Government, Militias Urge Calm in Standoff

With a Northern Michigan Militia member suggesting that a “second American Revolution” is at hand and saying that his group plans a supply convoy to the “freemen” holed up on a Montana ranch, both government officials and other militia leaders Sunday urged outsiders to stay away from the armed standoff.

Speaking on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation,” Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and the attorney of Garfield County, where members of the freeman movement are resisting arrest by federal authorities, called for restraint by other anti-government groups. Their appeals were echoed by militia leaders from Montana and South Dakota.

Baucus and Garfield County Atty. Nick Murnion also praised the federal government’s handling of the armed standoff, while the militia officials withheld their usual complaints of federal intrusion.

Speaking on ABC-TV’s “This Week With David Brinkley,” John Trochmann, founder of the Militia of Montana, warned that “if anyone from another state wishes to come visit Montana, they’d better do it without their guns.” Militia of Montana members have provided armed escort for some of the fugitive freemen.

John Parsons of the Tri-State Militia of South Dakota urged fellow militiamen to “stay home and let the negotiators and the people on the site handle this problem, so we don’t have a Waco or a Ruby Ridge.”

“The key thing here is that we need a peaceful solution to this problem,” Parsons said on the ABC program. “They need to come out and face their forum in a court of law and state their problems in a court of law under a system that is just.”

Those comments came as law enforcement officials continued to surround a cluster of houses and other buildings on a 960-acre wheat farm north of Jordan, Mont. Inside, members of the freemen are armed and refusing to submit to arrest. About 14 of them are believed to be wanted on state and federal charges ranging from check forgery to tax evasion.

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The freemen deny the legitimacy of the government and refuse to pay taxes or recognize the authority of the courts.

Despite the calls for restraint, Norman Olson, who identifies himself as the leader of the Northern Michigan Militia, proposed to launch what he called Operation Certain Venture. He described the operation as a convoy of concerned Americans that would deliver “needed commodities and resources” to the freemen.

Olson added that he would personally go to the scene of the freemen’s protest to assess the military needs of the group.

“If this is going to turn into a battleground, if this is going to be the place where the second American Revolution finally culminates in war, then it’s good for a battlefield commander to be there to look at the logistics, to look at the needs and to find out exactly what the situation is on the ground,” Olson said on the CBS program. He lambasted federal officials for what he said was their trampling on the authority of state and county governments in the case.

But Murnion countered that the community surrounding the freemen’s compound “has welcomed the FBI into this operation.” He told Olson, “We have been oppressed by the freemen and not by the federal government.”

Townspeople in and around Jordan have been circulating a petition urging the freemen to leave the ranch. Relatives reported that they would soon try to deliver the petition to those holed up in the complex that the freemen call “Justus Township.”

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The standoff is the first incident in which the FBI has used its new guidelines for dealing with heavily armed protesters resisting arrest. Many see this incident as a test of whether federal agents can deal with groups of fugitives without bloodshed.

The agency’s reassessment of its tactics came after armed standoffs in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and near Waco, Texas, resulted in deaths.

It was reported Sunday that the FBI was considering an offer from white separatist Randy Weaver, whose wife and son were killed by federal agents in the 1992 shootout at Ruby Ridge, to mediate an end to the standoff.

But Baucus said that intervention by anti-government protesters like Weaver, who exchanged gunfire with federal agents, is “probably . . . going to create more problems than they’re going to solve.”