Protest at US Interests Section

Brian Becker                              

When 80 U.S. citizens held a militant demonstration in front of the U.S. Interest Section in Baghdad, Iraq, on May 11, it was a first.

The chanting demonstrators carried signs and banners denouncing the U.S. government for carrying out genocide against the Iraqi people. The protesters included former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, the Rev. Lucius Walker, Sara Flounders of the International Action Center and others.

It was also historic because it was a profound gesture of internationalism and anti-imperialism by progressive and working-class people from the United States. It was a bold expression of solidarity aimed at countering the policy of genocide against a small developing country and its 22 million people.

We had gone to Iraq as part of the Iraq Sanctions Challenge. The Challenge openly defied the so-called Trading with the Enemy Act—which says U.S. citizens can be imprisoned for up to 12 years for bringing medicine and other vitally needed products to the Iraqi people.

The Challenge was initiated by organizers of the International Action Center. Challenge delegates collected more than $4 million worth of medicine in less than eight weeks.

They took medicine because more than 1.5 million Iraqis have perished in the last eight years since the U.S. government successfully forced the United Nations to impose economic sanctions on that country. With the economy strangled, the death rate for children under 5 has increased 12-fold since 1991.

Seeing children dying sparks action

After touring hospital wards and witnessing Iraqi mothers clutching children dying for lack of simple medicines to cure amebic dysentery, acute diarrhea, and other easily treatable diseases, the group held a thorough discussion on what to do next. We decided it was appropriate and necessary to demonstrate against U.S. government facilities in Iraq.

Some in the U.S. media stationed in Baghdad baited the demonstration: "Isn’t this a sign that you are carrying out a propaganda effort for the Iraqi government?" "Doesn’t this prove that your motives are political rather than humanitarian?"

The demonstrators were unmoved by this predictable taunting. These same media, after all, have served as the mouthpiece for every act of aggression carried out against the Iraqi people.

We proudly carried out this demonstration against the U.S. government because it is vital that progressive people show the world that the sanctions policy is dictated by Big Oil and the Wall Street banking and corporate establishment, not by the working class inside the United States. This same government is equally as pro-rich and racist at home as it is abroad.

The other reason we demonstrated in Baghdad is that progressive forces in the United States have an obligation to renounce the racist demonization, embellished by a heavy dose of imperialist patriotism, that serves as the ideological cover and justification for the war criminals who run the White House, CIA and Pentagon.

The May 11 demonstration in Baghdad was a small but important step toward creating a new international movement. Let’s call it "globalization from below."

It represented solidarity and common action between working and oppressed people fighting for justice and liberation throughout the world.

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