By Gavin Taylor
Every Saturday over the past several months, a motley crowd has gathered in downtown Ottawa to protest American policy toward Iraq.
There are punks with Mohawk haircuts, Protestant ministers, elderly women in tweed coats, families, anti-poverty activists, Marxist-Leninists and concerned Arab-Canadians.
Their numbers have swelled since the war began, with some 5,000 demonstrators converging on Parliament Hill for a March 22 protest. On the same day, as many as 200,000 protesters took to the streets in Montreal; 18,000 people marched in Edmonton’s largest-ever peace rally; and tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Toronto, Vancouver and every other major Canadian city.
And those are just the Canadian numbers – millions of demonstrators around the world joined in the protests, even in the United States, where hundreds of thousands of people in New York, Washington and other cities marched against the war.
In a remarkably short period, activists have mounted one of the largest and most far-flung peace movements in history.
It has emerged spontaneously, with little central organization.
“Things are moving too fast to do much planning,” says Jamie Kneen, a member of the Network to Oppose War and Racism (NOWAR), a group that has played a leading role in organizing anti-war protests in Ottawa.
The network started in October 2001, when some activists grew concerned by the anti-Muslim backlash that followed Sept. 11. They organized occasional demonstrations against the war in Afghanistan, the harassment of Canadian Muslims, and threats to civil liberties posed by anti-terrorist legislation.Last summer, as George W. Bush began drumming up support for an invasion of Iraq, the network formed a separate working group, the Committee for Peace in Iraq, to organize protests against the coming war.
The committee, a loosely-knit group of volunteers, serves as an umbrella organization for dozens of student associations, labour unions, churches, NGOs and other groups opposed to the war. Since the summer, the committee notified these groups of marches and demonstrations through e-mail and word of mouth.
Over the past six months, as war loomed closer and news of the protests spread, the marchers’ ranks grew from a few dozen to several thousand. This rapid growth has been duplicated elsewhere. Since February, protests against American policy toward Iraq have drawn millions of people into the streets in dozens of countries.
“The organization has been fairly spontaneous,” says Kneen.
“Some people in New York might send out an e-mail calling for an international day of action on March 5. Then we’ll organize something here in Ottawa for that date. It’s not a collective action in any sense. It’s just a proposal that gets picked up by a lot of people.”
In many ways, the movement duplicates the structure of the Internet: it’s a loosely woven web of small groups from around the world, without any central organization.
“I see it as a kind of nodal network,” says Mick Panesar, who spent two weeks in Iraq this winter and has delivered about 30 presentations since his return .
“There are nodes in the movement. It’s diffused, but not to the extent that there aren’t centres of organizing. NOWAR is one of those nodes.”
There have been differences of opinion among the groups in the movement.
At one demonstration, a pro-Palestinian protester brought an Israeli flag with a swastika painted on it. Other protesters persuaded him to put the flag away.
“When we say we’re against racism that includes anti-Semitism,” says Kneen.
“We’re not just opposing a war; we’re trying to build a peace movement. That means using non-violent methods and not getting into fistfights at marches.”
While the protests have mobilized groups that were already active in the peace or anti-globalization movements, they have also drawn some unlikely activists out of the closet, Panesar says.
“The war has been a real personal awakening for some people,” says Kneen.
“They haven’t thought about it in larger political terms, but they’re disgusted by what’s going on. They just want a chance to say that there are ways to solve things without killing people.”
Activists like Kneen and Panesar hope the anti-war movement is the sign of a growing wave of activism in Canada.
“People are starting to connect wars abroad with wars at home,” says Panesar.
“They see that the war on terrorism is threatening civil liberties here in Canada. They’re starting to make connections between what’s happening in Iraq and what’s going on in Canada and the United States.”
Panesar, a veteran of the anti-globalization movement, says he sees a lot of new faces at the anti-war rallies.
“The key is to connect the different threads of activism that we see at the marches,” he says.
“We want to make sure that this movement doesn’t fizzle out when the war comes to a close.”