Global Demonstrations Call for Peace

Protesters in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere kicked off global demonstrations against a war on Iraq as British activists geared up for an antiwar rally that they hoped would draw 500,000 people today.

At least 150,000 people packed the streets of Melbourne, Australia, on Friday to protest a possible war, to which Australia has already committed 2,000 troops.

Above an Auckland, New Zealand, harbor today, a plane trailed a huge banner reading “No War -- Peace Now” as competitors left their bases for the America’s Cup international sailing competition.

An estimated 6,000 people joined a protest march Friday night in Tokyo, and a similar number marched to the U.S. Embassy in the Philippine capital, Manila. About 500 people demonstrated peacefully in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

In London, British activists prepared for a rally in Hyde Park at which the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Bianca Jagger were slated to appear. The London demonstration is expected to be among the largest of events planned worldwide to protest possible U.S. and British military action against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. In advance of the protest, about 70 singers from London’s theater scene took the stage Friday at the Criterion Theatre in central London to sing “Seasons of Love” from “Rent.”

The march has been organized by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Stop the War Coalition and the Muslim Assn. of Britain. A march in Glasgow, Scotland, was scheduled to converge on a Labor Party conference in time for Prime Minister Tony Blair’s speech.

Blair has been President Bush’s ally in his threats to go to war with Iraq if Hussein does not destroy his alleged weapons of mass destruction.