Activists began trickling into Washington yesterday as the numerous players on the city's protest stage -- organizers, downtown office workers, police -- searched for housing, prepared to shut some buildings and mobilized their forces for tomorrow's curtain-raising.
Protesters, organizing for demonstrations targeting this weekend's annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, offered street medic training, set up the Anti-Authoritarian Babysitters Club and scrambled for bed space in churches, hostels and friends' homes.
Police prepared for the arrival of 1,700 out-of-town officers to help create a force of about 3,200. They also ordered city crews to remove benches, newspaper boxes and cigarette urns from some downtown sidewalks and urged commuters to stay off the roads in the District tomorrow. Police officials said they would establish a fenced perimeter tonight around the World Bank and IMF headquarters in Foggy Bottom.
Police preparations focused on a mix of permitted and unpermitted demonstrations, including a call to bring traffic and business activity in the District to a standstill tomorrow and to prevent IMF and World Bank delegates from leaving their meetings Saturday.
District officials have said the city will remain open for business, but some offices took extra security steps.
One large D.C. law office notified workers they could use vacation time to take the day off. Property managers for an office building in the 1800 block of L Street NW said they would permit access only to those with a pass card. And the Smithsonian Institution's Renwick Gallery on Pennsylvania Avenue NW, across from the White House, said it had been ordered by the Secret Service to close tomorrow through Sunday and had moved Renwick events to other Smithsonian buildings.
Many downtown businesses urged employees to take Metro and allow extra commuting time, or allowed workers to take time off or to work from home. Police also are continuing to advise commuters to take public transportation into the District tomorrow and suggested that those who live and work in the immediate area of the IMF and World Bank secure construction sites, reschedule deliveries and remove garbage cans and other street furniture. The "Party Animals" donkey and elephant street sculptures have been removed.
D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said a fenced perimeter will be set up around the World Bank and IMF buildings after rush hour tonight, from Pennsylvania Avenue NW on the north to G Street on the south, and from 18th to 20th Street, although Ramsey said police might expand it. Police have not said how big the perimeter will be Saturday, when protesters plan to surround the IMF and World Bank offices.
Many plans for anti-globalization demonstrations were still being hammered out last night, and meetings will continue tonight. Organizers said they are nonviolent and contend that law enforcement officials had misrepresented their intentions. Protesters said they expected thousands at two separately organized demonstrations tomorrow and Saturday, but they were unwilling to predict how many will participate. Police said they expected as many as 20,000 protesters but said they had little means of projecting the numbers.
Within protest networks connected nationwide by e-mail, cell phones and the Internet, activists said months of organizing promised the biggest demonstration in Washington against the IMF and World Bank since April 2000, when about 20,000 flooded the city for protests that ended in mass arrests and complaints of unconstitutional police tactics. Some protesters said they hope the demonstrations will help rejuvenate the anti-globalization movement, whose members postponed demonstrations in Washington last year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks prompted the cancellation of the annual meetings.
This year, offers and requests for rides to the District have been posted on activist Web sites from points from Boston to Seattle. And they have attracted an assortment of activists. Those included Will Sanders, 19, a North Port, Fla., college student heading to Washington in a rented van with 11 others, who said he expected to arrive late tomorrow.
Eric Larson, 25, a graduate student at Brown University who lives in Providence, R.I., planned to catch a ride with activists from Boston. "I'm one of a growing number of people in the academic community who are frustrated over the enormous divide between academia and politics and society," said Larson, who also plans to be in the District tomorrow evening. "There's a whole bunch of different caste systems in the world today, where people in different situations have only a very small chance of ever escaping the desperation in which they live."
Aaron Sandland, who lives in Lake Pleasant, Mass., and attends Greenfield Community College, said he and four others will leave Boston about 5 p.m. tomorrow. Where would they sleep? "We really don't know," said Sandland, 19. "Anybody who can't survive a couple of nights in a car or a tent really shouldn't be doing this."
Housing accommodations are just as improvised for others. An organizer for one protest group said about 300 protesters would find room in beds, cots and sleeping bags in churches. Jubilee USA Network, a group advocating debt relief for poor nations, reserved 150 rooms at various hostels more than a month ago. "People are trying to stay with friends or else trying to find church basements that are opening up and letting people stay on the floor with sleeping bags," said Jubilee activist Jonas Bunte.
The D.C.-based coalition responsible for coordinating demonstrations two years ago, the Mobilization for Global Justice, plans a rally and march Saturday, aimed at seeking reform of the IMF and World Bank. Mobilization members said that they have a permit to gather at noon at the Sylvan Theater on the Washington Monument grounds and that they plan to march north to either McPherson or Farragut square.
About 4 p.m., activists said, they will try to surround the security perimeter as part of a symbolic, unpermitted quarantine that protesters said is meant to keep delegates inside the compound so they could not spread corporate greed outside. Plans include preventing finance ministers and others attending the meetings from leaving. Protesters will confront delegates "in a creative, dignified and nonviolent way," said Patrick Reinsborough, 30, an organizer with Mobilization. "We definitely intend to hold them into their meeting spaces until they've acknowledged the truth about how their policies have gone awry."
Tomorrow, though, is the day when authorities expect the most trouble. A group of anti-capitalist and anarchist activists plans a "People's Strike," issuing calls to shut down the city by blocking downtown intersections, slowing traffic on the Capital Beltway and targeting corporate and government offices for small-scale protests. The group, the Anti-Capitalist Convergence, said the action was against capitalism, which activists said twists the priorities of government and corporations by placing profits above people's welfare.
"No longer should one's survival and access to human needs be determined by one's economic means," said Andrew Willis, 19, an American University sophomore and ACC organizer, speaking at a news conference outside D.C. General Hospital yesterday. Two unpermitted marches -- one for protesters on bicycles, the other for those on foot -- are scheduled to begin early tomorrow at Union Station and Franklin Square. Other actions are to be coordinated by individual affinity groups, which are "using whatever tactics they're comfortable with," Willis said.
Willis and other ACC organizers said nonviolent civil disobedience is planned, in the tradition of the civil rights movement. Organizers said the ACC neither condones nor condemns property destruction.
Staff writers Monte Reel and Debbi Wilgoren contributed to this report.
Protests
