Give peace a chance...

[denny]

So that was the anti-war demo...

The crowd was quite a bit younger today, with noticeably fewer morally outraged Guardian readers, or whoever all those normal people were at last months demo. This strikes me as being quite a shame, as the range of people at last month's demo gave it a lot of credibility. However, the different crowd did give the whole thing a bit more of a party atmosphere this time, especially once things reached the park and there were half a dozen jugglers, a dozen or so poi-ers (?), and quite a few people with diablos and devil sticks too.

The march was good, about 500,000 people according to one of the stewards I heard announcing stuff. The range of the slogans on placards was again interesting, with everything from lengthy analysis of UN Resolution 1441, to jokes about Tony Blair's son. There were quite a few musical groups in the march, including two samba bands and scatterings of percussionists who were great fun to march with - the crowds around them were always bouncy and lively. The whole thing went very smoothly, with less waiting around than last month, presumably due to the lower attendance.

I'd bought 3 cheap bouncy balls on the way to the meeting point, as I had a psych(ot)ic intuition that there would be juggling involved... so when we reached the park I messed about with those for long enough to look like I knew what I was doing, then started borrowing other people's much nicer toys and juggling with them instead  *grin*  I also had the astrojax with me, which got lots of attention. A couple of the poi experts fancied their chances with it and wandered off with cracked knuckles - no fine control, some people  :)

Incidentally, it turns out I can do poi-type-stuff. I'd always steered clear of trying, as it looked a bit tricky, but I got the major swirly patterns right first go. So I might have to get some of those now too  :)  Tomorrow I'm going to drag duranorak to Camden (kicking and screaming, I'm sure) and get myself some shiny dayglo balls for showing off in the daytime, for demos, outdoor raves, etc... summer is a-coming. So I hear.

Anyway, the park stuff settled down into three crowds: the main stage, with speeches etc; a group around some percussionists, including most of the jugglers/poi/etc; and a crowd around a fairly loud sound-system some guys had dragged in on a bike trailer. The percussionist lot packed up shortly before the speeches finished, and most of us that had been there drifted across to the sound-system to carry on being happy at each other.

Then the speeches finished and the crowd around the stereo got really big. One of the bright guys who'd built this bike-trailer-PA suggested to a policeman that perhaps the bike-trailer lot could assist by moving out the park and everyone else would follow - as people were currently reluctant to disperse (I'm not sure why we had to, but the police didn't seem to want us staying in Hyde Park having fun).

At this stage things went a little bit wrong. You may have seen some of this on the news, there were definitely video cameras around through most of it. I give you an eye-witness report from a distance of about two arms length from the trailer which formed the nucleus of this sequence of events...

The policeman addressed turned out to be the one in charge - which was handy. Unfortunately, he hijacked the good idea and turned it into a terrible one, by ordering his men (about two or three dozen policemen) to surround it and force it to leave. This didn't go down to well with the crowd, and this started the trouble - crowd interference with the movement, jostling and shoulder-barging, people laying down in the way, etc etc. Eventually the jostling resulted in a guy near me falling over. As his mate bent down to pick him up, the policeman that the bloke on the floor had been shouldering up against punched the second bloke in the back of the head. Oh dear.

The second bloke fell over too. The two policemen each side of the apparently unhinged one grabbed both his arms (he was trying for another punch, from the look of it) and tried to drag him back into the middle of their ranks, but a few people from the crowd had other ideas and dived in there too. Fight.

Most of the police were fairly okay, but there were the usual half a dozen who were just dying for an excuse to hit people (if you've done any 'eventful' demos in the past, you know the ones). The crowd were also mostly sensible, with people dragging the fighters out and getting them well away from it. So it did die down. Then the chanting started...

"Shame on you! Shame on you!"

Aimed at the policemen. The crowd formed up against the policemen, but not to fight... just to escort them out of the park. I kid you not, we herded them all the way to the edge. Well, it was a peace demo, and they weren't very peaceful  :)  They called in their mates with horses in the end, and there was a standoff at the edge of the park for a while, and then we dispersed. Peacefully. Grinning a bit.

I took about a hundred photos. Some of them even came out, including a nice one of the policemen all walking backwards, with hundreds of grinning demonstrators walking nonchalantly towards them en mass. I didn't take any of the fight because I was a bit busy being very involved (without hitting anyone or getting hit... I was helping drag people out / pick people up). The pics I did get will show up in a post sometime tomorrow, when I get my laptop near a network. duranorak, bless her anti-geek pop-socks, has no network. But she does have other charms... on which note, I'm off  *grin*

Comments

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Close enough for my liking, yeah.