Demonstrators Steer Clear of Their Designated Space

By JOHN KIFNER

The streets around the Democratic
National Convention site resembled an armed camp on Sunday
– helicopters overhead, bomb-sniffing dogs and their
handlers, police officers and soldiers lining the
intersections, many kinds of barriers, and an officially
designated "Free Speech Zone" sealed off with cyclone
fencing and razor wire.

It looked like an empty cage.

The designated demonstration area, a dank place under
abandoned elevated tracks, failed its first test on Sunday
when what will probably be the largest demonstration of
the convention period simply walked right by it.

"We never intended to use it," said Rachel Nasca of Boston
Answer, the main protest coalition, marching at the head
of the line. "We never even bothered to take it to court.
Did you see that thing?"

Indeed, the Free Speech Zone is rapidly becoming the
hottest local issue of the convention, with most of the
protest groups vowing to boycott it. The only protesters
to embrace it were members of a pro-Palestinian group that
says the cyclone fencing and barbed wire provide an ideal
visual backdrop to their message of opposition to the
Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

"We want to draw attention to what Palestinians have been
subjected to for years," said Marilyn Levin of the group,
United for Justice With Peace. "We can leave our cage, but
Palestinians cannot leave theirs."

Sunday’s demonstrators, mostly antiwar, numbering about
3,000 by police estimate, marched for about two hours in a
big circle from the Boston Common over the top of Beacon
Hill past the FleetCenter, the convention site, proceeding
back past Government Center to the common, without serious
incident. There was a brief scuffle with one of many
anti-abortion protesters, who were also out in force.

"Bring the troops home now," chanted the antiwar
demonstrators, who supported a variety of causes,
including women’s rights and opposition to what was termed
the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan, Puerto Rico and
Haiti, as well as Boston school bus drivers working
without a contract.

The demonstrators were escorted by hundreds of city and
state police officers, preceded by policemen on bicycles
pedaling at a gruelingly slow pace, and trailed by police
S.U.V.’s, correction department detention wagons and even
school buses, to be used in case of large-scale arrests.
Lines of police - city to the left, state to the right -
moved alongside, flanking the demonstrators, and there
were phalanxes of officers at the intersections.

The police turnout was only one indication of the security
precautions that have turned the FleetCenter into a
virtual fortress. Helicopters and jet fighters patrol
overhead, and Coast Guard and police gunboats cruise the
harbor. National Guardsmen in camouflage patrolled around
the convention center, which is surrounded by double rows
of iron fencing.

An embarrassing threat to the Democrats was lifted when a
contract dispute involving Boston’s firefighters union was
resolved on Sunday. The firefighters had threatened to
picket 30 welcoming parties scheduled for Democratic state
delegations on Sunday night, and Boston’s police union had
pledged to join the picketing even though a state
arbitrator issued a decision on Thursday resolving the
police union’s own contract dispute.

Those threats had unnerved some Democratic delegates, many
of whom were reluctant to cross picket lines. In response
to the threats, the Ohio and Michigan delegations had
canceled their welcoming parties.

The firefighters announced Sunday morning that they would
not picket the parties, minutes after an arbitrator
announced a contract award for the firefighters: a 10.5
percent raise over three years, compared with the 14.5
percent raise over four years the arbitrator awarded to
the 1,400-member police union.

While the labor dispute was settled, the battle over the
Free Speech Zone continues. After the American Civil
Liberties Union and the National Lawyers Guild filed suit
against the zone, Judge Douglas P. Woodlock of Federal
District Court toured the site last week and said that
while he intitially doubted the lawyers’ claim that the
site resembled "an internment camp," he concluded that the
comparison was "an understatement."

"One cannot concieve of other elements put in place to
create a space that’s more of an affront to the idea of
free expression than the designated demonstration zone,"
he said in a ruling on Thursday.

Nevertheless, Judge Woodcock said, there was no
alternative. He told the lawyers: "There really isn’t any
other place. You’re stuck under the tracks."

Putting finishing touches on the area this morning, a
workman, who asked that his name not be used, took in the
fencing and the razor wire wrapped around the overhead
track.

"Does it look like a concentration camp?" he said. "I’m
Jewish. It looks like a concentration camp."

Later, as the demonstrators gathered on the common in a
welter of speeches, posters and pamphlets, Robert Aili,
50, said of the Free Speech Zone: "I think it is obviously
an obscenity and an insult to the First Amendment." BOSTON

New York Times