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Jailed
Activists Just Say No to Helicopter Baloney
BY BILL LASCHER
(photo courtesy dc.indymedia.org)
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Why were six vegans served doughnuts and
baloney sandwiches? It wasn’t an April Fool’s joke, but because the
Washington, D.C. jail they were spending Monday
night at would not offer anything else. They weren’t arrested because
of their dietary habits, but because of their protest at a conference
for suppliers of Sikorsky Corporation, which manufactures Blackhawk
helicopters for the U.S. military.
In order to inform Sikorsky and the suppliers of their concerns, seniors
Sarah Bania-Dobyns, Rebecca Johnson, and Laurel Paget-Seekins junior
Jaqueline Downing, and sophomores Sarah Saunders and Kate Berrigan locked
their arms together inside pipes in the conference room at Washington’s
National Guard Memorial Building where the meeting
was being held.
The action was a statement of the students’ opposition to the $221 million
order of 30 helicopters as part of the recently-approved Plan Colombia.
A taxpayer-funded package of nearly $1.3 billion in mostly military
aid to the South American nation, Plan Colombia was passed by the U.S.
Congress last summer as an effort to help fight the drug war and these
helicopters will be given to the Colombian military. According to a
statement released by the students, three of whom have recently been
in Colombia, the aid is not welcome by the people of Colombia and the
helicopters will probably be used by the Colombian government to help
fight the country’s 40-year civil war.
“This wasn’t just Sikorsky,” Downing said. “This was a conference of
suppliers [of parts for the helicopters]. There were about 100 corporations
making money off the drug war, and war in general.”
As the executives from the suppliers were watching from outside the
room and a 100-person rally was held in front of the building as rush
hour traffic passed, Sikorsky’s vice president spent five minutes talking
to the protesters and listening to their pre-written statement. Meanwhile,
30 police squad cars complete with dogs and tape took part in the arrest.
The protesters were originally charged with unlawful entry and possession
of an instrument of crime (the lockboxes they used to attach themselves
to the pipes). By the time the protesters got out of jail and went to
court they were only charged with the first offense, on two conditions:
the first being that they take drug tests and the second that they would
not return to within a five-block radius of the protest-site. Interestingly,
the courthouse where they were arraigned and will go to trial on June
20 falls within this radius.
Although the attention garnered from the furor surrounding the arrest
was welcome — leaflets were passed out to the passing traffic outside
and members of some independent media organizations were on hand — Paget-Seekins
said that because the main goal was to confront the executives, they
were not going to change their actions just to get media attention.
However, they have received e-mails showing support of their actions
from those who heard about the protest. Moreover, a magazine entitled
Today is considering doing a feature on the six activists, who all live
together in one house.
Not only have strangers shown their support, but other members of the
Oberlin community have as well. “In my experience, my professors have
been supportive and my boss has been great,” Johnson said. She works
at the Student Union, where her boss covered her on Tuesday while she
was being arraigned in a D.C. court. Although the College as an institution
does not want to be portrayed as encouraging illegal activities, she
said, individual members of the administration have shown their support.
Kept in one cell, the six were concerned with what they felt was better
treatment than the other inmates at the jail were given. “We were treated
with a measure of respect that I feel wasn’t afforded everyone else,”
Johnson said. The protesters said that some of the other inmates in
the jail were threatened with a baseball bat.
The next step in educating about their concerns with Plan Colombia will
be made April 17 when a member of the Colombian Support Network will
speak about Plan Columbia as well as the Free Trade Area of the Americas
and its connections with the drug war.
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