Several million people from all walks of life took to the streets yesterday in what was billed as the biggest global anti-war demonstration in history.
People of all faiths from Antarctica to Iceland, in more than 600 cities and towns, were united in their contempt for US President George W. Bush’s hawkish stance on Iraq.
Those protesting were given added momentum when Hans Blix, the UN’s chief inspector in Iraq, told the Security Council in New York on Friday that his teams had not found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Thousands of protesters throughout the US told the White House to “give peace a chance.” The display of public dissent took place in over 300 cities and towns. Rallies and marches were held in places that have not held protests since the Vietnam War, and in others where people have never protested anything.
There were huge rallies not only in New York and Los Angeles but also in Watertown, New York, and Fargo, North Dakota where anti-war zeal meant coping with temperatures that dipped to 30 degrees below zero with three feet of snow on the ground. Las Vegas, the gambling haven of the world, also protested the war, as did down-home cities such as Fort Wayne, Indiana; Bisbee, Arizona; Hilo, Hawaii; Sitka, Alaska; Fresno, California; Reno, Nevada, and the well-heeled retirement community in St. Augustine, Florida.
In Washington, several Muslim-American and Arab-American organizations were also urging their people to participate in a march on Washington, D.C. “to demand an end to the mounting attack on the civil rights of Muslims in America.”
Organizers said the Memorial Day weekend event will be the largest ever gathering of Muslims in the nation’s capital.
“The time has come where we must draw a line in the sand, stand up for ourselves, and demand an immediate and unconditional halt to the Bush administration’s profiling, harassment, and abuse of our community,” Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Washington-based Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, told Arab News.
Others protested in all six continents.
“The whole world is against this war. Only one person wants it,” said Muslim teenager Bilqees Gamieldien as she protested in the South African city of Cape Town.
“What the US is doing now is wrong. We are on the brink of World War III,” said Japanese housewife Mariko Ayama at a Tokyo rally.
One Russian protester’s banner in Moscow showed a photograph of the US president with the words: “Butcher: Get out of other people’s lands.”
In mainly Muslim Malaysia, about 500 protesters gathered outside the US Embassy in Kuala Lumpur waving placards reading “Drop Bush not bombs”.
German police said more than 100,000 people attended a rally in the center of Berlin. “We haven’t seen anything comparable in Germany since the 1980s,” organizer Malte Kreutzfeldt said. “And it is the first global demonstration of such a scale,” he added.
In Italy, an estimated one million people, from dreadlocked teenagers to graying pensioners, gathered in Rome.
In Baghdad, two massive anti-war rallies, each snaking over several kilometers, filled the streets, with many protesters carrying guns to demonstrate their opposition to US threats.
In Britain, an estimated half a million people of all ages, nationalities and religions began their demonstration at noon, when the huge crowd started its journey from Westminster, near the Houses of Parliament, to Hyde Park.
A Scottish woman in her 40s told Arab News that, although her mother was very ill with diabetes and could not walk properly, “she insisted on joining me and the rest of the demonstrators to call for peace.”
An Englishwoman, who was also with her mother, told Arab News in Hyde Park that there has never been a more crucial time for ordinary Britons to make their voices heard.
In France, where the government has given a voice to anti-war sentiment throughout the world, the police initially estimated the number of protesters in Paris to be only 25,000, by late afternoon it was obvious that more than 10 times that number had turned out.
They met at Place Denfert Rochereau near Montparnasse, paraded through the Latin Quarter, and eventually reached Place de la Bastille, where an important all-night celebration was expected to attract tens of thousands of additional participants.
The numbers would normally have been greater, noted the event’s organizers, except that the anti-war march fell in the winter school holiday, when a good many Paris-region families are off skiing in the French Alps. Organizers also said that the French had little to protest about, since their country has been in the forefront of the movement to block a US-led attack on Iraq.
— Additional input from Agencies
