Protesters mourn Afghan war

By Isaiah Kramer
The Guardsman

Below a buzzing helicopter and flanked by idle policemen, about 50 protesters rallied near the Powell Cable Car Turnaround to observe the ninth anniversary of the Afghanistan War, a conflict responsible for innumerable civilian casualties.

The exact number of Afghan civilian deaths is unknown because the United Nations only started recording casualties in 2007, and the data has not been made public. The U.N. reported that the first half of 2010 has been fraught with civilian bloodshed.

The Act Now to Stop War and End Racism Coalition organized the Oct. 6 protest with endorsements from other groups including Unite Here Local 2, which is now on strike against the San Francisco Hilton.

“The people of Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine got the same enemy we got,” union member Marc Norton said. “That enemy is the small batch of capitalist overloads.”

Beneath a banner that served as a stage, speakers stepped forth with a microphone and spoke of crimes perpetrated in the wars abroad, the suffering of Afghan people and the “greedy capitalists” fueling it all.

The protest did not limit itself to Afghanistan, but indicted all military occupations and acknowledged the relation between the $2.5 billion weekly expenditure in Afghanistan and cuts to health care, education and joblessness in America.

“This isn’t a war about fighting Afghanistan,” said Father Louis Vitale, an activist who has been arrested over 200 times in the pursuit of his cause. “The main enemy is at home.”

Vitale equated the Afghani warlords who orchestrate “war crimes,” with the use of unmanned drone planes—the “war criminals” right in Nevada who operate them.

“Don’t they feel kind of chicken-shit being 10,000 miles away dropping a bomb on a school?” Vitale said. “These drones are going to be flying over and watching us someday.”

Code Pink: Women for Peace illustrated much of what Vitale spoke of with miniature paper drone planes that flew above, re-enacting crimes of war.

“We’re attacking wedding parties and funerals just like the drones,” Code Pink member Leslie Angeline said while maneuvering a model drone held above her head.

Attendees of the protests were predominantly members and affiliates of the ANSWER coalition, Local 2 and pamphleteers from various socialist groups. The protesters were easily matched, and possibly outnumbered, by the irritated tourists lined in a U-shape around the Powell cable car.

Teachers and students were notably absent from the protest, though many protesters advocated for education funding with chants like, “money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation.”

After approximately 10 speakers addressed them, the anti-war crowd marched to the strike at the Hilton in solidarity with Local 2.