S.F. Activists Protest War’s Next Phase

Despite the apparent fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, or at least of his statue, several thousand protesters marched through rain-swept San Francisco, declaring that their war against the war wasn’t over.

Speaking to a sea of umbrellas in front of City Hall, Carweil James of Direct Action to Stop the War rallied the crowd not to pack up its signs. There’s another stage of the war yet to come, James said.

“We’ve entered a new phase: the corporate invasion of Iraq,” he said.

Organizers said about 5,000 people braved the driving rain for Saturday’s protest, far fewer than the tens of thousands who attended demonstrations before military action began.

Organizer Richard Becker of the ANSWER coalition acknowledged that the weather and the way the war has played out were behind the relatively small turnout.

“The political circumstances have made it difficult. They say the war’s over, but we know that’s not true. This shows we have a core group of people who are committed to protesting this unjust war.”

Becker added that the antiwar movement has had to shift its focus since the rapid fall of Baghdad, and that protests will begin to target corporations that stand to benefit from lucrative contracts to run Iraq’s oil fields and rebuild the country’s damaged infrastructure.

The demonstration was peaceful and stood in marked contrast to the protest at the Port of Oakland on Monday, where police fired wooden dowels and threw flash-bang grenades at protesters. San Francisco police said there were no arrests on Saturday.

Riva Enteen, a National Lawyers Guild member at the Oakland protest, urged the San Francisco protesters not to let the police action of the previous week dampen their spirits: “They shot us with rubber bullets, but we’re still gonna be out there!”

The march and rally began at City Hall and wound through several neighborhoods and up Haight Street to Dolores Park, in San Francisco’s Mission District, where demonstrators listened to several antiwar speeches, songs and poems. The spirited procession had the air of a Dixieland funeral, with protesters dancing to a brass band and lifting their umbrellas in rhythm.

Marchers chanted “Self-determination! End the occupation!” as residents cheered from apartments and diners came out of restaurants to watch the parade pass.

Berkeley artist Catherine Jones carried a homemade sign taped to a yardstick that summed up the feeling of many protesters. It read: “We’re still here!” Jones said that, more than anything, she came out to protest the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

“It’s not just about Iraq, it’s about the effect of the preemptive strike clause on other countries.”

Betty Price, a 68-year-old retired San Franciscan, stood under an umbrella from which was hung half a dozen George W. Bush voodoo dolls. She said she has sold hundreds of the dolls at protests over the last year, and that they were her way of expressing displeasure with the president.

“It’s not that I believe in voodoo, it’s just that he’s so misguided,” she said.