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Monday, November 30th marks the 10th anniversary of the WTO protests in Seattle. What began as a peaceful demonstration outside the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference erupted into a violent clash between police and protestors in the city streets. The "Battle of Seattle" made headlines around the world for months to come (including incorrect reports that protestors threw Molotov cocktails at police). The scale of this protest was huge: low estimates put the crowd at about 40,000.
Since then the protests have been the subject of much debate (and at least one feature film). Depending on your politics, you may think of them as the genesis of a new "internationally minded, globally linked movement" of anti-corporate protestors, or as a "Noah's ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960's fix."
Ten years on, what do you see as the legacy of the so-called Battle of Seattle? If you were there, what led you to join the protests? How have the protests impacted your thoughts on free trade and globalization since then?
Tagged as: battle of seattle · wto · wto protests
Photo credit: djbones / Creative Commons
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The presence of police in riot gear and a chain link fence to keep out the rabble was my first indication that peaceful actions were going to met with major resistance by the police state protecting the WTO delegates and restricting the rights of citizens in their expression of free speech and freedom of assembly.
As the violent behavior of the police intensified during the week I was gassed many times. No Democracy zones were established but the boundaries were changed frequently. I was surrounded by police stripping stickers off my clothes and backpack. They destroyed my signs and threatened to throw me in jail with a $500.00 fine. I was eventually allowed to continue to a church to demonstrate against the third-world debt.
Wednesday we were gassed indiscriminately, many people were beaten and hundreds were arrested. I was shot in the back when swarms of police suddenly appeared and starting chasing and shooting us with rubber bullets and canisters. It was a state of war against unarmed citizens.
People gathered on Capitol Hill Thursday morning and talked about how the police had broken into residences the previous night destroying property and brutalizing residents.
Some of us acted in solidarity with the protestors incarcerated in the King County Jail. Organizations donated food, clothing, blankets and cardboard for ground cover as we protested the incarceration of activists and the refusal to grant them legal representation.
My battle against the WTO continues. I testified in court on behalf of the citizens who were incarcerated in Seattle. We won that case and won a financial settlement against the City of Seattle. I also protested against the WTO in Cancun.
The Battle of Seattle was a pivotal and dramatic experience for me.
Sue Bastian
Bend, Oregon
541-389-3677
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I had a different experence protesting the WTO in Seattle. I went as a member of my union. As a wheelchair user, I had a small team of union brothers and sisters who helped me get around, pushing me in my chair to the rally and the whole length of the demonstration parade route the first day. I was deeply moved by the wide range of people who showed up at the protest; young and old, labor and environmental and groups not easy to label.
The protest that I participated in was large and free of violence on all sides. It wasn’t until we were on the train, headed home to Oregon that we even started to hear about violence. For me the protests were a brief time of hope that people could influence change for the good of us all. Ten years later I am not as hopeful as I was then.
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I went up to Seattle as a part of the peaceful demonstration parade from Clark College. But the thing that I’ll most remember about the protest is meeting the girl that would become my future wife. We were paired as “protest buddies” and spent the whole day marching with the giant sea turtles in the parade. We did see some vandalism and could smell some tear gas but really we didn’t know what was going on at the Convention Center. The next day we went on our first official date, and as you can say the rest is history.
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Re the e coli water deal.
This guest sounds like the Portland Water Bureau is improvising at top speed.
What notice was given to people staying in hotels in the impacted area? This seems like a really hideous thing for Portland tourism. Did the Bureau ask the hotels and motels to tell their guests??
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It is never a good thing to discover E coli in the water system. The good news is that Portland Water Bureau found it due to required daily repeated testing of our water. Bottled water, on the other hand, has no required testing and offers no potential for informing the public of contamination until people get sick.
Bull Run Water is still the safest, most excellent water available to Portlanders.
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I was there because world trade was being set up unfairly then as it is now. We called it a "Race to the bottom". Which it is. We have environmental and worker protections here that are not followed overseas. The trade which big business promotes allows them to push the pollution to countries which don't care. It has shifted unionized jobs with living wages and adequate worker safety concerns from here to countries who will kill (or disappear) any worker who objects. Now we have fewer living wage jobs here and more worker exploitation overseas. Pollution has increased overseas with the manufacturing sector.
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On November 30, 1999, I was a journalist attached to the newly formed Independent Media Center, which, following the week in Seattle, branched out into a global news gathering organization.
I spent the day on the line between protesters and police, and one of the things that struck me was the near-total lack of mainstream media in the center of the action. For the most part, the major TV, radio, and newspaper reporters situated themselves several blocks away from the police line, where they relied on second-hand reports from the authorities.
What they missed was a responsible, diverse resistance movement that for many hours kept the peace amidst a growing crowd, protecting downtown property in the process. It was only after the firing of tear gas by police into the crowds that peaceful protesters would fall back, allowing vandals to rush into the void and cause property damage. This pattern repeated itself over the course of the afternoon.
The sensationalistic media images of the moment missed the story that only came out later, through independent reporting and angry Capitol Hill residents. It was not the actions of uncontrolled anarchists, but rather the largely unprovoked use of force, tear gas, and pepper spray by police, that created an atmosphere of chaos and ultimately led to several successful lawsuits against the city.
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I am more interested to hear from people who took part in the protests then and have not been a part of a large-scale mobilization again. What inspired non-activsts to take to the streets? Do those participants feel like they made a difference? Would they take similiar action in the future? If so, why?
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I was a part of one of the activist groups assigned to "take over" a vital intersection at the WTO. The first part of the first day was full of chants, songs, and an awesome sense of community and grass-roots power. The rest of my memory is of a terrifying show of force by the police- - batons, grenades, pepper spray, tear gas, lines of advancing swat team members - - it was horrifying. I saw a 70 year old woman knocked over by rushing SWAT teams, who left her behind with a huge gushing head wound. I saw a three year old child and her mother who'd both been tear-gassed. The use of force greatly outweighed the supposed "threat" of the protesters - and since the WTO, this has consistently been true - that first ammendment rights to protest have suffered under the weight of brute government force.
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I was at the time just a guy. Had to get up in the morning and go to work, family to support. I'm really happy that somebody finds something positive out of all the negative actions that occurred.
Did anything change? the simple answer is NOTHING changed, maybe the powers that be changed their rhetoric, but for myself and I'll bet the majority of the working class, nothing changed.
Just as an observation, if you choose to piss off the people with the weapons and you have no plan other then to do that you have pretty much earned the results; right or wrong. -
The 'Battle of Seattle' was largely an aesthetic or social event, the message now and then is largely unclear to me. In many ways it had a disingenuous quality---like 'are these people really that interested in the impact of the WTO?' Have they really investigated and thought about it that much? It was great it happened, it reminded us we are still alive, still kicking. We can get angry. We can coalesce. Even if it was superficial---or more about the act or the ritual, then the gripe. Certainly there were those who knew what time it was, they knew the score. But the majority were hangers-on.
We all failed, the world had already past the point of no-return prior to the 'Battle of Seattle.' It was our last hiccup---a tiny dance. Planet Earth is already one big warehouse-store, everything has been Costco-ed. We were too late!
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@scottmil
One thing that often gets overlooked by the anti-globalization people is that the 'Big Corporate interests' have many credible and strong "allies" among both the 'humanitarian elites', and the 'world security/stability elites'.
And, even though the choices we face may be between the lesser of evils; if we focus and are clear about the complexity of the issues, we may yet find ways to make things better.
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If you were too late, it was 200 + years ago when one influential school of thought posited that the only way a tribally adapted species - competing for ever larger survival units - would ever stop killing each other, was if they were economically interdependant. There were and are other schools of thought looking at the same dilemma, but all of them recognize the underlying dynamic that pushes the perenial problem.
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Regarding the E.Coli contamination: I thought chlorine is added to the water after it leaves the reservoir to kill contaminates like this. Chlorine kills e.coli, that's why it's added. The water warning created a lot of anxiety among water users. Maybe this water contamination notice is part of a drive to have the reservoirs covered. The contractor that gets that job will make a lot of money.
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Community radio station KBOO is running a full day of Seattle '99 coverage from 8am until 8pm today. 90.7 in Portland or www.kboo.fm on the web.
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I was living in Seattle at the time of the protest. It was before I had my eyes turned to politics in any way.
Looking back, I realize that my anti-establishment leanings were birthed as a result of the POLICE violence that I witnessed that week in Seattle. I lived on Capitol Hill at the time and came down to the first day of marching mainly as a spectator. I believe I was there at the turning point between "the two faces". The puppets were up, there was dancing and music, but things were also heating up. Every time someone got a little rowdy, "no violence" chants began.
Later that night I was back on capitol hill and it was a police state. We weren't allowed out on the streets, my roomate at the time was shot with a rubber bullet as she came out of a Value Village (she hadn't had any part in the protest and this was completely out of the area where protests were happening).
It is only in the last couple of years that I have learned to trust the police again.
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The actions of the police at WTO politicized people in my family who had never really been involved or interested in politics before. I wasn't there, but was really startled to hear their accounts, as they were witnessing police abuse of power that wasn't in the mainstream news.
The most disturbing event they experienced occured when the police suddenly swarmed out of vans and without provocation gassed a group of people peacefully sitting on the sidewalk eating their lunches.
My uncle reported this, as he was caring for my aunt and they were staying in a condo complex filled with patients receiving cancer treatments at Swedish. They had a front row seat to the above event, and their complex started filling with tear gas; my uncle frantically called the police to tell them that the police were gassing a building full of immune-compromised patients. (A patient in the building died later, and it was never determined if the tear gas was involved.) To my uncle's astonishment, the police hung up on him! So he called back, and I can't recall his exact words, but he said the police made it clear that they didn't care, and they hung up on him again.
My uncle said he'd never been interested in politics before, but this experience changed him. My mother was also at the protests--I don't think she'd been in a protest in her life--and since then she's become much more involved in acting on her politics.
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The WTO is in essence the One World Government that Benito Mussolini and his WW2 Axis partners tried to achieve, the "Corporate State" Domination of the World that he said was really Fascism.
Over the last three decades of descent into Conservatism, of De-Regulating Corporations and unleashing them on the People, we have seen the return of Mussolinis dream, The Corporate State. And it is far worse than even Mussolini dreamed of.
It is a very sad state of affairs.
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People from across the Pacific Northwest will be gathering in downtown Portland on Saturday, December 5th to both celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the Seattle protests and to demonstrate opposition to the NEW World Trade Organization Ministerial taking place in Geneva this week.
People are meeting at noon at Tom McCall Waterfront Park under the Hawthorne Bridge, followed by a march through downtown and an indoor rally and concert at PSU. Learn more at www.December5.org.
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Though I was only there for the big march on November 30th, there was at least a week of teach-ins, featuring many of the most prominent progressive thinkers of our time. There was so much hope in the air -- for a future in which people would have a voice and a presence, as we did that day in such large, hopeful numbers
I attended the labor/environmental rally at the Seattle Center, where the expression "Teamsters and Turtles together at last" was born -- a joyous occasion, and the march that followed was so uplifting and positive -- a true feeling of popular solidarity in a shared universal cause. We even saw police along the sidelines, smiling and encouraging us on (this was about noon).
Our contingent was met with whoops and hollers by the heroic downtown contingent, who had closed down the meetings. It was a momentous occasion, for as long as it lasted. We saw upturned dumpsters, some small fires, kids with bandanas -- all quite harmless, as the huge crowd was peopled by all ages and varying sympathies. But we were united in our stand against the cruelties imposed on the world by a handful of rich and powerful men, and tasted a brief moment of a kind of victory, before the teargas cannisters began to fall. (Those of us who had been at the Seattle Center had been stunned to hear rumors of morning tear-gassings.)
I am saddened to hear this morning that we are all still referred to as "the protesters" -- still being marginalized as we were by the mainstream press, including NPR, at the time of the event. It was clearly the police who rioted, as anyone who experienced that day can testify.
Another thing missing in the discussion is that another event was in the works, to be held in Washington, D.C. on September 24, 2001, which promised to be an expansion of the action in Seattle. It may or may not have been held, but this is clear: it was totally derailed and sidelined by the events of September 11. The coalition of unionists, environmentalists, peace activists, fair trade activists and hordes of other NGOs and concerned citizens world wide has never regained traction in the years since.
I am saddened that the anniversary of such a momentous gathering has come and gone, and all we get -- instead of what should have been a celebration -- is a sad post-mortem, with continuing misleading and belittling language.
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Comments are now closed.
I attended the Seattle Protest, tagging along with a friend that was involved in ILWU5. At that point in my life, I was just beginning to awaken to the wide world of politics (particularly those outside of my immediate sphere; Oregon, the US, etc.) Being in Seattle, watching what started as a peaceful protest rapidly devolve (I think both sides played a role in that) truly pushed me into the realization that things were not as they seemed.
Up until that point, I was content to accept news and history essentially at face value. Being on the receiving end of tear gas canisters while walking away from the protest made me realize that there was a whole undercover world that I felt I should be aware of.
Because I wasn't as aware of where things stood before, I can't speak with understanding about how things changed outside of my own experience. Now, ten years later, I am at PSU as an MBA candidate, and I can say with authority that my understanding of the world was drastically shaped by my experience in Seattle. In the end, I would even say that it led me to business school: I believe that it is incumbent upon the world of business to use all the capitalist power that exists to work for the good of the planet. I also believe that this isn't the prevailing understanding in business, but especially given the meltdown in the past couple of years, that is open to discussion. Developing my business acumen will enable me to work in the growing ranks of businesses that are working with groups like B-Corp., Ceres, Climate Savers, even Umpqua Bank that are working to build into business operations attention to social and environmental needs, no longer passing that off as “externalities.”
To me, Seattle was a learning experience; I learned that the world was not what I had thought. And eventually, that understanding led me to take steps to make positive change.
I hope I can catch the show tomorrow!
Best,
Nate Young