By Andrew Lovdahl

Gargoyle staff reporter


Posted Friday, March 16, 2007, The OG, news

[March 16 UPDATE: This article has been revised to reflect a change in the number of Uni students participating in Saturday's March on the Pentagon. Three students were originally scheduled to take part.]

WHAT ARE YOU going to do on the first day of spring break? Sleep until noon, glue your eyes to college basketball, maybe get on a plane to Florida?

Two Uni students — juniors Shara Esbenshade and Kumars Salehi — have other plans: They will be in Washington, D.C., joining in the March on the Pentagon, a mass protest against the Bush administration's policies both overseas and here at home.

They will leave Champaign-Urbana at 5 p.m. today along with members of the Campus Antiwar Network. The group will travel to Washington on a rented tour bus.

“The schedule is we drive all night, march all day Saturday, drive all night and get back to Urbana Sunday morning,” Esbenshade said.

Esbenshade has established something of a reputation among Uni students as a political activist.

She helped to organize an anti-war rally Jan. 27 in downtown Champaign and regularly contributes to the Gargoyle on political issues.

“Far more Iraqis have died from war than died under Saddam Hussein's rule,” she said. “The millions of dollars that are spent every day to fund this war take away from our very own future as young Americans. The war is not just ruining Iraq, it is ruining the United States and all that we stand for: liberty, justice, democracy, prosperity, and the pursuit of happiness.”

While Esbenshade is hardly a stranger to protests, Salehi will be marching for his first time.

“I haven't been to any other protests,” he said. “This is my indoctrination into public activism.”

Salehi, who is Iranian-American, is especially concerned about possible U.S. military action against Iran.

“The debacle that was the Iraq war is bad enough, but now it seems that my country, Iran, is being targeted for a similar treatment,” said Salehi. “We can't let this happen again, and if it does, I'm not going to take it sitting down.”

Not to take action, he said, would be “ignorant” and “apathetic.”

Participants in the march will gather about one and a half miles northeast of the Pentagon between 8 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. Saturday for pre-march activities. At 12:30, the group will head off from West Potomac Park across the Potomac River.

The march is mainly being coordinated by Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (the ANSWER Coalition), an activist group that formed mere days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It has offices and members across America, and it works closely with the Arab-American and Muslim communities. Besides anti-war and anti-intervention efforts, the coalition also focuses its energies on calling for civil rights and an end to discrimination.

Since its first organized protest on Sept. 29, 2001, which featured a turnout of about 25,000 participants in Washington D.C. and about 15,000 in San Francisco, the organization has helped to arrange several large protests. In January 2003, ANSWER called for a worldwide “Day of Action” against the Iraq war, with half a million demonstrators in Washington and untold millions participating globally.

The Pentagon march coincides with the fourth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and 2007 is the 40th anniversary of a similar march in protest of the Vietnam War. In an online statement, ANSWER describes the Iraq war as “genocide” and cites its primary motivations for marching as the massive death toll in Iraq and the use of U.S.-provided cluster bomblets by Israel against Lebanon, which ANSWER describes as a “war crime.”

Other issues addressed in the statement include the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, government surveillance, the role that oil resources played in the decision to invade Iraq, and the close-to-home costs of the war, such as less funding for aid programs and a decline in assets devoted to veterans and the education system.

In her comments to the Gargoyle, Esbenshade offered this definition of terrorism: “The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.”

She went to say: “Terrorism defines the way the Iraq war has been conducted. It cannot go on. This is why I put so much of my time and energy into organizing against the war, and this is why I will be marching.”

She hopes that the protest will send a message to U.S. lawmakers, reminding them of their responsibility to make every effort “to stop this mass violence and destruction and the all-around dehumanizing, disgusting, tragic mess that is war.”

Salehi, meanwhile, doubts whether the protest will make much of a national impact, but that's not the reason he is participating.

“I don't really think it will do anything of note,” he said. “The network news stations won't cover it, and if they do, they'll twist it so that it doesn't sound as important. I'm doing it for myself, because I feel like I have an obligation as a citizen of the world to fight this sort of thing, especially when a country I know so well will be the target of indiscriminate military violence.”

RELATED

— ANSWER Coalition: March on the Pentagon

— Gargoyle audio slideshow: Are protests effective?

— Gargoyle story: For student activists, persistence is the name of the game