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Copyright 1999 Newsweek  
Newsweek

December 13, 1999, U.S. Edition

SECTION: NATIONAL AFFAIRS; Pg. 30

LENGTH: 1769 words

HEADLINE: The Siege of Seattle

BYLINE: By Kenneth Klee; With Patricia King and Katrina Woznicki

HIGHLIGHT:
In a ruckus over foreign trade, a surge of violence rocks the placid '90s. What 
does this odd coalition of globo-protesters really want?

BODY:
The nose-ringed young woman in the thick knit poncho looked admiringly at the 
twisted letters on the marquee of the Nike store. Man, she said, they f----d 
that up good! Nearby, two young men stood chest to chest, screaming in each 
other's faces, both tear-stained from the pepper gas wafting along Sixth Avenue 
in downtown Seattle. One wanted to smash the Nike window, the other to stop him. 
How do you think they stopped Vietnam? demanded the one with the rock.It was the 
opening day of the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, and all hell was 
breaking loose. The rest of the week would mark a descent into a deeply weird 
maelstrom where masked young men rampaged while mixed-up (and sometimes 
out-of-control) cops shot rubber pellets at the wrong people, including Olivier 
de Marcellus, a 56-year-old protester from Geneva, who says he took one in his 
glasses as he stood chanting with the crowd. Helicopters roared overhead and 
concussion grenades boomed and flashed in front of ritzy downtown properties. 
Fancy retailers boarded up their windows at the start of the Christmas shopping 
season. An armored car stood guard at the Four Seasons Hotel. When WTO delegate 
Henk Campher smelled the tear gas, he says his thought was Home sweet home--in 
South Africa, where he used to demonstrate against apartheid. 

Until last week, not so many Americans had even heard of the WTO. Fewer still 
could have identified it as the small, Geneva-based bureaucracy that the United 
States and 134 other nations set up five years ago to referee global commerce. 
To Bill Clinton, it is a mechanism that can allow America to do well and good at 
the same time. But to many of the 40,000 activists and union members who 
streamed into Seattle--a clean, scenic city that has grown rich on foreign 
trade--the WTO is something else again: a secretive tool of ruthless 
multinational corporations. They charge it with helping sneaker companies to 
exploit Asian workers, timber companies to clear-cut rain forests, shrimpers to 
kill sea turtles and a world of other offenses. The protests drew an equally 
wide array of groups, from stilt walkers to beefy Teamsters mechanics to a guy 
in a get-up that made him look like J. P. Morgan with a sinister mosquito beak. 
Where was he from? Planet Earth.

Seattle didn't feel like Earth last week--or at least not like the Earth we've 
come to know in the peaceful and prosperous 1990s. Still, the battle of Seattle, 
though sparked by a fringe element, cast light on the tensions over who's 
getting left out of the new global economy, and the images from the streets 
seemed to form a new face of protest in American life. The reality is that 
global trade is going to march on in any event; human ambition and the Internet 
are seeing to that. But it's also true that the process raises some tough 
questions, and any organization that tries to sort them out is bound to get a 
lot of people mad. It's a long way from the civil-rights marches in Selma, Ala., 
to smashing up a Starbucks, but the story of the siege in the Pacific Northwest 
suggests that liberal activism, all these years later, is not yet dead.

There were countless marches, big and small. You could turn a corner and find 
1,500 women parading silently with their mouths taped, then stopping and staring 
at a row of helmeted, booted riot cops. Or watch as a young man with a red beard 
gathered a spontaneous following by pointing to his friend, who beat loudly on a 
big plastic bucket. Follow the drum, people! he said. They did.

To a lot of people in upwardly mobile Seattle, the meeting had seemed like a 
great way to showcase their city. And a sophisticated export powerhouse that is 
home to Microsoft and Boeing--Bill Gates and Phil Condit cochaired the host 
committee--certainly seemed up to the task. But the better planning was done by 
the demonstrators--the many nonviolent ones, and even the radical few. Mayor 
Paul Schell and Police Chief Norm Stamper had plenty of warning that the 
protests could be violent, but failed to give their undermanned police force 
enough backup until it was way too late. What were they thinking? Seattle is a 
gentle place where we agree to disagree, Schell explained last week.

Meanwhile, Mike Dolan, field organizer for the Nader group Public Citizen, spent 
nine months in the city getting things ready (and consulting regularly with city 
leaders). The Naderites and other groups posted Web pages to educate their 
followers on the evils of foreign trade and to draw them to Seattle. The 
demonstrators started showing their tactical smarts the first day of the 
conference. Early that morning, thousands of activists--who had announced their 
intention to completely, but peacefully, block access to the huge Washington 
State Convention Center--had taken up key positions, amounting to a ring around 
the meeting facilities. The police formed an inner ring, looking formidable in 
their RoboCop-like riot pads and helmets. The mostly seated protesters couldn't 
approach the convention hall, but neither could delegates, unless they wanted to 
risk a scuffle. The start of the meeting had to be delayed. By late morning the 
cops began trying to clear some streets--not by arresting the kids, which most 
had expected, but by spraying them with pepper gas and firing rubber pellets at 
them. They ran, but not far. David McGraw from south Seattle said he got shot 
twice with the stinging, marble-size pellets.

Enter the anarchists. A few dozen evidently came from a Eugene, Ore.-based group 
that had staged a similar, violent protest in their home downtown earlier this 
year. Their philosophical leader, 56-year-old anarchist author John Zerzan, was 
also in town. Whoever they were, in fatigues and black masks, they opened their 
knapsacks and got out their hammers, spray paint and M-80 firecrackers. With the 
police still occupied closer to the convention hall, they began their assault on 
the brand-name retailers: FAO Schwarz, Starbucks, Old Navy and others. They 
broke windows and painted their A-in-a-circle logo on walls.

A short monorail ride away, 20,000 unionists were rallying in the stadium 
beneath the Space Needle. Big Labor would shortly commence the most massive 
march of the week, reinforced by some kids dressed as monarch butterflies 
(threatened, they say, by genetically engineered corn) and some local Laotian 
refugees protesting the presence of their homeland's communist leaders downtown. 
The idea was to go all the way to the convention center, but the scene around it 
had grown even more chaotic, so the marchers turned around. In front of Nike and 
FAO Schwarz, many protesters were chanting No violence! But the angry street 
kids who hang out in the same neighborhood where much of the protest was 
organized--around Seattle Central Community College--had by now come charging 
down Capitol Hill, and they seemed determined to outdo the anarchists. They hit 
and ran into the evening, when additional police enforced a curfew by chasing 
all the kids back up the hill.

The area around the college became the scene of one of the day's worst 
confrontations, with the cops using their constellation of force--including 
concussion grenades--to disperse turf-conscious crowds, just a few hours before 
President Clinton's arrival at the trade talks. The Secret Service wasn't about 
to bring Clinton into a melee. Mayor Schell finally called in the National Guard 
and established a protest-free zone encompassing the convention center and major 
hotels.

The nights were strangest. That was when you noticed the copters the most, 
because they had their searchlights on. A curfew kept the downtown streets 
mostly empty, except for all the National Guardsmen in camouflage suits, 
carrying riot staves.

So what did the trade conference itself achieve to make up for the trashing of 
downtown Seattle? Very little. The goal was modest to begin with: deciding what 
would be on the table for the next few years of trade talks. The United States 
and other agricultural exporters wanted Europe and Japan to cut farm subsidies 
and let more of their products in. Japan and Brazil wanted the United States to 
ditch its anti-dumping laws and accept more of their steel. The United States 
and Europe wanted poor countries to vigorously enforce intellectual-property 
rights on things like software, movies and biotech. But nobody came ready for 
compromise.

Clinton himself became the focus for much of the discontent. He had come hoping 
to sell the Trade ministers on ways of putting a human face on the global 
economy. In particular, he urged the WTO to try to raise labor standards in the 
developing world and open the WTO's own proceedings to greater public scrutiny. 
The poor countries didn't mind his call for more openness; they might even 
benefit from it, since they often think the rich countries exclude them from key 
decisions. The organization had already taken the first steps in that 
direction--for example, by accrediting more than 740 groups for last week's 
meeting. But the poor countries were deeply suspicious of Clinton's tilt toward 
labor not long after the AFL-CIO endorsed Al Gore's presidential bid. To them, 
having the WTO decide if they're up to snuff on issues like child labor and the 
right to organize is just a form of protectionism, sure to be abused by 
rich-country interest groups. We don't want to be excluded because our eyes 
aren't blue, says Iqbal Ebrahim, a textile manufacturer and Pakistani delegate. 
While some Pakistani bosses don't treat workers according to the standards the 
AFL-CIO advocates, he says, he certainly does. He has to: his 7,000 unionized 
employees are making products for image-conscious corporations such as Warner 
Brothers.

The trade meetings finally fizzled out on Friday night. U.S. Trade 
Representative Charlene Barshefsky wearily explained that the negotiators will 
take a timeout and try again in Geneva. The demonstrators danced in the streets, 
and of all the graffiti on the walls of the retail district, one seemed 
especially apt: we win. Still, those who imagine they've halted 
globalization--or eliminated the need for a traffic cop as it proceeds--are 
dreaming. National Economic Council chairman Gene Sperling reflected after last 
week's breakdown that when you take on the largest economic challenges of the 
day, you're going to hit a few bumps along the way. Seattle could count more 
than a few of those bumps: $3 million in property damage, at least $10 million 
in lost Christmas shopping revenues. But, hey, they can afford it. Greater 
Seattle exported $34 billion worth of goods last year.

GRAPHIC: GRAPHIC: (Map) The Downtown Battle Zone (Graphic omitted); PHOTO: 'WE 
WIN': Rampaging protesters attacked any symbol of globalization--like this 
Starbucks shop ; PHOTO: CLOUDY DAYS: A spasm of violent rage in 'a gentle place 
where we agree to disagree'; PHOTO: AT THE FRONT: The police used tear gas and 
rubber pellets against some demonstrators

LOAD-DATE: December 7, 1999