COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: War Protests: General
Protest and Pushback on Campus
Ryan Grim, The Nation
October 12, 2005
As a campus police officer put Tariq Khan in a chokehold, a lunchtimecrowd at George Mason University began egging the officer on. Chants of
"Kick his ass! Kick his ass!" were intermingled with cries of "Punch
him!" "Kick him!" and "Take him down!" Two students--one had earlier
ripped a sign off Khan's chest, the other had repeatedly called him a
"pussy"--and a computer-lab staff member assisted the officer in
"apprehending" Khan, as university spokesperson Dan Walsch put it, by
piling on top of him and twisting his body until he cried out in pain.
Khan, 27, a four-year Air Force veteran and a junior at GMU, had been
walking through the Johnson Center on September 29 when he saw a Marine
recruiter. He made up a sign, "Recruiters lie. Don't be deceived," and
silently stood next to the recruiter's table. Less than thirty minutes
later he found himself in the chokehold. Backup police dragged Khan
from the building, and one of them pulled out pepper spray. "I'm being
nonviolent, and this officer is going to pepper-spray me! If you have a
cell phone, please take a picture," Khan says he shouted. Aimee Wells,
a junior and a library staffer, says she pulled out her camera-phone
and the officer put away the canister, saying, "Don't worry. Nobody's
getting pepper-sprayed today."
Khan, a sociology major, was taken to the Fairfax County jail and
charged with disorderly conduct and trespassing. While there, he says,
one officer told him, "You people are the most dangerous people in the
world." Another officer, he says, warned him that if he didn't behave,
"They'll hang you up by your feet." Police photographs show a bruised
and bloodied Khan. A campus investigation is under way into the actions
of the police, the staff member and the students, but no charges have
yet been brought. "Buz" Grover, the balding, gray-ponytailed computer
lab staffer who jumped on Khan and pulled his arm back, looks about
six-foot-six and weighs maybe 280 pounds. "I assisted the officer," he
said, "but beyond saying anything else I think I should consult with
the university first.... Basically, someone doesn't want to take
responsibility for his actions, and I'm not inclined to help them do
that."
Last semester, the counterrecruiting protest movement was just getting
warmed up. New York's City College; William Paterson University in
Wayne, New Jersey; San Francisco State University; and the University
of California-Santa Cruz all saw confrontations that resulted in
varying degrees of police and/or administrative action against
counterrecruitment protesters. Though it's still early in the 2005-06
school year, the counterrecruiting movement has picked up serious steam
nationwide, and is being met with angry--sometimes violent--reactions.
"It's getting really ugly," says Liz Rivera Goldstein, chair of the National
Network Opposing Militarization of Youth and a mother of two draft-age sons.
The same week that Khan was arrested, student protesters in Wisconsin
and western Massachusetts were met with similar displays of force.
Ultimately, though, it may be Holyoke Community College (HCC), located
in one of Massachusetts's poorest towns, the predominantly Puerto Rican
Holyoke, that has recruiters the most worried. Protests against
military recruitment may not be welcomed by recruiters on campuses in
Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Madison or Manhattan, but they're not
unexpected. These campuses, based in deeply liberal areas, have a
strong sense of community and a proud history of protest. Besides,
well-educated liberals don't necessarily make the most fertile soil for
recruitment. Says Holyoke sophomore Charles Peterson, "It's OK for
Amherst or Hampshire College to have politics, but once working-class
students start protesting, then state cops in riot gear get called in."
Community college students tend to be less affluent than their
four-year peers, making them easier targets for the low-wage military.
"That's why [recruiters] prey on HCC," says Peterson, 24, a student
senate vice president, citing the school's large Hispanic and
African-American populations. "They're everywhere on campus."
Compounding their vulnerability, community colleges are less organized,
for the simple reasons that the tenure of students rarely runs past two
years and students commute to class instead of living on campus.
Mobilizing a fleeting class of impoverished commuters would try a
professional organizer's mettle--for 20-year-olds the challenge is
daunting. So Army National Guard recruiters may have been a bit
disturbed to see fifteen to twenty protesters from the Antiwar
Coalition--a chapter of the Campus
Antiwar Network--surround their table on September 29 at HCC, the
same day Tariq Khan was being dragged out of the George Mason
University student center.
The protest had been preannounced; state police in riot gear were
waiting for them, say demonstrators. Boxes marked "gas masks" sat on
the ground nearby. It was a show of force stronger than the four-year
schools have seen. Accounts vary as to what exactly happened, but the
chaos ensued when campus police chief Peter Mascaro grabbed a sign from
a student. The college claims the sign had a wooden stick taped to it,
making it inappropriate for the demonstration. The students say video
footage clearly shows there was no stick. Mascaro's reaction, they say,
was to the sign's admittedly provocative content: "Cops Are
Hypocrites."
Peterson won't comment on what happened because of possible criminal
charges, but HCC spokesperson Erica Broman claims he told the college
he was trying to help the student whose sign was grabbed from falling.
According to Broman, he grabbed and bruised an officer's arm. "The
officer gave him pepper spray, which, of course, subdued him," Broman
says. Peterson was banned from campus. A student who witnessed the
pepper-spraying rejects the university's claim, as do accounts of the
incident online. The student asked not to be identified. "They
recognized that I was in a leadership position and attacked me when
they got the opportunity," says Peterson, who is an outspoken critic of
the war on campus. A week later, nearby University of
Massachusetts-Amherst students jointly organized a march with their
Holyoke counterparts in support of Peterson, who has since been allowed
back on campus.
Peterson says he has been told that criminal charges have been filed,
but he has not received official notice of them. Khan, who is married,
faces a November 14 court date and is being represented by the American
Civil Liberties Union. It was during his last year in the military, he
says, when he was stationed at Osan Air Base in Korea, that he first
became politically aware. "There were a lot of protests outside the
base," he says, "and they were always chanting, 'Yankees go home!' " I
wondered, Why are we here, if they don't even want us here?" He says he
began reading Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Emma Goldman and Alexander
Berkman, and began questioning the military system. "I had always known
there were a lot of jerks around, but I didn't recognize the whole
system behind it, why all these people are jerks." He has since written
a pamphlet based on his Air Force experiences--"3 Good Reasons Not to
Join the Military."
On September 26, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, about
twenty-five student protesters were threatened with arrest as they
peaceably assembled at a CIA/Marine/Air Force recruiting table during a
job fair. They were told by police they were violating campus policy,
says Ben Ratliffe, a senior and member of the campus Stop the War
Coalition, but they wouldn't say which policy. "I'm not going to debate
you on this. You have three minutes before you're all arrested,"
Ratliffe, a cultural anthropology major, says the officer told the
group. When he and his partners reached for their handcuffs, the group
ran out of the building. The students returned to similarly greet Navy
recruiters on October 10, and were met by fifteen to twenty cops. "They
were ready," says Ratliffe. He says they were given the same vague
threat and left again. Dennis Chaptman, a school spokesperson, says the
students violated section 18.06(30) of the code, which covers pretty
much anything: "No person may engage in violent, abusive, indecent,
profane, boisterous, unreasonably loud or otherwise disorderly conduct
under circumstances in which the conduct tends to cause or provoke a
disturbance, in university buildings or on university lands."
At UC-Santa Cruz last spring, student protests against the war caused
recruiters to leave a job fair. With the momentum from that victory,
students set up a tent city at the university's gates; one of its goals
was to permanently bar recruiters from campus. Police arrested nineteen
people the first night. And at San Francisco State University, two
antiwar groups were sanctioned for what members described as petty,
trumped-up charges that stemmed from demonstrations they held against
Air Force and Army Corps of Engineers recruiters. The groups are still
on probation, and had university funding pulled. According to student
organizer Kristin Anderson, a junior with Students Against War, three
campus leaders--Michael Hoffman, Katrina Yeaw and Pardis Esmali--are
currently facing disciplinary action on similarly trumped-up,
bureaucratic charges. "When it comes down to it, the university doesn't
want us protesting on campus," she says. Plans are already under way to
protest Marine recruiters set to hit campus on October 27.
Peterson, Khan and others say their movement won't relent until
recruiters are completely banned from the nation's educational
campuses. They've got a long way to go. Erica Broman says HCC is
unwilling to jeopardize the $7 million it gets annually in federal
dollars, which it would lose if it banned recruiters. Spokespersons
from GMU, UC-Santa Cruz and Madison--all of them public, perhaps not
coincidentally--expressed the same concern.
"It's not just Madison or Mason or Holyoke. It's a national trend,"
says Madison senior Ben Ratliffe. "They're missing their recruiting
numbers. It's a massively unpopular war. They certainly don't want a
movement like this to take hold."
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