Continuing demos and arrests in NY.

national | miscellaneous | news report Monday February 04, 2002 07:20 by jim d

Sunday Saw a couple of hundred arrests during demos and direct actions in NY. Nevertheless the weekend has been a big success and proof that the radical movement for global justice is here to stay.

As of Sunday night there have been approximately 250 arrests in Manhattan. Several unpermitted demonstrations and direct actions took place during the day and while police were initially slow to respond physically by late afternoon sweeps and roundups had occurred at several points around town. Several people seem to have been targeted specifically, some from indymedia and several from NY Anti Capitalist Convergance among them. Prisoners are being held at the tombs downtown and at the Brooklyn Navy Yard which was designated as a warehousing centre for the cops for this weekend.
It appears that few can be charged with anything substantial though one youngster may be charged with allegedly breaking 4 windows at the office of the company that owns Huntington Life Sciences, notorious within the British animal liberation scene, in midtown. It seems that the strategy may have been to remove as many as possible from the streets before a planned demo about the Enron collapse outside an Anderson office tomorrow morning.
Overall the feeling here is that the weekend has been a great success. at least 15000 marched in a highly disciplined and creative anarchist organised demonstration yesterday. This was after a very short time to organise anything as the WEF only announced their intention to come here in October. Meanwhile post September 11th there was a real possibility of the demo being a poorly organised and atttended fiasco, exactly what the city and WEF had in mind. A knock out blow for the movement in the US. To back it up there has been a concerted campaign of intimidation in the media to prevent people attending with fluff pieces about NY cops preparing for battle in mock rehersals at Shea stadium. The Village Voice, normally critical of the ultra violence which is endemic to the police force here, carried a piece about the lengths the cops were going to prepare for an expected army of vicious killer hooligans who would descend on the town. The response from readers was so critical that the Voice effectivly retracted the piece in the following issue.
Instead of cowing people their strategy of locking down the city for a week, eerily reminiscient of the weeks after the 11th, has pissed off huge numbers of ordinary New Yorkers who wont look forward to any WEF return to the city when it means gestapo policing and long delays coming and going. Whats more, the cynical manner in which the WEF and city elites envoked the dead of September to explain the presence of cocktail swilling fat cats and their pop star mates (just say bo no) has found them few converts.
Any talk of cocktails should lead us directly to Porto allegre where the jet set civil society normally takes its winter vacation. The shamless retreat of the liberals, also using the dead of September as a justification, should remind us that they are complicit in the attempt by the state here to crush the movment once and for all this weekend. The state has failed spectacularly and the NGOs have underwritten that failure by abandoning street protest and formulating an attempt to institutionalise the global justice movement.