Democracy In Seattle's Streets

It was in Chile, as an international observer of the 1988 plebiscite that voted Augusto Pinochet out of office, that I first saw the dramatic transformative power of nonviolence. I saw it the second time in Seattle during the protests of the meeting of the World Trade Organization.

The Seattle protests relied, not on state power, but on the strength of well-organized people's power. On November 30 and the following days, decentralized nonviolent direct action won the day, transforming a city (and changing the perceptions of the world) by defeating one of the most powerful bureaucratic financial institutions ever created.

Simple Intent, Complex Design

The direct action plan was as simple in its intent as it was complex in its logistics and design.

The plan was to surround the WTO meeting sites with a human blockade, preventing delegates from entering and forcing the cancellation of the meeting. Protesters gathered at 7:00 a.m. on both sides of the convention center where the WTO meetings were to take place. In a cold and driving rain, my group marched from Pike Place Market on Seattle's waterfront toward the city center. We passed streets blocked with dumpsters, garbage cans and yellow plastic strips that looked like police crime scene tape but read, "Unseen Crimes."

Affinity groups peeled off to construct high- and low-tech barricades at downtown intersections. (High-tech barricades included tripods-tall, three-pole structures with someone sitting at the top, which can't be dismantled without harming the person-and lock boxes, pipes made of plastic or steel in which protesters lock their hands, making it difficult for police to separate people standing in a line.) My group marched to the Paramount Theater, where U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky was to hold the WTO's opening press conference at 9:30.

We found a line of buses blocking the street, with a small opening guarded by Seattle police in modest riot gear. Strictly low-tech, using nothing but our bodies, we locked arms at the only opening in the bus line, in front of the police, and prepared to hold that ground all day. From high on a hill with a wonderful view we watched the city as the rain slowed. The King County Sheriffs guarding the nearby bus depot were friendly and talkative, in contrast to Seattle police. They joked that they had the easiest job, and we commiserated about our common inability to leave our posts for bathroom breaks. When a stymied delegate looked as if he might try to break the barricade violently, the sheriffs quickly moved in to protect the protesters.

At 8:00 our tactical coordinator heard via walkie-talkie that the blockade was in place, securely surrounding the meeting site and preventing delegates from entering. At 9:30, Barshefsky canceled the opening press conference because no one could enter the Paramount Theater. The opening plenary was also canceled. We, the people, had stopped the WTO!

Gas, Spray and Bullets

No one could believe the police weren't arresting the blockaders. But around 10:30 we smelled and felt the presence of tear gas or pepper spray. Cloth soaked in a solution of water and baking soda helped block the mild but noticeable effects on my nose and lungs. A little later, we heard that police had used rubber bullets in addition to tear gas and pepper spray (and also that the police were jamming the tactical teams' walkie-talkies with repeated sexual obscenities). As the day wore on, we smelled and felt the chemical presence more intensely. We walked to the other side of the convention center, where students from two different campuses were in lock boxes. They told us that the cops had been good to them all day, "except in the morning when they pepper-sprayed and tear-gassed us!" Although the chemicals inflicted real pain, the barricades held.

Back at our site near the Paramount theater, sometime around 2:00 p.m., we saw "hard shell" riot police in SWAT uniforms and body armor approaching. Later in the day, we would see more hard shells and mounted police break through human barricades to escort delegates inside-but the first hard shell group had a different mission. I tried to get close to find out what they were doing. They were very edgy, intently focused on their task, which (as we learned a little later) was to monitor the movements of a group of anarchist youth. The group arrived about 10 minutes after the police. They approached our line, then turned and left; the hard shells disappeared with them. Later, I wondered how it was possible that at 2:00 in the afternoon, police could track this group so effectively that they arrived 10 minutes before the anarchists, yet only a few hours later could not deter them from breaking windows and setting fires. Did the police actually want violence to occur?

Honeycomb of Activism

The Direct Action Network, which planned the blockade and other protests, is a loose-knit coalition of West Coast-based nonviolent direct action groups. It organized the actions out of an old warehouse-turned-dance-club in the residential neighborhood of Capital Hill, now known as the Convergence Center. During the two weeks that preceded the WTO protests the building was a honeycomb of protest activity.

When I arrived November 27, I saw as many as 100 people at a time learning about nonviolence through discussion and role play in one room. In another, activists used the same techniques to plan legal strategy. In the alley outside, others learned about blockades and constructing tripods. In the far corner of the largest room, artists and activists worked day and night to make props, signs, banners and puppets. A medical clinic took care of the sick and distributed free condoms, information about sexually transmitted diseases and tips for dealing with tear gas and pepper spray. Volunteers prepared nutritious vegan meals, feeding up to 1,000 people a day. A large sign in the dining area read, "We got bugs in the wall, bugs on our phones, bugs at our actions, we don't need bugs in our food. Please wash your hands." At the front orientation table people answered questions, gave out direct action information packets, asked for donations, kept a sign-in sheet, recruited volunteers and sold T-shirts. Organizers maintained security and kept one room locked for luggage.

WRL representative to War Resisters' International Vivien Sharples and I participated in a training on high- and low-tech blockades-from human knots to steel-pipe lock boxes-and in a legal training to prepare for arrest and jail. Organizers prepared clear "jail solidarity" guidelines: Carry no identification and do not give your name; refuse to allow the group to be separated; demand equal treatment for all; demand that all arrestees be issued citations (not felony or misdemeanor charges). Protesters were advised to plead not guilty to all charges and demand court-appointed attorneys and jury trials if those conditions were not met.

All that activity happened without an office, without staff, without funding, without an executive director. The Direct Action Network paid $4,000 to rent the Convergence Center, but the benefit of sharing and developing skills with all those young activists was priceless. It was anarchism at its best, a decentralized effort that happened below the radar screens of both the more mainstream protesters and the police-even though DAN's media savvy had brought far more press attention than usual to the preparations. The day before the action, the Seattle Times' list of upcoming events included the "Nonviolent Blockade to Shut Down the WTO"-and the information that a prior training was encouraged and could be gotten at the headquarters of the Direct Action Network. One of Seattle's two mainstream newspapers was telling its readers to get nonviolence training if they wanted to participate in civil disobedience!

The Convergence Center and DAN represented a remarkable coming together of movements and efforts, some of which, like the Ruckus Society (which held a special training camp to prepare for WTO), Rainforest Action Network, Global Exchange, Center for Campus Organizing and War Resisters League had been working on these issues for years. DAN also gained from recent campus-based activism including animal rights, environment and anti-sweatshop campaigns.

Speaking Truth

Much of the post-action press coverage focused on the protesters' alleged lack of information about the WTO. Apparently, the reporters who wrote those stories hadn't heard exchanges like the one I witnessed between a demonstrator and a delegate from the European Union who claimed that he wanted to break the barricade and enter the Convention center "to convince your government [the United States] to accept protections for European farmers."

The protester asked how the WTO could be beneficial when it overturned labor and environmental standards. While the delegate tried to explain that he thought the WTO could be reformed, the protester asked about one of the WTO's controversial rulings, which overturned local laws requiring shrimp trawlers to have equipment protecting dolphins from the trawling nets.

"Perhaps [the protections are] a burden to industry," replied the delegate. "Do you know how much such devices cost?" asked the protester.

The delegate admitted he didn't. The protester did: "50 dollars," he said.

The conversation went on for 30 minutes, during which the protester offered well-reasoned and well-informed arguments supported by statistics and analysis. And that was only one of hundreds that took place that day, as delegates, blocked from entering the convention hall, were met by protesters with questions and comments. The nonviolent blockade afforded protesters the kind of access that corporations and lobbyists pay thousands of dollars for; it was the best kind of lobbying, not in the marble halls of power, but in the streets-streets that were like a carnival.

Or a liberation zone. There were dancers, puppets, clowns, street theater, radical cheerleaders, people dressed like turtles and cows and butterflies, people on stilts and lots of music. There was a young man in a Boy Scout uniform who claimed some of his merit badges were for civil disobedience and blockade-making.

It may have been the closest I will ever come to a general strike, and I saw it in the only U.S. city that has actually ever had a one-day general strike. At the end of the day, as we walked, tired but satisfied, through downtown Seattle streets still filled with the stench of pepper spray and tear gas, we chanted again the words that captured the spirit of the day: "This is what democracy looks like!"

Reprinted with permission from the January-February 2000 issue of the Nonviolent Activist, the magazine of the War Resisters League.