INTRODUCTION

by Erik Farseth

Intellectuals are the shoeshine boys of the ruling elite.                      

- Killdozer

SEATTLE, WA -- November 30, 1999

Paul Schell was apoplectic. The Mayor of Seattle had thought that he was going to be welcoming President Clinton and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to the city. Instead, he had a riot on his hands.

The 1999 WTO Ministerial Conference was supposed to have been the highlight of Schell’s first term in office, a showcase for the Emerald City. The WTO (World Trade Organization) Conference was a symbol of Seattle’s newfound cultural and economic clout. Once an outpost of the lumber industry, Seattle was at the cutting edge of modern music, a leader in aerospace engineering, computer technology, and coffee. Now the ruling elite was coming to Seattle to pay its respects to Microsoft, Starbucks, and Boeing, booking reservations at the downtown Convention Center for the Millennium Round negotiations that were to determine the future of international tariffs and trade.

            Speaking at a news conference on November 1, 1999, Mayor Schell proclaimed:

This is a momentous and exciting affair. It speaks to the growing stature of Seattle on the world stage, and it shows impressive confidence in our ability to serve as gracious and confident hosts for international dialog.(1)

      But instead of glad-handing members of the World Trade delegation, Schell was staring out the window at clouds of tear gas, as hundreds of National Guardsmen from an armored tank division lined the streets. With news crews camped out in front of City Hall, the Mayor could feel his prospects for a second term in office slowly fade away. Downtown Seattle was under martial law, surrounded by a four mile wide “No Protest Zone.” Seattle residents had been placed under curfew, confined to their homes after 7:00 p.m. Armored personnel carriers were rumbling down Pike Street, while police helicopters were hovering overhead.(2)

            Though the opening session of the Ministerial Conference had been canceled, WTO Director General Michael Kenneth Moore vowed to carry on behind closed doors. The secretive General Council of the WTO (an unelected body based in Geneva, Switzerland) had expected to conduct its business with little interference, and Paul Schell’s office was more-than-happy to oblige. Free trade demanded nothing less.

THE ‘VIOLENCE’

            On the morning of November 30th, 1999, small teams of activists roused themselves at 5:00 a.m., and began to make their way to downtown Seattle. Soon, hundreds of people had gathered on the streets surrounding the Convention Center and the Paramount Theater.(3)There, they locked themselves together, using U-bar locks, chains, and sections of PVC pipe to secure themselves to lampposts and concrete blocks. By 7:00 a.m., the Seattle Convention Center was completely surrounded. By mid-morning, 10,000 people had joined the blockade.(4) This, in addition to the 40,000 union members, environmentalists, Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs), and their supporters, who were there for a legal rally.

      Unable to enter the Paramount Theater, the delegates (including Kofi Annan) were trapped inside of their hotels.(5) The opening ceremony of the WTO’s Third Ministerial Meeting was officially cancelled, the conference delayed until the following afternoon.(6)

      For months leading up to the protests, a coalition of fair trade activists and environmentalists had been undergoing training in nonviolent civil disobedience. Responding to a call put out by the Direct Action Network (DAN), hundreds of people volunteered to “take” key intersections, and “hold” them long enough to disrupt the WTO. The streets surrounding the Convention Center were divided into 13 sections, each one held by smaller “affinity groups,” who kept in touch with cell phones. “Some of them held those positions until 4:00 p.m. or later,” wrote City Pages reporter Betsy Raasch-Gilman.(7)

      None of this was secret: the protesters had declared their intentions six months earlier, during a series of public meetings.(8) Having learned from the mistakes of the New Left, the nonviolent direct action movement had adopted a sunshine policy, organizing openly in a grassroots, democratic fashion. Closed cells were an invitation to government repression, a breeding ground for paranoia and agents provocateurs. That was not their style. The WTO protesters had nothing to hide. DAN organizers David Solnit and Erica Kay had spoken to The Seattle Weekly two weeks prior to the WTO meeting. During the course of their interview, Kay and Solnit had calmly discussed their plans to “Shut down the WTO.”(9)

No one took them seriously.

A veteran protester, Bay Area writer Gordon Edgar took part in the anti-WTO demonstrations.

Gordon Edgar:

I can’t say that I had a leading role.

All of a sudden, maybe a year beforehand, people started to talk about “Hey, the WTO is coming to Seattle.” And it was the sort of thing where everybody—and I mean everybody—who I had ever done politics with was talking about it a year, or six months beforehand. And I was thinking to myself: “This thing is going to be fucking huge!” I even said that to a couple of people: “I think this is going to be a really huge demonstration.”

A lot of Bay Area people were really motivated, like the Ruckus Society and all those folks. People who had really come out of the anti-nuke movement: small affinity groups, doing direct actions in coordination with other groups.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t really commit to much -because I was working. It wasn’t until right before the protests that I knew I could get time off. I actually flew up to Seattle the day the WTO started, took the bus downtown, and walked into this total Liberated Zone in downtown Seattle (it was the bus that goes under the city, so it wasn’t shut down). And I immediately ran into some old friends of mine from the anti-Apartheid movement [of the 1980’s]. They were organizing a union march. I worked with them. I didn’t do any of the militant stuff, like locking myself down. I mostly did support for other people who were there.

And part of it was just walking around, and taking it all in. I don’t have much respect for the whole ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’ concept, and the way it gets played out. But when you’re walking around whatever city you’re in, and the city is completely shut down –because people are taking action against the people they think are oppressing them… it’s a powerful, powerful thing!

And I kept running into more and more people… people I had known my entire adult life. Not necessarily people I knew well, but people who I had been seeing at demonstrations, or who I had seen at some anarchist event in 1993, or some anarchist coffeehouse, or working on some zine. Everybody was there. It was just like: “Holy crap! We can do stuff like this! We can shut down cities!” That was a great feeling.