a conversation with Kim Feicke

 

 

A month and a half before the end of the century, our side put on one hell of a protest. Who could forget the images of the events surrounding the World Trade Organization in Seattle? Tens-of-thousands of non-violent protesters came together to, among other things, link arms in a unified effort of drawing world-wide attention to a secretive organization that they believe puts trade above the environment, food safety, animal protection and human welfare. And draw attention they did. Not only did the WTO receive some scrutiny -- even though that was often ignored in favor of sensationalism by the media -- but we also saw a true police-state in the democratic and civil rights-loving U.S.A. We saw the police dressed in full Robocop regalia, doing little to maintain the peace, but in fact exacerbating tensions with their violent and seemingly irrational overreaction. We saw non-violent protesters kicked, hit with batons, sprayed in the face with pepper spray and shot at with rubber bullets. We saw a world transfixed by these events.

Kim Feicke is a long-time activist, reformer and educator. She went to Seattle from Chicago a month before the WTO meeting to help organize and get things ready for the event. The interview with Kim shows the commitment, passion, organization and thoughtfulness necessary to put together a very successful protest. There's a lot that we can learn from how things were handled in Seattle, from media savviness to activist training, and I hope we do learn from their example. This interview is jam-packed with great information and insights. Thanks Kim!

"There will be court cases going on for years about what happened in Seattle, but that doesn't change what the police did and how they impacted the protest. They fully realized that it's much easier to confiscate the stuff and deal with the court cases later."

Vegan Street's Marla Rose: My first question to you is why did you personally feel that it was necessary to protest the WTO? Were there any issues specifically that you wanted to raise?

Kim Feicke: Basically the reason I went out there was the autonomy and democracy in decision-making that we seem to be losing in this country. Nations that have joined the WTO have given away our democracy and decision-making rights. There were a lot of different issues, which you saw. There were many different groups protesting a specific issue, but they all fall under a basic umbrella of us losing our autonomy.

MR: A rallying cry seemed to be big business and big government taking precedence over human welfare and environmental protection.

KF: That's right; profits over people.

MR: What was your role with the protest? Were you with an organization? What was your job there?

KF: I was with the Direct Action Network (DAN)(add link), which was a coalition of several different organizations, mostly activist and environmental groups. DAN was created specifically for the WTO in Seattle, and it was planned to dissolve after the protest, but it's going to continue. There's still a lot of follow-up going on in Seattle right now: the legal teams are still working full-time out there; media is still doing work.

MR: How did you become involved with DAN?

KF: I got involved through a series of connections. I work with Art & Revolution in Chicago, which is a group of activists, educators and artists working with non-profit organizations to help them put creativity into the work that they do. So we get together with them, do brainstorming around their issues, perhaps a specific action that they're organizing. We help them come up with creative visual and artistic images to help them get their message across. There are Art & Revolution groups all over the country and a lot of them are on the West Coast. They were all working as a part of the DAN coalition.

MR: You could definitely see their influence just on how everything looked. There was a lot more attention to the visual aspects of protesting, with the massive puppets and other sorts of attention-grabbing stimuli.

KF: Well unfortunately, about half of our puppets got confiscated before the first protest.

MR: How did that happen?

KF: When the folks were setting up for the procession on Tuesday morning, the police just started confiscating.

MR: One thing that you're probably well aware of is that the police don't really have to give you a reason behind why they're doing what they're doing.

KF: (laughing) No. They're police. There will be court cases going on for years about what happened in Seattle, but that doesn't change what they did and how they impacted the protest. They fully realized that it's much easier to confiscate the stuff and deal with the court cases later.

MR: It's kind of similar to arresting now and asking questions later, or arresting without any intention of prosecuting, just to get people away from the scene.

KF: Exactly, just to get them off the streets.

MR: What was your role with DAN and what were some of the different roles that people filled there?

KF: I did security with a friend of mine for the spaces we were in. I also helped to pull the media team together.

MR: It must have been quite complex logistically, just dealing with this huge influx of people. You knew that it was going to be a huge group of people quite early on, didn't you?

KF: We did. We had no idea quite how big it was going to be, but we knew that it would be big.

MR: Were you prepared for the influx into Seattle?

KF: We were as prepared as we could be with the amount of time that we had, and the amount of people that we had working on it.

MR: I know that you went down to Seattle like a month in advance. Did you work pretty much the whole time that you were there?

KF: (laughing) Yeah. I got to sleep once in a while, but not very often.

MR: I understand that during the protest you were also working at a station of some sort?

KF: Well, like I said, I was working on security for the spaces, and one of the spaces was where we had the convergence and did 10 days of workshops and puppet building and training before the demonstrations started. We also had a clinic there, and there was a team there handling a lot of the medical that was going on.

We did a lot of things in our space. We built our puppets and did music and singing and street theater workshops -- we did the whole creative end of it, which I think was very important for what happened. We also did a lot of non-violent civil disobedience training, legal and jail solidarity training, first aid, and trainings on blockades, and techniques for banner hangs and such.

MR: A sort of all-purpose preparation for activists.

KF: Yes, preparing people for what was to come. And there were a lot of mini-workshops that happened too, around media and that sort of thing. One of the things that DAN organized itself around was the principle of non-violence, and we knew from the beginning that it was the cops who were going to be violent. Which made it even more necessary for us to prepare people for that and to get that message out in the media from the get-go.

MR: One of the things that impressed me was how media savvy the protesters and organizers seemed to be and it just flew in the face of expectations of how protesters behave and in general the way events like this have gone. What do you attribute that savviness to?

"One of the things that Direct Action Network organized itself around was the principle of non-violence, and we knew from the beginning that it was the cops who were going to be violent. Which made it even more necessary for us to prepare people for that and to get that message out in the media from the get-go"

KF: Experience. As activists, we've all had bad media experiences, so we've learned over the years.

MR: But with that many people participating, there must have been people who wanted to approach things in a different way.

KF: Well, a part of it was also that this experience was a little different than most of us activists had ever faced. The media was there, and they were calling us and begging us for stories. They were just all over us.

MR: You didn't have to court them like you normally would.

KF: Exactly. They were right there. The fact that we were so organized surprised them. And also the independent media center was crucial.

MR: That was in operation 24-hours a day, wasn't it?

KF: Yeah. And the DAN had a desk within which they did their media.

MR: Can you talk a little about the legal and prison solidarity?

KF: Yes. The lawyers did trainings with hundreds of people before the event. When people were arrested, they had left their i.d.s behind when they went out in the street. So they went into the jails refusing to identify themselves and refusing to cooperate with the process in order to slow down the process and back it up, and create chaos from within the system, and create room for demands to be made. We had a list of demands that people were making from the inside around the types of charges that people would receive or the fact that people should receive no charges and should just be released. Part of the solidarity also included any of the international people who got arrested; we wanted to make sure that anyone that got arrested for protesting the WTO was not going to get left behind in jail and have difficulties with future visa issues. We ended up having 95% solidarity within the jail, which is incredible with that many people.

MR: I understand that the police used some pretty nasty methods for trying to extract information from people.

KF: It was very brutal. People were beaten up. People who were trying to organize within the jail got put into solitary confinement. They also refused to let people see their lawyers.

MR: When did that end?

KF: On Thursday we had a solidarity rally outside of the jail, and we said that we were going to stay there until something got taken care of. As a result of the rally, which attracted a lot of media attention, we had a meeting with the mayor, and negotiated through him with the jail administrator to let the lawyers in.

MR: Going into Seattle, what were your expectations for what would happen? I know we try not to have many expectations in these situations, but you generally have something loose in your mind for how you think things will transpire. Were your expectations met at all with what you encountered?

KF: I think that the greatest expectation I had was that we were going to be able to get out through the media word of what the WTO was doing and be able to get more education out into the American public just exactly what the WTO was, and what it was doing, and how it was affecting our everyday lives. That was my goal, and I think we definitely reached that goal. Did I realistically think that we were going to shut down the WTO that first day and stop their meetings? No. So that was a pretty powerful feeling. I think that the largest thing that's come out of this is there's a whole new generation of activists who've been radicalized by this event and really empowered by what they saw. They were in the streets and they took action and it had an impact.

MR: Even for those not there, though, just watching it on the news, if it didn't radicalize people, it at least made some think: What is this? Why is this happening? Why are they protesting? Also, just putting the words World Trade Organization out there into mainstream culture, lifting the veil that surrounds it, is very positive.

KF: One thing that's clear is that the activism in Seattle was not spontaneous, it was not sporadic. A hell of a lot of work went into it. Not just in Seattle; a lot of what you saw was the result of groundwork that's been done for years. We're starting to see some of the results of the groundwork that we've done.

"I think that the largest thing that's come out of this is there's a whole new generation of activists who've been radicalized by this event and really empowered by what they saw"

MR: That's so exciting. Although you had all taken the oath of non-violence and that was how you pursued your activism, you were prepared for the violence from the police force. How did you prepare the activists for this?

KF: I don't know how much one can actually prepare people for that, except to acknowledge that it might happen. A lot of people had gas masks, we also physically prepared people as far as knowledge about pepper spray, and how to deal with that and the injuries the may receive from the police. As a result of that, though, the medics were targeted by the police and some of them were beaten. Medical supplies and first aid materials were confiscated. It was pretty frightening.

MR: It sounds like all along you had your health clinic, and you weren't completely broadsided by what happened. It also sounds like you just immediately went into crisis mode: okay violence occurred, this is what we need to do now.

KF: Yeah, and I think a part of that is what we do in our activism is try to create communities that we want to be a part of and live in. Health care's a big part of that.

MR: I know that groups have been working with the police for several months before the WTO meeting... What do you think it was that caused them to disregard all that training? They knew that people were going to block the entrance and that they were non-violent protesters, intending to be arrested. What made them use pepper spray, shoot rubber bullets and concussion grenades, instead of just picking up people and putting them in paddy wagons?

KF: I think that's going to be debated for years. I think there are a million different factors. One is the possibility that they were trying to cause a riot and make us look bad. There were several cases where police cornered people in the streets and didn't allow them a way out. People were panicking and trying to find a way out of the streets and they weren't allowed to by the police. What is amazing is that under all that pressure, that people stayed calm and maintained their non-violence. It shows a lot about the integrity of people who were out there.

MR: It definitely does.

KF: The first day, the police did not have a strategy of arresting people. They were trying to maintain order, they weren't going to arrest people. They adopted the strategy of violence and arrests on the second day and I think that they weren't prepared for that to some extent. The police had been through training, obviously, as to what was going to happen there. There's such a difference between going through that training and actually experiencing it on the street. Very few, if any, of the police officers had ever seen anything as large and organized as what happened in Seattle.

MR: With the non-violent activism that you were doing, it seems like the police were just befuddled by it, too.

KF: Part of it was that; part of it was that were we told by some of the representatives of the police that they considered our blocking of the streets to be violence, and violence is supposed to be met with violence.

MR: That's incredible. A lot of what we saw on the news was the image of cops being provocative. A lot of what helped people become sympathetic to you, even if they were antagonistic or neutral to begin with, is they saw what happened, and they saw the police being out of control. Also, they saw very little violence on the part of the activists.

KF: That's exactly right. There's a lot of footage of cops arguing with protesters, and they're just repeating: I'm just doing what I'm told. That was the only response they had. I don't think that they knew what they were out there for necessarily. Their goal was to open up the streets and get the WTO meeting going through any means necessary.

MR: There was a lot of media attention in the first couple of days especially, on the small group of self-described anarchists who did some property destruction. Do you have a feeling either way of whether destruction of property is destructive or helpful as far as getting one's message across? Do you consider that to be violence?

KF: I think that property damage, when it's targeted and well thought out, as it was in Seattle against the big chains like McDonald's and Starbucks, can have some merit. Of course the media is going to twist any kind of image like that.

MR: Considering that this was supposedly a group of about 30 or 40 people as opposed to the 35,000 who were protesting without any destruction, it was definitely magnified.

KF: I think it does have its place; it's a part of our movement. You can't deny that. A lot of people who were a part of the DAN, who were out there protesting non-violently, did agree with their tactics even if they didn't participate. I think that they could have done a lot better about strategizing on how to deal with the media, to get their message across as to why they were doing that, why they hit the places that they did.

MR: The aftermath is largely that we saw windows broken, but we didn't really hear why.

KF: Yes. There were some people who were actually defending some of these stores, which I also think it great.

MR: I agree. I think it shows a lot of thoughtfulness and depth of consideration.

KF: And there needs to be a place in our movement where we can talk about these differences.

MR: Do you think that the media outlets positively reflected what was going on in Seattle?

KF: Well, to a large extent, I don't think that's possible because most of our media outlets are owned by large corporations and that's what we were there protesting. It's pretty hard to get a fair cut in the media. I think the fact that the police were acting the way they did was part of why we got as much media as we did, although they very quickly turned to the violence and ignored the issues.

"It's a privileged position to be able to go out in the streets and risk being arrested. We had a lot of cases in Seattle where homeless folks just got picked up off the streets with us and were not a part of it, but they just got swept away and treated horribly. That's an issue that we have to deal with"

MR: Are you concerned at all about a backlash against the activists, because that seems to be a nearly inevitable process here in the U.S.

KF: Yeah. We're already seeing that in Chicago, actually. The Anti-Racist Action had a neighborhood leafleting a couple weeks ago and 20 of them got arrested -

MR: Intentionally?

KF: No, not intentionally. The police went out of their way to round these people up and arrest them, and, in fact, there were some folks that were on the fringes who were waiting blocks away for these guys to finish leafleting, and the police went and found them, and arrested them as well. The interesting part of it was as they processed these people through the system, I was told that the FBI contacted the police station there and asked for the names of all the arrestees so they could compare it with their list from Seattle. None of those people had been anywhere near Seattle. In effect, it alerted these cops to the connection that there are all these scary activists out there who are all networked and working together. They are working to instill fear, which is what we saw in Seattle. They had worked very hard to instill fear in the Seattle cops as to what we were capable of, and what we were going to do, regardless of how much we put out that we were non-violent.

MR: It seems like the cops had ample warning that things were maybe not going to go as smoothly as they'd hoped.

KF: They knew exactly what we were going to do, and like I said earlier, all of our decisions were made through consensus. Where we were going to blockade, how we were going to blockade, where our processions were going to start, all of that happened in open meetings.

MR: What kind of information did you share with the police?

KF: Well, they knew where our starting points were, they knew what our procession routes were, and they knew that we were planning on blockading. We had hundreds of people at our meetings, so I'm sure they knew about everything. That became part of our strength, the fact that we made all of our decisions by consensus, and that they were all activated in a decentralized manner, because everyone had all of the information, so the police couldn't just tag 5 or 6 people as leaders and arrest them and have the whole thing be over with.

MR: It was dispersed among thousands of people.

KF: Everyone was empowered to make their own decisions.

MR: Is there anything that you wish you would have known ahead of time, and if you had known, anything that you would have done differently?

KF: (laughing) I wish I'd known I was going to get as little sleep as I did. I think that there's definitely some questions that need to be asked as we continue the DAN. One of the questions that has come up in my talks with other people is the diversity of the organization. It is a mostly white group. Part of that I think was the fault of the way the DAN was organized - I don't think that there was strategy going into it on how to make it a diverse organization. I think it was an afterthought. I think there are a lot of issues around that, though. When your working with concepts like direct action, there's a lot of privilege issues there. It's a privileged position to be able to go out in the streets and risk being arrested. We had a lot of cases in Seattle where homeless folks just got picked up off the streets with us and were not a part of it, but they just got swept away and treated horribly. That's an issue that we have to deal with. We got beat up, we got out knocks in jail, but we had hundreds of people outside of the jail supporting those people, we had legal teams working non-stop.

MR: You had resources, unlike a lot of people in jail.

KF: Right. Also, when you talk about food issues, we do a lot of work fighting for organic foods. Well, who gets to buy those foods?

MR: Again, it can become an issue of privilege. But part of strengthening the organic industry is making it more affordable. The food issues are really, really vital, because when you go into impoverished neighborhoods, look at the choices available.

KF: Yeah. At the neighborhood I was teaching in [editor's note: Kim taught pre-kindergarten for ten years], I quickly saw what an issue nutrition was. So I thought: What can I do? Maybe I could do some classes to teach parents how to cook good food. But then I looked around and you know what? There's no grocery store in the neighborhood that carries fresh produce at all. All they had in that neighborhood was convenience stores, and that's all there was. So what good would it be for me to teach nutrition when there's no access to this healthy food?

MR: Also, you can run the risk of coming off as this privileged white woman coming in to civilize these poor ignorant people, which is a bad dynamic.

KF: It's a really complicated issue, and it's something that we are going to have to look at a lot as we continue this work or else were going to find a lot of these health issues divided along class lines. We need to work to stop that.

MR: I've got one last question for you before the tape runs out: Do you think that the WTO protests have lit a fire under the American consciousness, and do you think it will help promote activism?

KF: I think it's inspired and motivated a whole group of people who've been on the borderline. I think it's pushed some people over the edge, and it's going to turn a lot of people into activists and it's radicalized people in that way. To see the power that we had in the streets, and the fact that we made something happen. We succeeded in what we set out to do. It was very powerful. I think it's going to bring some level of education to folks who hadn't paid any attention or had no idea about globalization.

MR: Thanks a lot, Kim.

KF: Thank you.

 

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