The failure of March 1

national | miscellaneous | news report Sunday March 02, 2003 17:29 by Firewoman

Who are the GNAW?

Personally, and I am sure many felt the same, I did not go to the protest as it seemed to be Controlled by an organisation I had never heard of before.

At the protest over in Dublin I was handed a stack of leaflets by the IAWM, red ink "peace activist diary". I decided to hand them out to people back home who I thought might be interested. Personally I am not an organisation person, I respect certain groups, but like a lot of the younger generation I don't trust much of anyone. Anyway I handed out some of these leaflets to friends, teachers etc. Then I checked Indymedia. What the hell was going on? It seemed that the protest had been hijacked or something by some organisation called "Grass roots Network Against War". Very grass rooots, hadn't even heard of them, well now what? Checked the "plans" on Indymedia, not too impressed. These "plans" seemed to involve trying to get arrested and required pretty high numbers of people.
Now I am quite young and the protest in Dublin was one of the first I had been to. However it seemed even to my inexperienced eyes, that the people attending the march were not the types to take risks of the types laid out in the bizarrely concocted plan. They were Grannies, families with kids etc. The people of Ireland who were againt the war, against the war planes landing in Shannon too, most of them.
GNAW and all the rest of the wierdness that happened confused people, they stopped thinking of it as their protest, their movement. It seemed out of our hands. it seemed like if you went you would have to conform to someones "plan" whether it was GNAW or the IAWM. That was what was different, that was why it failed. It didn't seem open anymore. For all that the GNAW can call themselves Anarchists, they took the power away from us.

Whoever the hell they are.