1/27/07 – Citizens from all over the country descended upon Washington DC today to demand that Congress listen to the voices of the voters and bring an end to the Iraq war. Today’s rally began a three day mass mobilization, which will continue with training tomorrow, followed by lobbying on Monday.
The mobilization, called for by
United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), began with two hours of speeches (
list of speakers) in front of the capital, followed by a short march which deviated from the route that Capitol Police approved and ended up encircling the Capitol. The original march route would have had the peace activists sharing one road, each marching in different directions. Resistance Media has never seen such a march route before, as it would have had the activists marching towards – and chanting towards – each other.
Rep. Maxine Waters (Dem., CA), who was near the front of the march, spoke with the Capitol Hill Police officers and demanded that the police move the buses they were using to blockade Independence Avenue. Perhaps in deference to the new Democratic administration, perhaps in deference to a member of Congress, or perhaps in deference to over a hundred thousand US citizens, the police moved the buses and let the march continue down Independence.
The crowd was made up of people from all over the country and representing hundreds of different organizations. While UFPJ, an umbrella organization with many member-groups all over the country, wrote the call to action for the Jan. 27th mobilization, many other non-UFPJ affiliated organizations showed up to voice their support for ending the war. Despite the large number of organizations represented, and with a few notable exceptions, the mobilization was almost wholly white and middle class despite most of the victims of war being working class people of color.
Estimates of the size of the mobilization vary, from the corporate media’s ‘tens of thousands’ to UFPJ’s estimate of 500,000. While Resistance Media doesn’t claim to have a sophisticated, universally agreed upon, methodology for determining crowd size (much like the Washington Post and New York Times do not), it seems unlikely that the crowd was less than 100,000.
The rally and march had almost no acts of civil disobedience, with the
exception of a single group of around 250 black clad anarchists, who rushed
the largely unguarded steps to the Capitol. The police presence was
light Saturday, and the police exercised restraint and worked to
de-escalate the situation. After the police cleared the protestors, all
that was left was an anarchist symbol spray painted on the Capitol and
a broken foot from a police motorcycle. No arrests were made.
