SAN FRANCISCO: THOUSANDS RALLY AGAINST OCCUPATION

By LeiLani Dowell
and Brenda Sandburg

San Francisco

Some 8,000 to 10,000 people participated in a spirited march and rally
in San Francisco June 5 to demand an end to the occupation of Iraq.
Contingents of labor groups, veterans, Haitian activists and youths
marched from United Nations Plaza in downtown San Francisco to the
beginning of the docks at Embarcadero Plaza. The protest was sponsored
by the ANSWER coalition.

A brass band played the "International" during the march. A small
counter-demonstration in support of the state of Israel was drowned out
by chants of "free, free Palestine."

Lara Kiswani of the Free Palestine Alli ance captured rally
participants’ sentiments: "You can put us in prison, murder our
children, demolish our homes, but you will never crush the spirit of the
Intifada. You will never crush the resistance that is rooted in our
history of blood, sweat and tears. Palestine will be free."

Henry Clark of the West County Toxics Coalition compared the torture of
prisoners at Abu Ghraib to the torture that goes on in U.S. prisons. He
cited the killing of Black Panther Party member George Jackson by prison
guards and prison officials’ refusal to provide medical treatment to
Native activist Leonard Peltier. "The torture of Iraqi prisoners is
business as usual," Clark said.

Families of U.S. troops also spoke. Maritza Castillo, whose son Camilo
Mejia is a war resister, noted the irony of Mejia’s prison sentencing.
"For refusing to torture and kill people in Iraq, the Bush
administration has condemned my son to one year in prison, the same as
those accused of torturing the prisoners of Iraq," she said.

Fernando Suarez del Solar, whose son was one of the first U.S. soldiers
to die in the war, reiterated that supporting the troops in Iraq means
demanding their immediate return.

Pierre Labossiere of the Haiti Action Committee decried the media’s
silence on the arrest of Lavalas leader and singer Annete Auguste (So’
Anne): "U.S. Marines went to her home and blew up the gate to her house
with military explosives, arrested her and 12 people in her house,
including her grandchildren, handcuffed her and put a hood over her
head, and we’ve not heard about this. Where are the human rights
organizations?" He also pointed to the U.S. government’s attempt to
paint the leaders of the Lavalas movement as drug lords.

LeiLani Dowell, lesbian anti-war acti vist and Workers World Party
member run ning for Congress in San Francisco, urged the crowd to
continue building an independent, anti-imperialist, revolutionary
movement, especially in this election year.

"With so many pressures on us at this period in time, with so many
attacks on all fronts by the U.S. government, the most important thing
is for us to stay unified, to not let anything divide us, to be strong
like a fist," she said to cheers from the crowd.

The Kabataang maka-Bayan (Pro-People Youth) Bay Area Organization Com
mittee issued a statement at the protest: "The situation faced by many
people here in the Bay Area, especially poor and people of color, is not
far removed from the instability and insecurity faced by the Iraqi
people in the face of a U.S. occupation. We also see an unstable future
for our youth, with never-ending school budget cuts, and constant
assault of military recruiters in the campus ... exploiting the youth’s
feeling of uncertainty to feed them into the imperialist war machine.
...

"We call on all youth and students throughout the world to expose,
oppose, and resist U.S. imperialist intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Haiti, the Philippines and elsewhere."

Others speaking at the rally included Richard Becker and Nazila
Bargshady for the ANSWER Coali tion and a representative of Fast 4 Edu
cation, a group that has successfully fasted for the past 26 days at the
Capitol Building in Sacramento, resulting in an almost 500-percent
reduction in the interest rate on state bailout loans for suffering
school districts in California.