Conscious Choice: Clueless in Seattle

January 2000

Clueless in Seattle

by Dave Aftandilian

On Tuesday, November 30, a group of peaceful protesters more than 30,000 strong (some estimates put the total as high as 60,000) shut down the World Trade Organization (WTO) on the first day of its Seattle ministerial summit in a tremendous show of solidarity among incredibly diverse groups. Labor unionists marched alongside environmentalists, grandmothers joined forces with college students, libertarians and greens found common ground in opposing the WTO’s plans to "liberalize trade" through closed-door meetings among wealthy capitalists and their government representatives.

But the importance of this monumental demonstration of peaceful solidarity to protest the actions of a previously obscure international trade group all too often got lost in the mainstream media’s reports of violence and disorder in downtown Seattle. "National Guard Is Called to Quell Trade-Talk Protests: Seattle Is Under Curfew After Disruptions," read the headline in the New York Times the morning after the protest, with the lead paragraph of the story reporting "sometimes violent protests by thousands of people."

The boldfaced lead in the Washington Post‘s story blared, "A guerrilla army of anti-trade protesters took control of downtown Seattle today, forcing the delay of the opening on a global meeting of the World Trade Organization." "WTO opening ceremonies besieged by protesters, then canceled," and later, "Mayor declares civil emergency, imposes curfew in downtown Seattle" said the online edition of the Seattle Times (whose background information and coverage of the events leading up to the trade talks and protests had been exceptionally good).

Hidden behind the photos and monotonous video clips of shattered storefront windows, burning dumpsters, and black-clad marauders is a more important picture of tens of thousands of protesters holding to a strict code of nonviolence against people and property, despite prolonged and repeated provocations from the Seattle police and the National Guard. When an armored vehicle pumped tear gas full in the faces of sitting protesters, they did not turn violent. When police officers in protective riot gear released caustic pepper spray directly into the faces of protesters, and round after round of rubber bullets into their unarmored bodies, they did not turn violent. When a motorcycle cop rode across the legs of a locked-down protester, sending him to the hospital, the crowds did not turn violent.

While it is true, as the media reports highlighted, that a few dozen self-described "anarchists" managed to smash a bunch of windows of multinational chain stores in downtown Seattle and paint slogans on their storefronts while the police stood by and did nothing to stop them, many protesters did their best to defend the stores from attack, shouting at the "anarchists" to stop and sometimes physically interposing themselves between the vandals and the stores. An eyewitness interviewed for CNN’s "Burden of Proof" on December 2, for instance, said that the protesters had begged the police to arrest the vandals, and that steelworkers had even literally sat on some of them until the police arrived. But the police refused to make any arrests — until they received word from the Secret Service that the President was on his way; then they began arresting everyone indiscriminately, sitting peaceful protester and window-breaking vandal alike.

The fact that a small group of vandals took advantage of the trade protests to deface corporate property is not the take-home message from Seattle. The real story is "the incredibly empowering and unforgettable solidarity throughout the whole week," as the newsletter of the U.S. Green Party recently put it, and that "40,000 people representing more than a hundred groups organized a nonviolent, peaceful protest of assembly in the streets of downtown Seattle and were successful," in the words of Sam Corl, web site designer for the Berkeley-based Ruckus Society.

And there was also a subtler, but perhaps even more important, victory in the battle to draw the attention of the world to the WTO’s trampling of environmental and labor protections in the pursuit of "globalization at all costs." Did you know what the WTO was, or what it did, before the Seattle protests? If so, you were doing better than 96 percent of the people surveyed in the U.K. a few days prior to the Seattle protests, according to a story Gibby Zobel wrote for The Big Issue. Or in the words of California state senator Tom Hayden, who took part in the protests, "Yesterday no one knew what the WTO was. Today the whole of America knows. It is a household word — and they know it is bad."

"The WTO will never be the same again," said Dan Seligman, Bill Arthur, and Kathleen Casey of the Sierra Club. "The pressure from labor, environmental, and human rights groups have forced a dialogue and attention that they cannot walk away from. The WTO will have to democratize, reform, or become extinct."

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