Carrying bloodied sheets, people dressed as ghosts wearing stilts towered above the crowd of about 300 people during a protest Thursday in Minneapolis. The protesting crowd moved a few blocks down Nicollet Mall and stopped at Orchestra Hall’s Peavey Plaza, where they demonstrated and presented a short skit.
“Stop the bombing! Stop the war! Hands off Yugoslavia!” the protesters chanted.
The demonstration, organized by a general coalition of nonprofit organizations, condemned the NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia.
“Bombing doesn’t help the situation,” said Anh Pham, one of the organizers of the event and a member of the University’s Progressive Student Organization. “It doesn’t make sense to bomb these people. Nobody asked the United States to get involved.”
PSO protests the U.S. campaigns on Iraq and Yugoslavia. They have spent every Thursday this month passing out protest fliers in Dinkytown.
Pham said she favors actively pursuing peacekeeping talks in Yugoslavia, rather than physical aggression.
It is very important for critics of government action to show up and protest, said Chris Hanson, who works in the Department of Housing and Residential Life.
“I am suspicious of the motives they gave us to say the least,” Hanson said. “The (real) motives are fairly clear: open up resources and people to U.S. capital and investment.” He said they want to set up an “investor climate.”
Hanson and Pham agreed that citizens and the media have shown too much support for the campaign.
“It really concerns me that there is not more coverage about anti-war,” Pham said.