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NYC Officials Seek to Ban Mass Rally at Republican Convention
New York officials for a second time denied the United for Peace & Justice (UFPJ) coalition a permit for a Sunday, Aug. 29 mass rally in Central Park to “Say No to the Bush Agenda!” The application to use Central Park was resubmitted after UFPJ leaders, upon reflection, declared that “the deal was off” regarding the coalition’s initial decision to accede to the city’s insistence that the rally take place at an isolated and cordoned-off West Side Highway location.
The fight for the democratic and constitutional right to protest has now become a critical issue in national politics. Public figures from newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin to authors Howard Zinn and Norman Mailer have weighed in on behalf of UFPJ’s right to rally in Central Park, realistically the only place in Manhattan capable of accommodating hundreds of thousands of protesters expected to assemble at the time of the Republican National Convention.
UFPJ asserts that it has a valid permit for its Aug. 29 march, scheduled to assemble at Seventh Ave. and 14th St. at 10am. A noon march, according to UFPJ leaders, will then proceed past Madison Square Garden, the site of the Republican Party Convention. But it is still unclear if the city’s rejection of the Central Park really site carries with it the withdrawal of the march permits granted as part of a package deal that originally included the West Side Highway.
An Aug. 13 UFPJ press release states: “The August 29 march is not to be missed! If ever there was a time to stand up for peace and justice and against the restriction of dissent, this is it. Bring your friends, your neighbors, your children, your coworkers: At this legal and permitted march, we will peacefully flood the streets of Manhattan with a cry for change so loud it cannot be ignored.”
Simultaneously, International ANSWER and the National Council of Arab Americans have joined in a suit in U.S. District Court for the right to use the Great Lawn in Central Park for a rally on Saturday, Aug. 28. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild, which brought the suit, said that the court action aims to clear the way for all groups to demonstrate in the park and to prevent police from arresting protesters.
We can expect that hundreds of thousands of people will assemble on Sunday, Aug. 29, primarily to express their opposition to the Iraq war. The UFPJ leadership, however, sees the rally as the culmination of their effort to defeat George Bush in the election and embrace the campaign of Democratic Party presidential candidate, John Kerry. To their dismay, local Democratic Party officials, fearful that the march would associate the Democrats with the antiwar movement, chimed in to urge either the demonstration’s cancellation or its restriction to the West Side Highway.
While Socialist Action rejects the pro-Democratic Party “lesser-evil” orientation of UFPJ over the course of the past several months, the fight for the elementary democratic right to assemble has now posed a challenge that cannot be ignored without great peril to the democratic rights of everyone. We urge the mobilization of the broadest and most massive forces in New York City on Aug. 29 to challenge all attempts to restrict the right to assemble to protest the war and political injustice.
Such a mobilization is required to guarantee that democratic rights will not be sacrificed at the behest of either of capitalism’s twin parties of war, racism and poverty.
No to the Bush/Kerry bipartisan agenda of war, racism and corporate globalization! End all restrictions on the right to peaceful protest!
The article above first appeared in the August 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.
(415) 255-1080 -- socialistact@igc.org |
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