Jim Lawson among arrestees protesting sanctions on Iraq
8/8/2000 NOTE: A photo is available.
WASHINGTON (UMNS) - The sidewalk in front of the White House was the scene of a peaceful Aug. 7 protest and sit-in that culminated in the voluntary arrest of more than 100 people, including the Rev. Jim Lawson Jr., a retired United Methodist minister and noted civil rights activist.
Ten years have passed since sanctions were imposed on Iraq as the result of that country's invasion of Kuwait. Lawson and others participating in the effort to lift the comprehensive restrictions maintain that more than one million Iraqis - more than half of them children under 5 - have died since then as a result.
Fellowship of Reconciliation, an interfaith peace organization, and the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker relief group, were the leaders among a long list of organizations endorsing a campaign to end the economic sanctions that they hold responsible for civilian deaths by malnutrition and disease.
General Conference, the highest legislative assembly of the United Methodist Church, voted May 6 to advocate lifting these sanctions with three-quarters of the delegates favoring this policy.
Before arriving at the White House, the protestors assembled on the steps of a U.S. Treasury building where a campaign representative announced the sending of gas chlorinators and chlorine to Iraqi orphanages and youth centers to provide water and sewage purification. The availability of pure water is a health issue in Iraq.
Although this violation of U.S sanctions against Iraq was announced on the steps of the agency charged with enforcement, the expected arrests were not made there, and the whole group proceeded across Pennsylvania Avenue to the sidewalk in front of the White House.
Walking back and forth in front of the President's residence, the group sang and chanted. In addition to signs and banners, many protestors carried loaves of French bread, symbolizing the food they want to make available to Iraq's poorer civilians.
By the time the 104 demonstrators sat down on the sidewalk - lined up in five rows with a large banner spread out in front, as if they were posing for a class reunion picture - many pieces of the bread had been impaled on the tall wrought iron fence behind them.
The park police, some on horseback, began a carefully choreographed process of separating all bystanders to the opposite side of the security-closed 1600 block of Pennsylvania Avenue and moving the press behind strips of yellow tape some distance from the demonstrators.
Three times, a policeman with a megaphone warned the sitters to move. A paddy wagon was backed up to the end of the demonstration area, and, one at a time, demonstrators were handcuffed with plastic cuffs and loaded into a series of trucks for transport to the local jail.
Lawson, who studied nonviolence and the life of Gandhi in the 1950s and is a past national chairperson of the U.S. Fellowship of Reconciliation, was one of the speakers at a brief rally of 200 to 300 people that preceded the group's demonstration and spoke to a crowd of about a thousand on the preceding day when the group marched from the Lincoln Memorial to Lafayette Park
"All the Christians in the country should be here because we are participating in genocide against the children of Iraq," Lawson said early on.
He compared the deaths of children in Iraq to babies in United States, saying 60,000 a year die in the United States due to lack of care and nourishment associated with their birth and first year of life. Throughout the world, he said, globalization has resulted in poorer health education and food for children.
Lawson reported that he was participating in these events to make a witness for the nation and to "sow non-violent seeds."
Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, a Roman Catholic from Detroit, asked the group, "Are the children of Iraq our enemies?" The group responded with a shouted "No!" The bishop then asked why this country is waging war on the children of Iraq. He, too, was among the people arrested.
Both Lawson and Gumbleton said they had made earlier trips to Iraq to see for themselves the effects of sanctions and bombings.
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