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ational Guard soldiers and SPPD officers fired impact rounds and chemical weapons into the crowd as we neared the corner of St. Peter and Exchange. Protesters dispersed and regrouped, some retaliating with rocks and bottles, shattering the windows of several police vehicles. Similar scenes were playing out all around downtown St. Paul, as heated battles between protesters and heavily armed police and military units effectively shut down the city. Police could be heard frantically yelling for backup as flaming dumpsters crashed into police cars and delegate buses were bombarded with sandbags from the overpasses as they attempted to convene on the Xcel Energy Center. The first day of protests against the Republican National Convention was underway.
When the location for the 2008 Republican National Convention was released nearly two years ago, there was an immediate optimism among activists. Minneapolis-St. Paul was known to have a dedicated activist community, and the location was geographically central enough to be inviting to a large section of the country. Planning and organization began taking place soon thereafter, promising to make it one of the most well organized protest events in US history. Here in Toledo, we committed ourselves to doing whatever we could to make the protests a success. In doing so we found ourselves seemingly on the forefront of a new era of political repression in the United States.
Locally, we organized an art show and dug into our own pockets to help raise funds for food and necessities for protesters traveling to the Twin Cities. Unlike the Republicans, we wouldn't be getting millions of dollars in corporate donations and federal grants. With similar efforts going on in dozens of cities across the country though, things seemed to be off to a good start. Organizers from Minnesota visited around a hundred cities, including Toledo, to share information and encourage people to join them in showing the RNC that it was not welcome in their city. And when Toledo hosted the 2008 Great Lakes Anarchist Gathering in June, several Minnesotans returned to provide a detailed presentation on what people could expect during the event. Within a couple of months we would all be the focus of attempted intimidation and political repression by one of the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world.
The main organizer for the protests in St. Paul was the facetiously named RNC Welcoming Committee, a broad organizing body created mostly by local activists in the Twin Cities, which acted as a clearinghouse for information and coordinator of local logistics and infrastructure, including, food, housing and transportation for those planning to attend the protests, as well as outreach programs aimed at helping more people get involved. Despite offering no specific plans for what actions protesters should take -- besides a very general plan for blocking traffic to prevent or slow delegate travel to the convention -- the RNCWC quickly drew the scrutiny of several law-enforcement agencies, including the local sheriff's department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It was Saturday, about two weeks out from our trip, when we were informed from a friend who was out of town that his family had been visited by the FBI regarding his connection with our organization and the upcoming RNC. Five days later another comrade was targeted by the FBI. Within about a week the feds had interrogated a total of four people they believed to be connected with our organization, making serious efforts to intimidate and coerce information from them regarding a variety of activities, primarily the Republican National Convention. Those who were interrogated were asked to name people involved in protest activities in Toledo, as well as matching names to surveillance photos, though these requests were refused. The agent, who identified himself as Matt Meyer, claimed to have no political agenda and to be only looking out for the safety of those involved.
The seven of us gathered together on the Friday before the convention week, we shared dinner, double-checked our suitcases, and carefully monitored the situation in St. Paul. Around 11PM word came in that the RNCWC's convergence center was under attack. Police had gone in, guns drawn, and detained dozens of people before photographing them and looting the building of every last computer, book and piece of scrap-paper, as well as a host of innocuous household items that they would try to present to the press as menacing jars, paint and rags of mayhem.
The following day four houses in the Twin Cities were raided, using the same warrant and several more arrests were made.
The immediate effect, and likely reason for the raids was to dismantle the local infrastructure that visiting protesters had been counting on to have an effective demonstration.
We arrived in Minneapolis around 8PM Saturday and, doing our best imitation of square-looking college students, cautiously made our way to the place we were being housed in St. Paul as at least two SPPD helicopters hovered over the area. Settling in for the night, we traded protest stories and shared plans for the days to come with comrades from Olympia, Kent and parts unknown that were sharing the space with us. Crammed in like sardines, we laid out on the concrete floor and got what sleep we could.
Sunday was spent with us trying to learn our way around downtown St. Paul. On our way into the downtown area we forced the butterflies out of our stomachs as we passed our first police blockade, where police were swarming around what we were told was an Iraq Veterans Against the War demonstration. Given the raids on the convergence center, we had opted to stay out of touch with the highly surveilled locals that were still free and teach ourselves the topography. After a day of dressing like tourists and trekking through downtown, we felt at least moderately comfortable coming up with more precise plans for the next day. This would be our last day of relative relaxation. Tomorrow, the action would begin.
Arriving near downtown, we gazed down on what looked like a city under heavy military occupation. Still in disguise, we travelled past the rows of armored police with false casualness to the State Capitol grounds and fell in with the thousands of others crowding the area. There were about two hours of downtime before we were supposed to meet up with a handful of other groups from the Midwest, which we spent coming up with last minute contingency plans.
When the time came, we marched up the street to meet up with our cluster. Unfortunately, they had gotten an early start and met us halfway down the road, pushing a borrowed dumpster, to be used as a roadblock, toward a line of police. The group of maybe thirty had probably jumped the gun in some of our opinions, as there were still another two-hundred plus protesters expected on their way to that intersection. Still, police looked more or less helpless as the black-clad demonstrators quickly moved through the streets, gradually picking up numbers. I overheard a sheriff's deputy saying there were police cars crashing downtown as they battled with another protest cluster.
A brief attempt to move down an embankment and onto the highway was short lived, and an effort was made to instead block the road with street signs, trash bins and other objects as we made our way closer to the center of downtown. Around that time, police backup began arriving, including a truck full of National Guard soldiers armed with assault rifles packed with rubber bullets, concussion grenades and tear-gas. As they began firing into the crowd, protesters and bystanders alike split up and took cover. Some threw rocks and bottles back toward the cops, smashing windows on several police cruisers. At one point a demonstrator used an intercepted police radio frequency to misdirect a chain of SPPD cars.
These sorts of battles were happening all around the downtown area, which had been divided into seven distinct sectors that were claimed by various protest clusters, and continued through most of the day. By nightfall the city was under almost complete lock-down and nearly three hundred people were in jail.
The intention of most of the protesters had simply been to blockade the roads leading into the Xcel Energy Center, where the convention was being held, in an effort to prevent delegates from entering: an act of civil disobedience most of us deemed a relatively small risk, considering the scale of the violence being routinely perpetrated by those actually attending the convention. The police and others who chose to work on the side of the Republican Party, however, did their best to make sure the convention went on as planned, instigating quite a bit of violence in the process.
The following days would see various iterations of this tear-gas filled chess game take place as police and protesters alike worked to devise new tactics and counters toward their objectives. Media personnel attempting to document police abuses were allegedly being targeted by police, with unconfirmed reports of journalists being picked up by unmarked vehicles. Demonstrators grew increasingly adept at outmaneuvering police and by the last day the cops had taken to using snowplows as mobile blockades, as seemingly endless droves of protesters continued to flood the streets faster than they could be arrested.
Following the first day of protests there was a rather harsh backlash from much of the mainstream media regarding the confrontational character of the demonstrations. Those with more traditional views of what constitutes valid political dissent were quick to attack the protesters as "nihilists" simply bent on disorder. Such notions, though, were quite a deviation from reality.
Protesters in St. Paul had a long list of causes bringing them together, including the ongoing wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, the torture chambers of Guantanamo Bay, capitalist economics, the environment, and many more too numerous to list. Most of those protesting were actively involved in political action and organizing in their own communities. Despite the dedication of those participating, the media made every effort to dismiss us as being apolitical and only interested in chaos, violence and random destruction. "We have no respect for the twerps who destroyed property at random in downtown St. Paul", stated a Pioneer Press editorial following Monday's clashes between protesters and police and military units.
"The insinuation is that we don't even have a cause. That we're only interested in violence and destruction", said activist Phil Mason, "But the people housed in that convention center, who are responsible for some of the most massive and devastating acts of violence ever committed on this planet, are simply exercising their political freedoms. They are not welcome in our city, and anyone harboring or defending these terrorists needs to know that they will be held accountable."
The role of those targeted for property damage, primarily police, banks and upscale, corporate entities in supporting the RNC is the stuff of lengthy political and ideological debates, but these acts, rather than the reasons behind them, was clearly the focus of most of the media attention.
One protester I spoke with expressed his view that purely symbolic protests had been proven ineffective over the course of the war against Iraq, noting that despite overwhelming public opposition and some of the largest peace marches ever organized, the war has continued on, unimpeded for more than six years. "At the last big demonstration I went to in D.C. there were 250,000 people claiming they wanted to end the war. If we were really committed, I told one group, we'd be having this conversation in the Oval Office right now. With that many people we could've marched right through the front door and ended the war that day. But we didn't. Everyone took their protest vacation and went home feeling self-righteous, having accomplishing nothing other than assuaging their consciences"
This was a sentiment that I heard echoed, in one form or another, repeatedly throughout the week. Many of the protesters that were committed to non-confrontational tactics countered by expressing concern for the less physically able demonstrators. During a march on Tuesday night, the spokesperson for The Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign urged restraint from the crowd due to the presence of "little tiny babies and people in wheelchairs", though some viewed her remark as patronizing to people with physical disabilities, pointing out that at least one person requiring a wheelchair had been actively involved in more confrontational protests the previous day.
Probably owing as much to the media's fickleness as to any purposeful blackouts, press coverage of the protests went from badly distorted to nearly non-existent during the last three days of the convention. News outlets quickly became saturated with the sexual escapades of Sarah Palin's children and the pageantry of the convention itself, leaving the action in the streets and the hundreds of ensuing arrests of interest mostly to local and independent news media.
By Saturday we had all made it safely back to Toledo.
As I write this, eight protest organizers from Minnesota, as well as two activists from Texas, are being held in solitary confinement, facing terrorism charges created under the Patriot Act. If convicted, they could each be imprisoned for more than ten years. In the four days of protests more than eight hundred people were arrested, including nearly three-dozen media personnel, who seemed to be specifically targeted on many occasions. Among the media people targeted for arrest were Democracy Now host Amy Goodman and her producers as they attempted to report police abuses. Many of the reporters have since had their charges dropped, which many see as evidence that the main intention of the police was simply to clear them from the streets in order to prevent them from documenting said abuses.
There are mixed views among those involved regarding the success of the demonstrations. While the RNC was not prevented, many point to the city of St. Paul's inability to capitalize financially off the convention as some consolation. Leading up to the event, editorials in the Pioneer Press and other local papers excitedly proclaimed that this was the city's chance to become an "event destination" and a "boon" for downtown businesses. Such prospects, however, were thwarted as the city came under almost complete lock-down for the majority of the convention's duration, and the city’s police alternately came across as either inept or overly aggressive.
In the end it’s probably difficult to label this protest either a complete success or a complete failure. Much like the actual conflict in the streets, there were a number of battles being waged in the Twin Cities that week. Only time will tell how these demonstrations and the political repression surrounding them will affect future protests, life in St. Paul, and the minds of those who watched the spectacle unfold.
