Protest U.S. war in Illinois
Members of Northern Coalition for Peace at Northern
Illinois University put up a table in the Martin Luther King
Commons area to distribute leaflets and have petitions signed
against the NATO/U.S. war in Yugoslavia on April 29. Student
coalition members enthusiastically handed out stickers saying
"Stop the Bombing" and engaged passersby in discussions about
their views on the war. One young man who stopped to talk was
a military reservist and the head of the veterans organization
on campus. He expressed many reservations about the U.S.
involvement and agreed to wear the "Stop the Bombing" sticker.
Petitioners collected 64 signatures in six hours.
The coalition came into being after an ad-hoc forum on the war held April 22 drew close to 200 people. That gathering was called together by History Professor Jim Schmid. Speakers included NIU student C.J. Grimes, Carl Nyberg from Illinois Peace Action, Dr. Bruce Field from NIU College of Education, and Dr. John Maher.
The group maintains an on-line discussion group in order to have continued talk around issues that arise. Topics that come up are: whether sending letters to Congress has any effect, mass actions vs. civil disobedience, whether to support Kosovar independence, how to relate to Serbian antiwar efforts, and why The Nation came out in support of the war.
There is ongoing talk about how to maintain the antiwar work now that the school year is ending. Many agree we should participate in the upcoming demonstration planned when [U.S. Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright will be delivering the commencement address.
Zena McFadden
DeKalb, Illinois
...and in Arizona
Over 200 protesters denounced the U.S.-NATO bombings of
Yugoslavia and Iraq before thousands of graduating students
filing into the McKale Auditorium at the University of Arizona
May 15th to hear Secretary of State Madeleine Albright address
their commencement ceremony.
Among those carrying signs were about 40 Chinese students who held enlarged photos of three Chinese journalists killed when NATO bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.
Their spokesperson, Li Duan, described the bombing as calculated and condemned it as exposing "U.S.-led NATO's disregard of international law and norms which demonstrates an ambition to dictate world politics."
Martin Taylor, spokesperson for the sponsoring Tucson Peace Action Coalition, denounced the university for awarding an honorary law degree to Secretary Albright who flaunts the U.S. and NATO's violation of international law, bombing Yugoslavia and Iraq and using illegal weapons of mass destruction, including depleted uranium.
Meanwhile, I've noticed that the Communist Party, Worker's World Party, and many liberals are claiming that the Kosova Liberation Army is organized by the CIA. I am enclosing a quote from a local group, Pueblo Por La Paz.
"The US and allies supported extreme anti-Serb ethnic separatists in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo well before the civil war. The NYT reported that Albanian paramilitaries were attacking minority Serbs in Kosovo in 1987. Just as for the US client regimes of Tudjman on Croatia and Izetgebovic in Bosnia, the central plank of the KLA is an ethnically pure, Serb-free Greater Albania including Kosovo. Evidence is mounting that the KLA is a CIA creation, like the contras in Nicaragua. The KLA are major heroin smugglers into Europe (Michel Chossudovsky). US special forces are training the KLA, and some `KLA units' are actually US, German and Islamic mercenaries doing sabotage and directing bombing inside Kosovo."
It would be a help if Argiris [Malapanis] could explain the background to these allegations.
Betsy McDonald
Tuscon, Arizona