Facing Tear Gas

[Photo by Sion Touhig] I first heard about the Seattle Protests at a Ruckus Society training camp about 6 months before the WTO was scheduled to come to town. Ruckus is a group famous for the dramatic and daring banners they hang from cranes and buildings and towers; they focus on human rights and environmental issues. The speaker there representing the anti-WTO organizers, after making an eloquent case for the connections between all the globalization issues and for a coalition of activists of all stripes, said “We will lie down on the airstrips and stop the delegates planes from landing.  If they get past that, we will block the highways leading from the airport to the city. If they get past that, we will block the hotels they are staying in, we will block the streets, and we will block the doors of the convention center and we will not let them make another another free trade deal that week in Seattle.” How could I not help with such a plan? In that moment I committed to go.

…I had met some of the people responsible for the communications systems at Ruckus, and thought I might lend a hand setting up communications for the event. I trained with the communications teams, and was one of the groups that checked out walkie talkies to help on the days of the events. Our training was strict. Contrary to popular myth, we did not use the communications systems to direct the protests, or call for blockades of particular  intersections, and so on. The role of the communications team was to hang back, observe the events, and notify legal, medics, and independent media of situations needing their attention.  Small affinity groups used smaller walkie talkies inside their groups to communicate from one end of a small action to another, but most of the co-ordination was done in the days leading up to the protests in big open meetings.  The actual plans of each affinity group covering a “pie slice”  were a secret known only to that affinity group, and they did not change much based on external information. Each group was responsible for somehow stopping all traffic from the convention center, by whatever means they chose which were kept secret from the overall organizers. This made us much more immune to rumors and bad information and contributed to the success of the actions. Even though the police could sneak a number of WTO delegates in through a weak link in our pie slice blockades, the event was so big that momentary breaches of our lines would still not allow enough of the delegates to get in for the conference to go on with business as usual. And there were plenty of people not committed to any particular blockade, who could step in and defend an intersection if the original blockade was broken.

…My friend Joan and I started out with a crew of about ten people carrying the umbrella and suitcase transmitter, and several carrying boom boxes. We started to walk around the perimeter, visiting different blockades with our goofy radio setup. Our programming left a bit to be desired, limited to running commentary as we walked along, interviews with random people passing by, and a bit of music. Our “show” probably broadcast for 3 or 4 blocks, though if we got to a high point we probably could have gone further, if anyone knew to listen. The first few hours were pretty fun, but by noon or so it became clear that the day was going to be more than we bargained for…

The police had started tear gassing in several places, and using beatings and direct applications of pepper spray to the seated blockaders.  They were also starting to charge our lines. We put away the transmitter because no one would hear it in this chaos. We continued to make a circuit around the convention center.  Joan and I joined newly forming blockades then leaving to help seed the next promising intersection ten or fifteen minutes later, once our forces seemed to have the intersection under our control.

Everything I saw on the part of the blockades on Tuesday morning was entirely non-violent, and this held up under a brutal police assault. We saw a lot more of it than many people, because over the course of the day we walked all the way around the perimeter, stopping wherever it seemed we could lend a hand.  Our lines often held for quite a while, or they would  be broken and quickly form back up as soon as the police moved on. Starting in the afternoon, I saw more people begin to fight back. As the tear gas canisters came down, people began to throw them back…

The under-told story of Seattle (lost in the window smashing anarchist controversy) is the immensity and effectiveness of the blockades. Many people focus on the glass smashing and the battles, but the simple fact was that many delegates could not get through the people’s blockades.  Often the blockades were three people deep and probably a hundred people across, running from one side of the street to the other, anchored to the buildings on each side.  They were simply impassable without resorting to violence. And they were at every intersection for a circumference of perhaps 30 blocks. Some were bigger than others.  In smaller areas, it might just be 7 or 8 people blocking a narrow back staircase past a parking garage, and running up and blocking anyone who tried to pass. But a large number of the blockades involved hundreds of people linking arms. Since the police were not arresting much on Tuesday, just trying to disperse people - even if they blew past our lines people would join another blockade blocks away, or retake the intersection as the police re-deployed.   -Pete Tridish