perfect world, weâd like to do, but in a real world is a less
viable option. Can you imagine me going to the mayor and the governor,
before the conference even happened, and saying âI need to create this
security perimeter from Seneca to Lenora Streets, from Fourth Avenue to
the freeway, and I need to shut all the businesses down for five days
the week after Thanksgiving?â Can you imagine the kind of response Iâd
get, besides them asking me for my resignation then?â
âIt was impossible,â Joiner said. âPolitically it was impossible. The
damage to the downtown business core would have been substantial.â
Once again, the Direct Action Network prevailed. The victory on Tuesday
was re-affirmed Wednesday, and Chief Stamperâs concerns about bringing
outside law enforcement into the city were realized in full that night
when police rioted on Capitol Hill.
At 7:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning, the police began mass arrests. Direct
Action Network protesters began assembling at a few locations and others
made their way into the downtown core. Some of the arrests occurred at
Denny Park, well to the north of the downtown. Police handcuffed some
demonstrators and put them on city busses which moved the arrestees to
the temporary jail at the former Sand Point Naval Air Station. Other
demonstrators had their signs taken away from them, but were not
arrested. These proceeded downtown.
According to Kelly Quirke, Executive Director of the Rainforest Action
Network, the police mass arrest strategy included targeting protest
leaders. âAt the police chiefâs and mayorâs press conference we had
watched on TV late the night before, they announced that they were going
to go after the ringleaders,â Quirke said. The counter-leadership
targeting was as ineffective as other police tactics, due to the Direct
Action Networkâs decentralized decision-making process, which operated
by group consensus. In effect, a network has no âringleaders.â
Protesters converged on the Westlake Center and arrests there began at
approximately 8 a.m. As the morning wore on, it became apparent that
Westlake Center, rather than the WTO conference location, was the focus
of Wednesdayâs blockade. The Direct Action Network had correctly
identified the shopping and business district as being the vulnerable
point in the new police strategy. By 9 a.m. Westlake Center was clogged
by a peaceful sit-down protest as protesters patiently waited for police
to arrest them. The crowds, consisting of demonstrators waiting to join
the sit in and spectators from business district, continued to swell. As
one protester was arrested more would leave the crowd and sit down. Once
again, the netwar tactic of âswarmingâ the target by stealthy approach
succeeded.
By 10 a.m. it was becoming evident that the police tactics were not
going to halt the sit-in and that the police were creating a situation
which they could not control. At 10:30 a.m., the police commander
stepped between his men and the protesters. He walked to the seated
protesters, leaned down and said, âWeâre outta here.â He then motioned
to his men to leave the area and the police withdrew in an orderly
manner. The protesters, both seated and among the crowd, were jubilant.
They had prevailed.
The disengagement of the police at Westlake Center marked the failure of
mass arrests as a police tactic. On Tuesday, the total number of arrests
was around sixty. On Wednesday morning, somewhere around three hundred
arrests were made at two locations. Wednesday evening, two hundred more
arrests were made at First Avenue and Clay Street, near the Seattle
Center. Another dozen or fewer people, mostly residents of Capitol Hill,
would be arrested during the night. Approximately five hundred and forty
of the arrests were for misdemeanors and eleven were for felony charges
such as vandalism or looting. One of the felony arrests occurred in the
Greenwood district, miles from the downtown area.
The arrests ended for two reasons. First and most importantly, the
police were running out of transportation to remove those arrested from
downtown. As the city busses arrived at Sand Point, protesters refused
to leave some of the busses. Others obstructed the booking procedures by
refusing to identify themselves. Many of the âarrestâ affinity groups
carried no identification for this very purpose.
Kelly Quirke, executive director of the Rain-forest Action Network, was
arrested at Westlake center. âThey drove us to a converted naval base,
where we spent the next 15 hours on the bus, eating and drinking only
the food and water we had on hand (they gave us none), doing interviews
and organizing the next morningâs press conference until our cell phones
went dead (we were quite adept at getting out of the plastic cuffs),
singing, meeting (of course), and demanding to see our lawyers,â he
said.
Police arrest procedures were so chaotic and slipshod that over 400
cases were dropped by City Attorney Mark Sidran due to the absence of
arrest reports and the failure of arresting officers to identify
themselves. The Direct Action Network strategy of blockade did not end
with the arrest of protesters. The target simply shifted from the
streets to the jails and then the courts. The second reason for the
police withdrawal was the demand by the Secret Service that the
presidential motorcade route and speaking locations be given top
priority by police.
The preceding day, as police and federal security officials had milled
around in an atmosphere of panic at the Multi-Agency Command Center in
the Public Safety Building, Ronald Legan, the special agent in charge of
the Seattle office of the Secret Service, laid down an ultimatum to
Seattle officials about the presidential visit. âI remember saying that
unless we could get control of the streets, we would recommend that he
not come,â Legan said. âNow the problem there is that, with this
president, he sets his own agenda and goes where he wants. And we did
not want to have to battle a 30-car motorcade in and out of Seattle.â
Seattle Assistant Chief Ed Joiner said he would not characterize the
discussion as âthreatening... but it was clear that if the situation was
going to be the following day what it was then, there was no way you
could bring the president of the United States into Seattle.â
President Clinton admitted the coordinated strategy between the AFL-CIO
and the White House in an interview with Seattle Post-Intelligencer
reporter Michael Paulson. The interview occurred on Tuesday evening, as
the President was between Washington D.C. and San Francisco. It is clear
that Clinton was either not aware or chose to deny that the Direct
Action Network protests were nearly equal in size to the AFL-CIO parade.
Clintonâs chief of the Secret Service in Seattle, Special Agent Ronald
Legan, estimated that the parade numbered 20,000 and the total number of
demonstrators was 50,000. As the excerpts from Clintonâs statements
clearly show, some understanding that the AFL-CIO would control the
protests existed between the President and the labor leaders:
âI think certainly if weâd had it [the protests] any place in the
continental United States we would have had the same thing and even if
weâd gone to Honolulu there might have been thousands of people there.
What I regret is not that there are protesters there... What I regret is
that a small number of people have done non-peaceful things and have
tried to block access and prevent meetings. Thatâs wrong. Itâs not only
illegal, itâs just wrong.
âI regret very much that a few people have given the protesters a bad
name, because I think the fact that the protesters are there, were it
not for those stopping meetings, stopping movements and not being
peaceful, would be a positive.
â...And then I think finally there are people who question whether these
trading rules are benefiting lower income countries, poor countries, and
question whether there is damage to the environment from certain trading
arrangements that wouldnât otherwise be there, and who question whether
this is a race to the bottom or the top. So that labor unions and
wealthier countries want to have certain basic core labor standards
observed in poorer countries because they think it will be better for
average people so that the trading system actually benefits. So I think
thatâs what is bringing all those people out.
â...I think that what we ought to do first of all to adopt the United
Statesâ position on having a working group on labor within the WTO, and
then that working group should develop these core labor standards, and
then they ought to be a part of every trade agreement, and ultimately I
would favor a system in which sanctions would come for violating any
provision of a trade agreement, but weâve got to do this in steps.
âI do think it is worth noting that the strongest opposition to this
position, however, comes from the leaders of developing countries,
including a lot of developing countries who have left-wing governments,
not right-wing governments, who believe that this is a strategy by the
American labor movement to keep them down and keep them poor and keep
them from selling products that theyâd otherwise be highly competitive
in the American market. It certainly could be used that way.
â...Again, if we can just get by the few people that arenât being
peaceful and the people that are trying to stop people from meeting, I
think the presence of others with legitimate questions about the WTO
process, the environment and labor and how poor countries are treated, I
think this can be a net positive, because weâre going to have to build a
much deeper consensus for global trade to carry it forward.â
This interview had a very direct effect on the WTO negotiations. The
Post-Intelligencer interview was read by many WTO delegates on Wednesday
morning. Roger Downey captured the impact of Clintonâs statements in a
Seattle Weekly article titled âClinton Throws Brickâ:
âWhen Clinton got up in Seattle and told the ministers that WTO had to
clean up its act if it wanted American support, home folks may have
nodded sagely in agreement; the delegates could only goggle speechlessly
at his hypocrisy. When he dropped the sanctions brick in his P-I
interview, they took it to mean that the US proposal of a WTO body to
consider worldwide core labor standards was the first step toward
establishing compulsory international sanctions against âviolators.ââ
On the streets, Wednesday afternoon was a repeat of Tuesday. The police
pulled back for the four hours that President Clinton was in public
view, just as they had pulled back as the AFL-CIO parade approached
downtown. In the words of one TV reporter, âThe streets were strangely
quiet.â At 1 p.m., Washington Governor Gary Locke gave a live interview
on local television. Locke stated that order was restored to Seattle and
told local shoppers to âcome downtownââinside the perimeter of the âno
protestâ zone. Unfortunately, the governor hadnât heard about police
plans for a 4 p.m. crackdown to drive pro-testers out of the downtown
core, a time which coincided with the downtown rush hour.
As Clintonâs motorcade departed, the streets were once again blanketed
in tear gas, and police fired pepper-spray at anyone who got in their
way. At the Pike Place Market, tear gas was severe enough that produce
merchants put out signs the next day announcing they were closed because
their fruits and vegetables were contaminated.
As on Tuesday, the police failed to move the crowds of protesters and
the main axis of protest movement once again became Pike and Pine
Streets. After two hours, police were only able to move two blocks, up
to Second Avenue. A protester blockade at Third and Pine stayed in place
until voluntarily dispersed at 6:45 p.m. It appears likely that the
Direct Action Network had decided to hold the streets until the 7 p.m.
curfew and then withdraw to Capitol Hill.
As the curfew went into effect at 7 p.m., the streets were mostly empty.
As if to celebrate their âcontrolâ of the streets, a column of a dozen
police cars raced through the empty downtown core with emergency lights
flashing and sirens blaring. Police officials explained to reporters
that this âwild weaselâ operation was a âshow of force to clear the
streets.â The news videos of the stream of cars are one of the more
surreal images from the entire week. Things would get even stranger that
night.
At about the same time as the âwild weaselsâ were racing through the
streets, police assaulted Seattle City Councilman Richard McIver. McIver
said city police officers yanked him from his car, pulled his arms
behind his back and started to cuff him as he drove to a World Trade
Organization reception event at the nearby Westin Hotel. The council
member had been stopped shortly before by police who let him continue
after identifying himself. The second time he was stopped and identified
himself, a policeman threw McIvorâs city council business card on the
ground and assaulted him.
The incident was witnessed by a U.S. Congressman, Rep. Dennis Kucinich,
D-Ohio, and Bill Lambrecht, Washington, D.C.-correspondent for the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch.
âWhat he [McIver] describes is what I saw,â Kucinich said. âFour to five
policemen converged on him and kind of spun him around. I thought the
people who handled it were overly aggressive. Iâm sure given the tension
that existed in the city, there might be many cases where in hindsight
they might do things differently but that seemed excessive.â
âIt was clear that he was telling them who he was. They seemed
unpersuadable,â Lambrecht said. âOne of the officers pulled him out of
the car and not gingerly.â
âI donât want to aid the hooligans who are raising hell and I donât want
to take on specific officers... But there are huge flaws with the
officers when it comes to people of color. Iâm 58 years old. I had on a
$400 suit, but last night, I was just another nigger,â said Councilman
McIver. A few days later, Councilman McIver stated that he was not
pursuing the matter and wanted it dropped.
The final incident of Wednesday night demonstrated the police strategy
for clearing the streets was not only ineffective, but that civilian
control of law enforcement ceased to exist for a time. The âBattle of
Capitol Hillâ degenerated into a âpolice riot,â perhaps the only time
during the WTO protests that police temporarily lost control of their
forces on the street.
As the demonstrators withdrew from downtown curfew area at around 7
p.m., a group of several hundred protesters moved north on Fourth
Avenue, followed at a distance by police. The group withdrew in an
orderly manner, stopping several times along the way to vote on where
they were going. They moved east on Denny Way into Capitol Hill and
reached Broadway and East Harrison Street at about 7:45 p.m., where they
joined another group which was already at the intersection. By now the
group numbered approximately 500. As they passed through the
neighborhood, they were greeted by cheering residents and honks of
support from motorists. The crowd marched back and forth along Broadway
for about an hour, carrying banners and accompanied by a band playing
music. The atmosphere was one of celebration rather than protest.
The crowd was predominantly residents of Capitol Hill, many of whom had
been angered by police the previous night when bystanders and people on
their way home from work had been indiscriminately attacked by the
police who had pursued demonstrators up the hill. At about 9 p.m.,
police and National Guard forces began arriving in the area. By 9:30
p.m., police closed several blocks of Broadway between East Republican
and East John. Tensions were high, due to the residents resentment of
the police presence and police fears of violence. KIRO TV reported that
the people opposing police that night consisted entirely of Capitol Hill
residents. Afterwards, police claimed there were reports of agitators
carrying gasoline bombs and throwing rocks and bottles. They said some
pro-testers charged officers. No gasoline bombs were thrown that evening
and news videos show only police charging, not civilians attacking
police.
Police began using pepper spray, tear gas, and concussion grenades
shortly after 9:30 p.m., first at John Street and Broadway to the south,
moving north, and near Harrison, moving south. More police blocked side
streets, preventing the crowds from dispersing.
âThe protesters looked completely calm to me... They were not
instigating this,â said Erin Katz, a Capitol Hill resident who watched
from behind police lines near Pine Street. âI heard absolutely no
warning and they started to gas them.â
For the next two and a half hours, police rampaged along Broadway. It
was during this period that some of the weekâs worst instances of police
misconduct occurred. National television repeatedly aired footage of a
Tukwila officer kicking a young man in the groin and then immediately
firing a shotgun within inches of the young manâs torso. Police
officials initially described the officerâs conduct as âappropriate.â At
a parking lot near Broadway, two journalism students were videotaping
the action. A King County deputy went up to their car and motioned for
the young women to roll down a window. When they did, the deputy
pepper-sprayed them both, shouting âTape this, bitch!â This footage has
also been repeatedly aired on national television. The deputy remained
publicly unidentified and on duty while an internal investigation was
conducted. These and other incidents resulted in civil suits filed
against the Seattle Police as the agency in charge, as well as the
officers involved.
Around midnight, the disorder had drawn several local government
officials, who tried to get the police and demonstrators to disengage.
They included King County Councilman Brian Derdowski, City Councilmen
Richard Conlin and Nick Licata, and Councilwoman-elect Judy Nicastro.
âThose council members tried to work through the chain of command of the
Police Department and they were unable to get anybody,â Derdowski said.
For two hours, the civilian officials tried to get the police to cease
attacking the crowd. Finally, around 2 a.m., the crowd began to leave.
The police responded with volleys of gas and rubber projectiles.
âI asked the police to be professional and just take one step back. That
would be the sign that these folks needed, and they would disperse,â
Derdowski said. âThe police said they couldnât do that, so we went back
and told the people that they needed to leave the area. And a lot of
them did, but a few persisted. And they started singing Christmas
carols. They sang âJingle Bells,â and when they started singing âSilent
Night,â the tear gas started. Something hit me in the back, and there
was pandemonium there, and so we left the area,â Derdowski said.
By Thursday, the success of the Direct Action Network protests was
undeniable. The WTO conference was prevented from holding its opening
ceremonies on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the conference began to come
unraveled when President Clinton made repeated statements supporting the
demonstratorsâalthough it appears he was referring only to the
AFL-CIOâand announced a U.S. policy initiative which guaranteed that
major consensus at the WTO conference would be impossible. On Wednesday
night, police attacked local residents in the sort of breakdown of
command and discipline shown by defeated troops. Graffiti began
appearing around Seattle reading: âRemember, We Are Winning!â On
Thursday afternoon, police finally came to an accommodation with Direct
Action Network protesters and provided a police escort for a march.
The focus of the Direct Action Network strategy now shifted from the WTO
to support for those still in jail as a result of the mass arrests. For
two days, vigils were held at the Public Safety Building, at times
completely surrounding the building.
On Friday evening, after meeting with city officials, Direct Action
Network legal staff announced an agreement with the city. Jailed
protesters would now begin cooperating with the courts and properly
identify themselves. Many had refused to provide their names and
addresses, giving their names only as âJane WTO,â âJohn WTO,â or in one
case âEmiliano Zapata.â As they were processed for arraignment, they
would be released on personal recognizance. Nearly all of those jailed
were released by Sunday. After the jailed protesters were released
Seattle City Attorney Mark Sidran issued a statement to the press
denying that any agreement had been reached and promising to prosecute
all cases.
In early January, Sidran moved to dismiss over ninety percent of the
cases, disclosing that virtually none of them could be prosecuted
because police had not bothered to file the necessary reports or
identify the arresting officers during the mass arrests.
The final act of the WTO protests was the announced departures of
Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper, strategic commander Assistant Chief
Ed Joiner, Nancy McPherson, civilian director of the Community and
Information Services, and Assistant Chief of Investigations, Harve
Fergusson. Those who made public statements regarding their resignations
or retirements said that the decisions had been made before the WTO
protests. Chief Stamper stated that one purpose of announcing his
resignation was to âde-politicizeâ the investigations into police
actions during the protests. The departures of the other polices
officials were virtually ignored in the media, though they represent the
departure of three out of seven of the chiefâs highest-ranking
assistants.
The Seattle police organizations launched a massive public-relations
blitz. In one of the more bizarre actions, police officers began shaking
down local merchants through the sales of T-shirtsâas if the police had
won some sort of a major victory. Uniformed officers delivered boxes of
the shirts to Dutch Nedâs Bar in Pioneer Square. The shirts show the
Space Needle engulfed in a tornado and say âBattle in Seattle WTO 99.â
The Guild also organized a rally to show support for the police. State
Rep. Luke Esser, R-Bellevue, a conservative âlaw and orderâ advocate,
issued a statement saying that he would attend the police rally
âcommending those brave men and women for working around the clock in
treacherous conditions to maintain law and order during the WTO riots.â
The Seattle Times ran a variety of pro-police articles, including one
front-page headline announcing the retirement of a police dog.
And the police department began writing letters of commendation for
actions during the protests. âWeâre hearing stories from through-out the
department of heroism and courageousness,â said Lisa Ross, a spokeswoman
for Chief Stamper. Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Kimberly Wilson
described some of these stories as âsurreal,â citing the case of Sgt.
Mike Coombs. Coombs saw a guard escorting a foreign dignitary draw a
handgun when confronted by protesters, an act that would normally be
considered assault with a deadly weapon. As the guard threatened the
protesters, some tried to grab the guardâs gun arm. Coombs sprayed the
protesters with pepper-spray and hustled the delegation away from the
protesters. His quick thinking probably saved lives, said Lt. Neil Low,
who is writing the commendation letter. The actions by other officers
deserving commendation have not been disclosed.
The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Lawyers Guild, and
Amnesty International announced that they were investigating the events
in Seattle. Amnesty International looked into âwidespread police abusesâ
against protesters, including âindiscriminant useâ of chemical agents,
rubber, and wooden projectiles, âflashbangâ grenades, beatings of
prisoners in jail, threats of rape during strip searches, and the use of
âfour-point restraint chairsâ in the jail. The mayorâs office issued a
statement saying, âAt this time, we have no indication that any events
such as those described by Amnesty International ever occurred.â The
Seattle Weekly published stories substantiating reports of jail beatings
and other charges by Amnesty International.
The WTO protests in Seattle were the largest left-wing demonstrations in
America since the [first] Gulf War. They were also the most successful
American political demonstrations of the decade, if success for a
demonstration is measured by the degree of congruence between the
protestersâ goals and the effect on public policy issues.
The WTO protests succeeded in the streets by a combination of strategic
surprise and tactical openness. The three key phases of the street
actions were: the Tuesday morning âswarmâ which blockaded strategic
intersections; the collapse of the police strategy to suppress the
Direct Action Network protests while allowing the AFL-CIO parade; and
the failure of the AFL-CIO parade to engulf the Direct Action Network
protests into a form acceptable to the Clinton administration.
The failure of the police strategy was almost instantaneous with the
success of the blockade. Non-violent civil disobedience usually succeeds
when the numbers of protesters is sufficiently large. The use of force
to disperse such demonstrations is a moral victory for the protesters if
it succeeds and a double victory if it fails. In Seattle, the attempts
to forcibly disperse the demonstrations not only failed, but also set
into motion a chain of events which undermined the legitimacy of the
police actions.
The critical instances in which the police lost control of their own
strategy began with the initial use of tear gas. The circumstances
surrounding the decision to use gas are still unknown, as is where the
decision originated. The pursuit of demonstrators up Capitol Hill on
Tuesday and Wednesday nights accelerated the collapsing strategy of
forcible dispersion. On Wednesday night, the failure of civilian
officials to control the police dramatically underscored the breakdown
of political control. On Thursday, the refusal of the City Council to
ratify the mayorâs emergency declarations began the process of regaining
political control of the police. And the January dismissal of charges
against demonstrators underscored the tenuous legality of the cityâs
actions against the protesters.
The most profound outcome of the WTO protests was the appearance of the
netwar construct in American politics. The âBattle in Seattleâ was
fought not only in the streets, but also in the infosphere. The WTO
protests were the first to take full advantage of the extremely dense
and wide-reaching alternative media network which uses the internet. The
use of âmedia special forcesâ is one of the hallmarks of netwar and
informational conflicts. With the rise of the alternative media, the
internet and other unmediated mass communications, it is no longer
possible for the establishment to control the information reaching the
public. Attempts to distort the news for propaganda or public relations
purposes will enhance movement recruiting and create a âcredibility gapâ
for establishment policies.
The WTO protests were the Chiapas insurrection come to America. Like the
Zapatista netwar, the conflict was one of civil society networks versus
markets. The role of institutions, be they police or military forces,
NAFTA, WTO, or political administrations, was secondary to the conflict.
Institutions intermediate netwar conflicts involving markets, but they
are not the primary actors. In Seattle, the police could not decide the
issue; they could only determine the level of violence.
As it turned out, the introduction of new ânon-lethalâ armaments such as
chemical irritant sprays and pellets, guns firing a variety of rubber,
wooden or âbean-bagâ projectiles, ârobocopâ armor, and all the rest were
not only ineffective but actually counter-productive in dealing with
non-violent protesters. In most cases, protesters were only infuriated
and stiffened in their resistance by the use of these weapons. The
widespread use of ânon-lethalâ weapons increased the aggressiveness of
police and the increased combativeness eroded strategic control.
The flexible and improvised communications infrastructure used by the
Direct Action Network was a significant feature in the protests. One of
the dictums of netwar is that netwar actors have a much greater interest
in keeping communications working, rather than shutting them down. The
dense and diversified communications used by the Direct Action Network
could not have been significantly harmed by any action less than a total
media and communications blackout in Seattle. Not only is such an action
impossible for the economic and social costs which would result, but a
blackout of the required magnitude would be the information-al
equivalent of unconditional surrender by the establishment. Because the
ultimate prize in a netwar conflict is understanding, not opinion, it is
the quality of information, not the quantity, which determines the final
outcome.
Netwar is nothing new as a form of conflict. It is a new concept, but
the underlying reality of it has been around for a long time. What is
new is the richer informational environment which makes the organization
of civil (and uncivil) society into networks easier and more efficient.
The essential conditions for victory in a netwar conflict are also the
conditions which make waging netwar possible: the shared under-standing
of a situation which demands direct action. In many ways, the victory of
the Direct Action Network was implicit in the fact that so many people
understood the conflict and were willing to act on that understanding.
From this vantage point, it is possible to interpret the WTO protests
according to any number of frameworks. They were a watershed in the
development of the contemporary anti-capitalist movement, at which
thousands of disparate groups discovered each other and the power they
could wield together. They were the point at which, a decade after the
fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the old âdemocracy versus
communismâ opposition, the fundamental dichotomy of global politics was
recast as corporate capitalism versus the common people. They were, as
the researchers of the RAND corporation self-servingly discovered, the
substantiation of theories about how new communications technologies
would shape social conflict. They were simultaneously the beginning and
the high point of a âmovement of movementsâ which ended when terrorists
hijacked the global stage on September 11^(th), or when communist
splinter groups hijacked the anti-war movement a year and a half later,
or which continues so long as certain anthropology professors require a
subject for inquiry.
The only thing that matters for us anarchists, of course, is what we can
learn from the past to act effectively in the present. Does it make
sense to pursue âanother Seattle,â or is that just a will-oâ-the-wisp?
Could any of the tactics that succeeded in Seattle be as effective
today, or are they subject to a law of diminishing returns?
Immediately following the Seattle WTO protests, some reformists moaned
that the confrontational tactics and far-reaching goals of militant
participants alienated people and ruined any chance of concretely
affecting national policy. Yet by reformist standards, the so-called
anti-globalization movement[1] associated with the Seattle protests
achieved practically unprecedented triumphs, and the credit for this
must go at least in part to the militants. The next WTO meeting had to
be held in Qatar, cementing the image of the WTO as an anti-democratic,
oppressive elite. Many of the proposals that had most outraged activists
were immediately dropped; likewise, the Free Trade Area of the Americas
(FTAA) agreement is now essentially dead in the water. Some analysts
have concluded that the mobilization against corporate globalization
peaked early because its goals were not ambitious enough.
In addition to giving the WTO a public image makeover and successfully
forcing con-cessions from it, the militancy of the demonstrators in
Seattle pushed its supposed critics to adopt a more uncompromising
stance. Organized labor and segments of the Democratic Party have to
present the illusion of being oppositional in order to justify their
existence. As was frankly acknowledged in the RAND report, they hoped to
maintain this illusion and simultaneously absorb and neutralize any
radical tendencies by putting in an appearance at the Seattle WTO
protests. Once they found them-selves caught up in a huge, obviously
popular demonstration against the WTO, they had to feign at least some
sympathy or else reveal their âoppositionâ to be a mere pretense. Thus
we can see that direct action is the most effective means both for
putting pressure on adversaries and for exerting leverage on supposed
allies. Even if you donât want to overthrow the government, forget about
voting and petitioningâthe only hope for change is in the streets.
Finally, the successes in Seattle brought US anarchists worldwide
visibility, along with a needed morale boost, and provided a format for
future actions. The âsummit-hoppingâ model made a virtue of the
transience that has been such a stumbling block for anticapitalist
organizing in North America; like it or not, a movement must make the
best of its weakness-es, and if many anarchists couldnât be counted on
to stay in one place long enough to do effective local organizing at
least that mobility enabled them to come together occasionally at
capitalist summits.
The breakthroughs in Seattle that affected the anarchist community
turned out in the long run to be dangerous gifts: as soon as the media
attention, the thrill of victory, and the effectiveness of the new model
were taken away, many anarchists felt they were back at square one.
In reflecting on the mobilization in Seattle, people often overlook the
years of failure that had preceded it. What happened in Seattle was
possible precisely because it had been years, if not decades, since so
many people joined in disruptive action against a capitalist institution
in the US. As noted in the RAND analysis, police expected symbolic
arrests Ă la the anti-nuclear demonstrations of the 1980s, not the
coordinated obstruction and rioting they got. Subsequent mass actions
were much more difficult to pull off, as the authorities mobilized every
resource to ensure that what happened in Seattle would not happen again.
Despite this, Seattle was followed by a series of demonstrations unlike
anything in the preceding decade: Washington, D.C. was shut down the
following April by protests against the International Monetary Fund, and
a year later the FTAA ministerial in Quebec City occasioned the most
intense street fighting since the Los Angeles riots of 1992. All the
teargas in the country was no match for the enthusiasm of the
anticapitalist movement once people had a model to work from and a
structure to plug into. It was not until after September 11, 2001 that
the tide finally began to recede, and this occurred primarily as a
result of the wide-spread self-fulfilling prophecy that the high point
of anticapitalist mass actions was over. The momentum that followed
Seattle was not destroyed by the government response, it was abandoned
by those who had maintained it: the most significant question presented
by the post-Seattle phase of struggle is not how to handle repression,
but how to sustain morale.
After anticapitalists lost the initiative, it was inevitable that the
partisans of willful impotence would regain it. Proportionate to the
number of participants, the antiwar movement of 2002 to 2003 was
incredibly in-effectual, largely due to the machinations of liberals and
communists who did their best to prevent anyone from taking effective
action. And once the legend of Seattle ceased to be the origin myth of
an existing, vibrant movement, it became a burden upon everyone who
tried to apply the mass action model. Even though many anarchist
demonstrations between 2002 and 2005 put everything that happened in the
mid-1990s to shame, they seemed stunted and disappointing compared with
the Battle of Seattle. Past accomplishments always cast a shadow over
the present, and shadows loom bigger the further the object casting them
recedes.
The FTAA ministerial in Miami four years after the Seattle WTO protests
showed how much ground anticapitalists had lost and how much their
adversariesâboth those in uniform and those carrying protest signsâhad
learned. While there were probably almost as many committed anarchists
in Miami as there were in Seattle, far fewer other protesters showed
upâpartly because Miami is so far from the rest of the US, partly
because it has the most reactionary Latino population of any US city,
and partly because the ability of anticapitalist networks to bring out
protesters had been sapped by demoralization and competition with
antiwar organizing. The AFL-CIO duplicitously coordinated with the
police while asking demonstrators not to carry out direct action during
their march, and the demonstratorsâinsanelyâagreed to this request. This
enabled the police to concentrate on beating and pepper-spraying people
before the union march, controlling the streets during it, and then
viciously brutalizing and arresting everyone who remained in town after
it. The police tactics in Miami, which were significantly more
aggressive than those of the police in Seattle, showed that the fluke in
Seattle was not that the police were so aggressive but that the
corporate media were caught off guard and accidentally reported on their
violence.[2] Finally, the strategy of the demonstrators in Miami, which
consisted of a largely symbolic assault on the fence surrounding the
meetings, had no hope of actually interfering with them. The protests in
Miami only succeeded in disrupting business as usual and giving the FTAA
a bad name because the authorities, still transfixed by the specter of
Seattle, went to such lengths to repress them.
As of this writing, the Miami FTAA ministerial is itself three years
behind us, and there have been no major mass actions in the US since
Bushâs second inauguration almost two years ago. Paradoxically, the good
news is that enough time may now have elapsed since the WTO protests
that a mass mobilization with a clever strategy could catch the powers
that be by surprise againâbut the bad news is that anarchists,
demoralized from so many years of trying to ârepeat Seattle,â may not
yet be ready to stake everything on another attempt.
The presidential campaign of 2008 will be the next backdrop against
which major mass actions can be expected to take place. Whatever
misgivings some of us currently have about them, for anarchists not to
have a powerful presence in mass actions in 2008 would be tantamount to
our disappearance from the national arena of social struggle.
The essential challenge of the mass action model is that its greatest
strengths and weaknesses are identical. Working from the physics
equation tension=force/area, this model brings together a great number
of people in a small space so their coordinated actions can have
exponential effectsâbut with sufficient warning, the state can also
concentrate its forces to neutralize their efforts. Consequently,
successful mass actions must either come as a surprise themselves or
employ an unexpected strategy. At the G8 protests in Scotland in 2005,
for example, participants outwitted the authorities by dispersing into
the countryside to block roads outside the areas where police forces
were concentrated.
Effective mass action necessitates that people from a broad range of
perspectives work together without limiting each other. In that regard,
mass actions are good practice for building the symbiotic relationships
fundamental to an anarchist society. The mobilizations that succeeded in
Seattle, Quebec City, and elsewhere succeeded because a great number of
people simultaneously engaged in a diverse array of complementary
tactics. Regardless of the success of a particular action, the ability
to do this itself constitutes a victory over the segregation, isolation,
and conflict promoted by the capitalist system. In that regard, the
Seattle WTO protests were not an unrepeatable miracle, but rather an
example of how powerful we can be whenever we find ways to work
together.
We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global
AnticapitalismâThrough testimony, photos, tactics, and history, this
book provides an excellent context for anticapitalist organizing in the
years up to and immediately following the WTO protests.
âFive Years After WTO Protestsâ by Chuck MunsonâIn this article, one of
the administrators of www.infoshop.org refutes corporate media reports
that the movement behind the WTO protests had come to an end by 2004.
âN30 Black Bloc CommuniquĂ©â by the Acme CollectiveâSome of the
participants in the Black Bloc in Seattle released this excellent and
nuanced defense of anarchist property destruction at the WTO
demonstrations immediately afterwards.
âDemonstrating Resistance,â the feature article in the first issue of
Rolling ThunderâThis extensive analysis follows the anarchist
experimentation with mass action and autonomous action models that
occurred between 2000 and 2005, drawing conclusions about what factors
must be present for each approach to succeed.
A simple Google search should turn up online versions of the last three
of these texts.
[1] Ironically, the âanti-globalization movementâ was perhaps the most
globally interconnected movement in the history of protest movements.
The corporate media christened it with that misnomer because identifying
it for what it wasâa movement opposing capitalist globalizationâwould
acknowledge the existence of capital-ism, and thus the possibility of
other social and economic systems.
[2] Likewise, as the dramatically militarized police force in Miami
consisted of at least six times as many officers as protected the WTO in
Seattle, and they faced off against crowds perhaps a fifth the size of
those that had gathered in 1999, they could not fall back on the excuse
of being âoverwhelmedâ and forced into violence. If anything, the police
in Miami were more violent than those in Seattle, thoughtlessly
attacking demonstrators, retired union members, and corporate media
reporters alike.