Boulder anti-war protesters run into heavily armed police on eve of DNC

by The Boulder Daily Camera (Colorado)

DENVER - If anything can be said about the members of CODEPINK, it’s that they are a restless lot.

Not satisfied with chanting anti-war slogans from a stationary position in front of Denver’s Union Station Sunday afternoon, the 200 or so adherents of the women-led peace advocacy group moved their message to the 16th Street Mall — and straight into a phalanx of helmeted, masked, and truncheon-toting police officers.

The CODEPINK marchers, which included a lively contingent from Boulder County, immediately went into a mass freeze with finger-formed peace signs above their heads as they faced off with stoic officers between Lawrence and Larimer streets.

When they realized they could proceed no further down the busy thoroughfare, the protesters broke out into a pacifist sing-song.

“One, two, three, four, peace is what we’re marching for,” they intoned. “Hey, pay attention, this should be a peace convention.”

Anne Marie Pois, of Boulder, expressed disappointment at the “over-militarized” law enforcement response to CODEPINK’s peace parade, which was halted because participants were congregating in the road rather than the sidewalk.

“I guess it’s their first day doingthis,” she said of the black-garbed officers weighed down with weaponry, hanging off roving SUVs, and perched atop horses masked against potential airborne crowd control chemicals.

As her colleagues drifted back to Union Station, so concluded one of the first of many protests to come at the Democratic National Convention, which officially starts today and runs through Thursday night.

Anne Toepel, 41, helped form the Boulder/Denver CODEPINK chapter a few months ago and was one of the people orchestrating Sunday’s procession. She also said the police response was “overdone.”

“We are completely practitioners of non-violence,” she said of the group, whose name is a play on the Bush administration’s color-coded national security alert system.

Toepel, a single mother from Boulder who teaches at Whittier Elementary School, will be busy with other activist commitments the rest of the week - all of them outside the official venues of the Democratic Party.

She said she is feeling only “lukewarm to hopeful” about the impending nomination of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama as the party’s presidential candidate.

“I’m not in the Obama bubble,” said Toepel, an early supporter of liberal presidential contender Dennis Kucinich. “We have to push him on the war. But our government is so corrupt, there is so much pressure for him to buckle.”

Deidre Johnston, a Boulderite since 1982, expressed the same lack of confidence in Obama’s ability to quickly end the war in Iraq. She, too, rooted for a Kucinich victory in the primary.

“Obama’s a much better choice than (Republican presidential candidate) John McCain, but I’m very concerned that he wants to go into places like Afghanistan and Pakistan in a war-like way,” she said, as her 10-year-old son stood nearby.

Johnston, 44, said the Democratic Party should work harder at including all the disparate elements within its constituency rather than moving the majority of the party toward the political center.

“I wish we had more of a seat at the table and were allowed inside the zone without being put in a cage,” Johnston said, referring to the fenced-off protest area located outside the Pepsi Center. “I would like to see the Democratic Party stand up for the policies it said it would stand up for.”