2000 REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION
Dictator Watch helped organize the Free Burma participation in the Unity 2000
march at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia (July, 2000). We
also participated in the demo the next day by the Kensington Welfare Rights
Union. The following photos document these events.
We should mention that while the Unity march had a police permit, the KWRU demo
did not. Early on the morning of the demo close to a thousand people gathered
at Philadelphia’s City Hall. There was a full-fledged media circus, and
perhaps a hundred police, many on horseback. The official declaration was that
if we marched down Broad Street, we would be stopped. At the appointed time,
everyone held their breath, and the demo began. The police (and the mayor) blinked,
and there were no arrests. The demo lasted hours, and was peaceful. What this
illustrated is that the powers of repression can be successfully confronted.
All it takes is organization, and courage.
(There were of course hundreds of arrests in Philadelphia, both at other demos
and at a puppet-making warehouse. For the latter, the police used misinformation
from inserted spies and agent provocateurs to close the warehouse and arrest
all of the activists who were inside. It was a preemptive strike, and also illegal
since it constituted unwarranted search and seizure. Of course, such concerns
did not worry the police. Their view is that the law does not apply to them.
And, thanks to the common rulings of U.S. courts, and also the existence of
what is known as “qualified immunity,” which prevents individual police
officers from being sued for their personal wrongdoings while they are on duty,
they are right. They are above the law. Also, months later, all of the charges
against the activists at the warehouse were dropped.)
One of the larger participants in Unity, the fabulous Billionaires for Bush (or Gore).
We must
be legitimate, we have a banner!
(Thank you Spiral Q Puppet Theatre!)
Puppets are wonderful, but you wonder what some of them mean.
After the march, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway turned into an all day activist
gathering,
a meeting of the tribes.
© Roland O. Watson 2001-3
