Anger over war in Iraq has thousands on march

Anger over war in Iraq has thousands on march
By Emma Graves Fitzsimmons and Nancy Ryan, Tribune staff reporters. Tribune staff reporter Mary Owen contributed to this report
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
Published March 21, 2007



Alex Enriquez, an office manager from Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood, said he isn't the type who usually takes part in political rallies.

But the war in Iraq has upset him so much that Enriquez, 38, said he decided he had to participate when he heard about Tuesday's anti-war protest downtown.

"You can't just stand idle," said Enriquez, who was among several thousand people who marched along Michigan Avenue and Clark Street on Tuesday evening to a rally at the Daley Center. "We have to start bringing [the troops] home. There's no progress. The people in Iraq are less safe now."

Similar frustrations were expressed by other protesters, who came armed with their own reasons for attending the march and rally, ranging from disgust with the loss of American lives to concern for the country's image abroad.

For Batu Shakari, a registered nurse at Stroger Hospital, ending the Iraq war would mean freeing up billions of dollars for health care and other vexing problems on the domestic front.

"We know that the war has an impact on the funding of services at home for Americans," Shakari said while speaking to a crowd that gathered before the march at Ogden School, 24 W. Walton St.

"The president can find $2 billion a week to fight an unjust and unpopular war. But he can't find money for health care. There's something wrong with that," he said.

An alliance of more than 100 groups called the M20 Coalition--named after the date, March 20, 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq--organized the rally and march, which drew between 3,500 and 4,000 people, Chicago Police Supt. Philip Cline said. Dozens of police officers in riot gear lined the parade route, but the crowd remained peaceful, with no reports of arrests or other problems, Cline said.

John Volkening, an organizer with the M20 Coalition, said he believed the size of the crowd was closer to 5,000.

The protest began with a gathering of about 600 at a pre-march rally in Ogden School and quickly multiplied as it wound its way along Oak Street to Michigan Avenue. The crowd flowed south across the Chicago River to Wacker Drive and turned west to Clark before ending at the Daley Center for a rally. The march came a day after similar anti-war protests were held across the nation Monday on the fourth anniversary of the U.S. invasion.

Tuesday's crowd was at least twice as large as the gathering of 1,500 people who marched last October from Grant Park to Federal Plaza during a day of national protests in more than 100 cities called "World Can't Wait--Drive Out the Bush Regime." More than 5,000 attended a protest held just after the war started in March 2003.

On Tuesday, among those standing on the stage for the pre-march rally were four local Iraq War veterans who last month helped start a Chicago-area chapter of the Iraq Veterans Against War. The group has 12 members.

One of the founders, Aaron Hughes, 24, a Chicago artist who served in the Army in Iraq from April 2003 to July 2004, said it didn't take long for him to become disillusioned with the war.

"I believed in it at first," Hughes said. "I thought I could help people. But we didn't do that. Armies don't help people. They kill people."

Like so many of the protesters, Samantha Hamlin, 21, a junior at Columbia College, said U.S. troops should be withdrawn from Iraq now and that the Democratic-controlled Congress needs to step up efforts to pull out the troops.

"You had people pouring into the polls in the last election, not for the Democrats but against the war," Hamlin said.

No organized or spontaneous counterprotests in favor of the war were seen along the route, and many of the casual bystanders along the protest route expressed disapproval of the handling of the war.

Louis Guerrero, 53, an architect from Oak Forest, was leaving work when he stopped to watch the protesters.

"I was happy to see people out in the streets," said Guerrero, adding that he felt Americans are increasingly turning against the war.

"The statistics are coming in," he said. "They never told us about all the wounded veterans."

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efitzsimmons@tribune.com

nryan@tribune.com