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A few weeks ago in Washington, D.C., thousands of protestors gathered to disrupt the semi-annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank as a follow up to the headline-grabbing protests of the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Seattle late last year.
Aaron Rogers, 21-year-old manager of his parents’ bar/restaurant — Habits Café in Oakley Square — decided to attend.
“I heard about Seattle about a week before it went down … and I started looking at the issues,” said Rogers, adding that he’s attended only one other protest in his life — for Mumia Abu-Jamal, the death row inmate convicted (some believe unjustly so) of killing a cop.
So what are so many people from so many backgrounds concerned about? What is uniting students, unions, environmentalists, and even anarchists?
The issues surrounding the IMF, the WTO and the World Bank are complex, but one main sentiment seemed to bond the protestors.
“I think the one kind of common denominator … is that they all had some kind of opposition to corporate power,” said Esly Caldwell III, who graduated with Rogers from Walnut Hills High School in 1996. “That seemed to unite us.”
Caldwell, active in student organizations at Earlham College, a small liberal arts college in Richmond, Ind., basically organized the student trip Rogers joined to get to Washington, D.C.
The way Caldwell sees it, corporations are the fourth branch of government in America. Through lawsuits and campaign contributions, he said, they can curb the powers of the other three branches of government to meet their liking, or at least lessen the impact of government regulations.
Another concern is the WTO’s power over its more than 130 member nations, according to Rogers. The WTO was created in 1995 to replace the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, established in the wake of World War II. Its main task is to mediate trade agreements and disputes.
“Their purpose is to make trade as free as possible,” Caldwell said.
The WTO has the authority to overrule local laws that it sees as unfairly restricting free trade, such as a Massachusetts state law restricting the import of tuna caught in nets that trap sea turtles, according to Caldwell.
The IMF and World Bank work alongside the WTO in international loans and finance. The IMF loans money to nations to aid economic development, but Caldwell said some counties can’t afford to repay the loans. Tanzania, in southeast Africa, spends 40 percent of its national wealth paying back IMF loans, he said. Other countries are repaying loans received by their former dictators who never helped the general population with the money, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The WTO, IMF and World Bank representatives have responded that they share the concerns of the protestors and that their trade and monetary policies are an effort to allow counties to grow and prosper through international trade.
On April 14, Caldwell, Rogers and about 20 people from Earlham packed two rented vans and headed for Washington, D.C. The goal: Prevent the World Bank and IMF from holding their semi-annual meetings. At least 10,000 others would join them that weekend.
Rogers’ van left Richmond late on a Friday afternoon, reaching Washington around 4 a.m. Rogers prepared about 30 pages of information about the WTO, IMF and World Bank from Web sites and other sources as a primer for his fellow protestors.
To his surprise, the college paid for the van and the mileage, Rogers said.
“Esly did a real good job of organizing this,” he said. “He was on point, definitely.”
The group stayed with an Earlham alumnae who was part of Mobilization for Global Justice, the organization created specifically to coordinate the hundreds of smaller groups attending the D.C. event. People slept on the floors, in the kitchen and even in walk-in closets.
At 9 a.m., after a short subway ride, Rogers and others arrived at the convergence center — the protest headquarters — for non-violence workshops and other training, but they never got closer than one block.
To Rogers’ surprise, the D.C. police and other law enforcement agencies had arrived minutes before, shut down the center, and closed it off. The reason? To the best of Rogers’ knowledge, alleged fire code violations.
Soon, the police expanded the blockade to a three-block radius around the building, Rogers said. But protestors had a back-up convergence center at a nearby church, so he and his companions headed there. This center was also later shut down. People formed pairs to learn how to deal with police.
“Basically, how to react to any physical injuries that you might receive from the cops,” he said. “They tried to anticipate police tactics.” The training, which included basic medical issues, spilled into an alley because there was no other space available. Rogers didn’t get to go to legal training.
“I should have,” he said.
The protestors were organized into “affinity groups,” which ranged in size from eight to 40 people, each with a leader/ spokesperson. Saturday afternoon, affinity group leaders met with each other and decided what strategy the protest would use. The protestors divided the territory around the IMF building into 12 or 15 pie slice-shaped sections. Each group would guard a section, blocking intersections.
The police, in anticipation, closed about 50 blocks surrounding the meeting.
“It was an attempt to spread the protestors out as thinly as possible,” Rogers said.
But before the main protests began, Rogers and a few friends got involved in another protest.
Saturday, after the training ended at about 3 p.m., Rogers and several Earlham cohorts unexpectedly joined a protest about privately controlled prisons held in front of the U.S. Justice Department. Rogers met people from Kent, Antioch and Oberlin universities before the group of several hundred people began a march down city sidewalks. Rogers couldn’t identify a leader for this protest, and didn’t know where it was headed, but city police graciously stopped traffic while the group crossed streets and made sure the group stayed on the sidewalks.
“It felt like we had an escort,” Rogers said. “I felt like they were taking care of us and making sure we didn’t get hit by cars.”
But there was more to it than that. After marching several blocks, the protestors ran into a wall of police, then another wall of cops pinned the protestors into a two-block area in a commercial district. A helicopter had been watching the group, and they noticed police on the rooftops.
“They just kind of blocked us in,” Rogers said. “And they wouldn’t let anybody leave.”
Almost immediately, a protester grabbed a megaphone and said the march was over, that they had made their point, and asked the police to let everyone leave. The cops refused.
“We were never told to disperse,” Rogers said. “I didn’t think we had done anything wrong.”
Police then offered to let the media — which included French TV and some independent press — leave the crowd.
“At that point I was freaking out,” Rogers said, adding that he figured the police were about to do something violent. He told the French TV reporter not to leave. Most of the press stayed.
About 3 1/2 hours after the police blockade began, another line of police split the crowd, following the yellow line in the middle of the street. It took about 1 1/2 hours to arrest everyone.
“Nobody was read their rights,” Rogers said, adding that people were handcuffed behind their backs with plastic cuffs and loaded on a dozen school buses and one city bus.
Rogers and Liv Leader, a friend’s girlfriend, ended up at the back of the last bus sitting next to two cops. They traveled to one prison or jail for processing — a privately run one, ironically — but it was full, so they went to a second. It also was full.
In the meantime, Rogers steered the conversation away from politics.
“I wanted to keep the atmosphere light and make sure the cops liked us,” he said. Both sides, after all, were just doing what they had to do.
“The cops were cool,” Caldwell said.
The trip ended at Judiciary Square at about 9:30 or 10 p.m. At first, police said the protestors might get processed by 1 or 1:30 a.m. But the first bus of protestors took two hours to process, and Rogers was on the last of six remaining buses.
Police told people to “post and forfeit,” meaning, to give their names and addresses and to pay a $50 fine, and they would be released. About 90 percent of the crowd agreed to do so, but the rest refused, further slowing down the process, although it was just a matter of time before they were identified through police databases. Those who refused were hassled by the cops, including being handcuffed hand-to-ankle so they had to continuously stoop “like a monkey,” Rogers said.
During his wait, Rogers found out that almost all of the nearby cops hadn’t slept for two days. Most of the police that weekend would work Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights with little or no rest.
“And that scared me, because there were going to be all these people blocking off intersections (on Sunday for the IMF/World Bank meetings),” Rogers said. “People were planning to get arrested. It was in the air that Sunday was going to be insane.”
At about midnight or 1 a.m., protestors were allowed bathroom breaks and provided with new handcuffs with six- or eight-inch straps connecting the cuffs so that they could spread their arms apart and sit up straight.
“That was bliss,” Rogers said.
As the night passed, some of the cops individually bought burgers and fries; the department bought doughnuts in the morning. Rogers said he tried to look pathetic and beg some food from the cops, but it didn’t work.
“Our relationship with the cops just deteriorated through the night,” he said, noting that he slept for about 30 minutes all night.
Finally, at about 10 a.m., with Rogers nerves frayed, three global justice lawyers showed up to help the protestors. They tried to get the remaining protestors to do a direct action, meaning refuse to give their names, because the longer processing took the more time the lawyers had to negotiate a mass release. But it was too late. Rogers and Liv were tired, hungry, and annoyed that the lawyers came so late; protestors had been calling the legal line all night. Even though Rogers wanted more information about his legal rights, he and Liv paid their fine, ending their 13-hour, 45-minute bus ride.
Rogers received an old, crusty, glazed doughnut and some juice while he waited in a holding cell for his release, which happened between 11 and 11:30 a.m. He also finally found out what he was charged with: marching without a permit.
“I was pissed,” he said.
A class-action lawsuit concerning the Saturday arrests is being organized by the International Action Center, a broad-ranging group focused on social justice which participated in the protest.
Rogers and the others arrested ended up missing the crucial event of the weekend. Sunday’s blockade of the IMF/World Bank meetings was supposed to start at 5 a.m. Apparently the cops spied on the organizational meetings, Rogers said, because they sneaked IMF officials into its building at 4 a.m.
Later on Sunday afternoon, Rogers participated in a legal march — the official, permitted protest near the national mall not too far from the White House. At the peak of the event, protestors surrounded a line of police on horseback, trapping them. An anarchist group donned black masks and jumped on a TV van, quickly exciting the crowd. A wedge of walking police parted the crowd, clearing a way out for the cops on horseback, Rogers said. After the cops retreated, the protestors claimed the space and chanted “Whose streets? Our streets!”
The police tried to intimidate the crowd at this protest and during the whole weekend by driving straight at them in cars and hitting the brakes at the last second and by speeding close to the crowd in motorcycles. At one point a police helicopter hovered above a crowd, blowing debris around. Sometimes the cops formed a wedge and pushed people out of the way or arrested a few people to show they were serious.
At the mall, Rogers saw quite a few themed protests, including a group of “Billionaires for Bush” dressed in bowler hats and Victorian clothing. Their motto: “Economic inequality is not growing fast enough.”
The day ended with Rogers and his friends going out for Pakistani food. The next day, he got up at about 10 a.m. and headed back for Cincinnati.
Although the protests failed to stop the IMF and World Bank from meeting, Rogers considers the weekend a success.
“Tactically, it was a failure, but in furthering the movement and educating people it was a success,” he said. “I think the big victory was getting a conversation started.”
Maybe the next time people see an article on the IMF or WTO, they’ll read it, he said. But Washington isn’t the end of the road, Caldwell said.
“This is still building momentum,” Caldwell said. “Five, 10, 15 years from now, I think it will be a lot harder to dismiss it.”
So far the mainstream media seem a bit baffled by the protests, maybe because of the participants or maybe because there’s no clear-cut list of demands or objectives.
Getting arrested was “empowering,” he said. Here, as in the Civil Rights movement, being jailed was a badge of honor.
Rogers made new friends by getting arrested, including Greg Kornbluh, Liv’s boyfriend, a 1998 Walnut Hills graduate whom he didn’t really know before.
“Getting arrested together is a good way to meet people,” Rogers said. ©
This article appears in May 10-16, 2000.