The New York Times

Tuesday, April 11, 2000

Washington Braces to Handle Flood of Globalization Protesters

By FRANCIS X. CLINES

WASHINGTON, April 10 -- A law enforcement armada from a half-dozen city and federal agencies is preparing for mass rallies here this week as organizers try to extend the protest against global economics that plunged Seattle into violent street confrontations in November.

"We're in the process of training drills with our mounted units and SWAT teams," said Sgt. Rob MacLean of the U.S. Park Police. "If a situation occurs like the one in Seattle, we'll be prepared."

For weeks, the Metropolitan Police Department has been studying the shortcomings of Seattle's attempt at protest control and stocking up on fresh tear gas and rubber bullets. The department, which has deep experience in containing capital demonstrations, has trained a special force of 1,400 officers in the latest baton-and-shield techniques of crowd control.

City officials are emphasizing the city's openness to peaceful protest while also preparing for the civil disobedience that some demonstrators have threatened as they vow to disrupt meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

"Arrests will be quick, swift and certain," the executive assistant police chief, Terrance W. Gainer, is warning potential trouble-makers as the department readies detention areas in the event of mass arrests. "We won't be caught sleeping."

The city's National Guard unit will be available to assist in the effort, but there is no plan to have soldiers in evidence among the hundreds of federal and city officers who will be assigned to keep the capital clear of trouble. The law enforcement effort includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Secret Service and U.S. Marshals Service, plus dozens of bomb detection specialists from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

A police spokesman said that seven demonstrators were arrested today.

Among them were John Passacantando, executive director of Ozone Action, and Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth, who were arrested by Metropolitan Police officers when they refused to climb down from a truck near the World Bank headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, the spokesman said.

Using the truck as a makeshift stage, the heads of the two national environmental groups, along with about 50 people, gathered to protest the World Bank's financing of oil, gas and mining projects.

Under the umbrella title Mobilization for Global Justice, organizers are promising that thousands of protesters will come to Washington intent on a raft of causes with global economic implications, from famine to deforestation, political corruption to global warming. A planned week of teach-ins, legal rallies and street entertainment is to culminate April 16 and 17 when protesters vow to block the two world economic gatherings.

In planning bus caravans, mass feeding operations and lessons in street protest, organizers are disavowing violence but emphasizing their intention to build on the Seattle experience. There, police eventually arrested 600 people in three days of downtown protests that veered into vandalism during a meeting of the World Trade Organization.

"The finance ministers and international bureaucrats who shape the world economy to make the rich richer and the poor poorer need to know that Seattle was not just a bump on their road to global domination," the mobilization group is emphasizing on its Web site (www.a16.org).