Protesters Urge Peace With Terrorists
September 30, 2001
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 - A few hundred protesters marched in downtown Washington
today urging a peaceful end to the conflict between the United States and
terrorists based in Afghanistan.
The police said that a few people were arrested and that pepper spray was
used to control some demonstrators. Assistant Police Chief Terrence Gainer
was himself affected by the pepper spray and had to be taken briefly to a
hospital to have his eyes rinsed.
Many of the protesters had planned to march during a meeting of international
financial institutions that was canceled after the terrorist attacks on Sept.
11.
Erik Ohlsen, 22, a teacher from San Francisco, said that the attacks were
connected to the questions of globalization that have drawn large protests
in recent years at meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World
Bank. "The countries that the people who attacked may have come from arefeeling
oppression by the global policies that the I.M.F. and World Bankimpose,"
he said.
Police officers on motorcycles swarmed around protesters in a park a fewblocks
from the White House, and a helicopter circled overhead.
At an appearance in Washington to raise scholarship money for victims ofthe
attacks, former president Bill Clinton said that protesters "are welcometo
say what they want to say." But, he added, "the people who did this toAmerica
would not permit them the same right."