“Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Bush and Allen have got to go!”
Hundreds of voices came together Thursday in chants and shouts to protest President Bush’s arrival in Richmond to fundraise for Sen. George Allen’s reelection.
Waving signs and banners, many with profane messages, the protesters congregated on the sidewalk across from the Science Museum of Virginia, spreading from the Pizza Hut across from the Department of Motor Vehicles to the Bank of America farther down the street.
City and state police lined the streets and sidewalks, and a row of James River Bus Lines buses blocked a clear view of the front of the museum, where Allen’s fundraiser was held. The senator’s campaigners began to gather at about 3 p.m. – the time at which the protest officially started – but Bush’s entourage of limousines, vans and police cars did not pull into the museum until 5 p.m.
Opposition to Bush’s policies – and to a lesser degree, Allen’s – and the Iraq war were the central themes of the protest. The Virginia Anti-War Network, composed of more than a dozen activist groups around the state, organized the event.
Many veterans attended the protest, such as Tom Palumbo, an Army veteran from Norfolk. Palumbo, a member of Veterans for Peace, said today’s war protests differ from those of the Vietnam War era.
“Unlike Vietnam, where you could tell which side you were on by the length of your hair or the clothes you wore, today we’re your brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, friends and neighbors,” he said. “That’s the thing: This is the real America, the people that are tired of these policies and who are suffering and dying for them. This is the real America saying ‘Enough is enough.’ ”
Other protesters came not as veterans but as military family members. Carol Manuel of Virginia Beach said her son, an Army warrant officer, is currently stationed in South Korea.
Manuel, a peace activist with the Tidewater Peace Alliance and a member of Military Families Speak Out, said it is often difficult to protest war and military policies and still support her son. But she said if he were not in South Korea, he would have probably attended the protest with her, as he opposes the Iraq war.
Manuel was one of many protesters who displayed their support for democratic senatorial candidate Jim Webb through signs, pins and stickers.
She said it was interesting that so many anti-war activists have committed themselves to the election of Webb, a distinguished Vietnam War veteran.
“It’s a very strange juxtaposition,” Manuel said, “but having been in a military family, I know that the military isn’t the problem. People in the military aren’t the problem; it’s the government
that sends them off to do things that
See PROTEST, Page CT4
are wrong.”
While some protesters expressed their sentiments by shouting, chanting or talking to passersby, others opted for a more visual approach.
Code Pink, a women-initiated peace organization, displayed 300 pairs of locally donated shoes on the sidewalk to represent the approximately 650,000 Iraqis who have died since the 2003 U.S. invasion. Each pair had a tag attached to it with the name, age and sex of a deceased Iraqi, such as Russel Yasser, an 11-year-old girl.
Dana Balicki, a Richmond organizer for Code Pink, cited the death toll from a Johns Hopkins University finding released earlier this month. The personal information came from IraqBodyCount.com, she said.
The Web site reports different figures for reported civilian deaths in Iraq than the Johns Hopkins finding. According to the site, between 44,380 and 49,297 civilians have been killed.
“We’re honoring the deaths of these people,” Bilicki said of the shoe display. “This visual speaks for itself.”
Many VCU students and faculty protested the fundraiser, including senior political science major Nichole Faina. She got attention dressed in a black hood and robe to represent Satar Jabar, the Abu Ghraib prisoner who was made famous by the image of him standing on a box with electrical wires dangling from his body.
“It’s important to remember that prisoners in Abu Ghraib were standing on stools with wires attached to them for up to 18 hours,” Faina said. “They were told if they fell off the stool, they would be electrocuted.”
Faina recreated Jabar’s pose on top of a stool. She said about an hour into the protest, a police officer approached her and took the hood off her head, saying it is illegal to wear a face covering in Virginia.
Although police made no arrests, they did confront protesters on several occasions. Police stopped Ray Scher of Caroline County when he crossed the designated protest area, flashing a peace sign. They also reprimanded one man after he rode down the closed portion of West Broad Street on a tall-bike with a sign attached to it that said, “Bush eats babies.”
While anti-Bush and anti-war protestors clearly dominated the event, some supporters of the president and the Iraq war did show up. Three supporters waving American flags stood at the right side of the intersection of West Broad Street and Davis Avenue.
Alex Davis of the Republican Party of Staunton, Waynesboro and Augusta County said the supporters were there to counteract the protesters and also to show their gratitude to troops stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Davis said he experienced some confrontation with the protesters. At one point, he said, protesters circled him and the other two supporters and overlapped their signs with anti-war ones before the police separated them.
Rhonda Winfield of Stuarts Draft was another supporter of Bush, Allen and the Iraq war. Her son, Lance Cpl. Jason Redifer, 19, and two other marines were killed January 2005 by a roadside bomb. Redifer was on his final mission in Iraq when he was killed.
“He was able to see so much good that had come just in the time he was there for his tour,” said Winfield, who wrote about losing her son in “When Johnny Doesn’t Come Marching Home: A Mother’s Story of the Price of Freedom.”
“He never wanted these terrorist attacks to come back to the doorstep of his family again,” she said. “He believed that it had to be addressed on their soil before it came back to ours.”
Winfield said she respected the protesters’ opinions but disapproved of the angry and often profane manner in which they expressed them.
“They talk about freedom, and yet they can’t even wrap their minds around the ideals that he gave his life for,” she said, referring to her son. “But I know one thing for sure: one of the things he died protecting was their right to stand there and do that very thing.”
Dark clouds and drizzling rain threatened to disrupt the protest, although they never did. At about five after 6, two vans blocked the intersection, and Bush’s entourage exited the museum minutes later. By 6:30 p.m., the hundreds of protesters had mostly dispersed, and traffic reappeared on West Broad Street.