Walkouts protest Iraq War anniversary

Shahreen Saifi Assistant News Editor

The war in Iraq sparked protests at colleges and universities across the country last week as students joined the growing anti-war movement. Marking the war’s four-year anniversary on March 20, students from a number of campuses participated in vigils and organized walkouts, calling for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

At The University of California at Santa Barbara, the protestors organized a bike ride to military buildings. University of Southern California students held a “die-in,” creating a simulation of war-torn Iraq by posing as corpses. A similar simulation held at Brown University became destructive when protestors began by placing hands “bloodied” with strawberry jam on the office buildings of Textron Inc., a company that provides helicopters to the U.S. Military.

Students at other schools, such as Rutgers University, North Carolina State University, and New York University staged walkouts. The walkout in New York, organized by the NYU Campus Antiwar Network and entitled “Red Tuesday,” took place in Central Park and attracted an estimated 150 protestors. On a larger scale, hundreds of Rutgers students walked down College Avenue in New Brunswick waving American flags. Most of the walkouts brought together students, faculty, community members and, in some cases, even students from nearby high schools.

Middlebury College observed a moment of silence in honor of those who died in Iraq. In a more elaborate ceremony, Harvard students held a six-hour vigil, during which a list of the war casualties was read aloud. “Today is the day to remember what’s happened rather than to make political statements,” said Garrett G. Dash Nelson, the Harvard Democrats’ communications director in an interview with the Crimson.

The national student activist organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organized a large-scale political statement on March 20, which they decreed a “Day of Action,” meant to bring the antiwar student protests into a cohesive, and therefore more effective, movement.

“We hope that this Day of Action will be a catalyst for students to rise up and get organized against the war in Iraq,” said Kati Ketz, spokesperson for the SDS, according to the Monthly Review. “Four years is four years too many, and it’s time that students in this country get organized against this war.”

While the SDS has attracted large numbers of sympathetic students, others argue that their proceedings are ineffective. But the SRS’s founding members see the student mobilization itself as a success.

“We know that the march is not going to end the war, but that’s not what the point of it is,” SDS’s UCLA Chapter co-founder Babken DerGrigorian told the Daily Bruin. “People have learned to be complacent and accept the war...The anti-war movement is building up and we are not going to sit here and let these things happen in our name.”