WTO

Seattle's still sleepless

by Jason Gay

More than two weeks have passed since the Battle in Seattle, or the Event Formerly Known as the World Trade Organization Ministerial, but things still haven't settled down in the Pacific Northwest. Between charges that some of the anarchist vandals at the WTO riots were actually police-agent provocateurs and rumors that cops fired unauthorized chemical agents (i.e., stuff other than tear gas and pepper spray) into the crowd, it's clear that the progressive-activist-anarchist network will be buzzing for a while over the American Protest of the Decade.

If you're jonesing for WTO info and gossip, your best source is the Independent Media Center (http://www.indymedia.org), a Seattle-based Web site where alternative-media reporters, protesters, anarchists, and anyone else who wants to can post stories, photographs, video, and audio from WTO week. Readers can find everything from on-the-scene accounts of the riots and mass arrests to up-close-and-personal videos of police-protester clashes. The Independent Media Center's site has also become a forum for different protest groups to debate the effectiveness and impact of their actions during WTO week.

Meanwhile, allegations of police misconduct continue to pour in to Seattle's Direct Action Network, an activist collective that helped organize nonviolent demonstrations during WTO week. Among other things, critics charge that police indiscriminately fired tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber pellets at peaceful protesters (as well as at civilians who had nothing to do with the protests) and grossly violated the rights of some of those who were arrested for taking part in nonviolent civil disobedience. A few individual protesters have already filed complaints with the city, the ACLU is talking mass lawsuits, and this week, Amnesty International called for an independent investigation of police conduct during the WTO protests. City-sponsored public hearings on that issue are already under way; if these prove ineffective, activists pledge to seek an audience elsewhere -- in Congress, even.

Of course it will be months, perhaps years, before any of this is settled. But that doesn't detract from a feeling of accomplishment among anti-WTO activists. "This was a historic event," says Denis Moynihan, a Jamaica Plain resident involved with the Direct Action Network. "It mobilized people and it radicalized a lot of people."