> (en) US, Boston: Albright speech disrupted at Northeastern U graduation
>
> >From "Matthew Williams" <mw21 at mindspring.com>
> Date Mon, 19 Jun 2000 04:19:57 -0400
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> A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
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> On Saturday, June 17, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright spoke at the
> graduation ceremonies at Northeastern University in Boston and received an
> honorary degree. Outside of the building where the graduation ceremony was
> being held, about twenty five to thirty people held signs and distributed
> over 1,000 leaflets to the huge crowd of Northeastern graduates and their
> families attending the event; the leaflets detailed Albright's horrible
> human rights record, highlighting sanctions on Iraq and military aid to
> Colombia in particular. We brought one complete sound system and several
> bullhorns and got around the police's ban on using amplified sound by
> rotating between them, the users of each feigning ignorance of the orders
> the last set of people had received from the police to not use amplified
> sound. Given that it was a pretty chaotic, unstructured coalition (groups
> present included Boston Mobilization for Survival (parent group of the
> Campaign for the Iraqi People and the Boston Campus Action Network; radical
> in orientation and includes a number of anarchist members), the Colombia
> Support Network, the International Socialist Organization (one of the less
> obnoxious Leninist groups), Food Not Bombs, the Committee for Peace and
> Human Rights (progressive but really flakey), and the New England War Tax
> Resisters), this would not have been entirely unbelieveable. The police
> finally allowed us to use a bullhorn from the concrete traffic island
> dividing the road near the building, from where the large crowd waiting to
> get in could still hear us--for police, they were actually being pretty
> reasonable. Speakers emphasized that we were not there to ruin any one's
> graduation, but to challenge the US government's abominable human rights
> record as represented by Albright's actions while in office.
>
> Twelve activists from Mobilization for Survival and the Colombia Support
> Network who managed to get tickets from sympathetic people with extras went
> into the graduation ceremony. Apparently hoping to prevent the sort of
> disruptions that have happenned when she has spoken, Albright started her
> speech while about a thousand people were still waiting to get in the
> building as everyone was made to walk through a metal detector and have
> their bags searched. Her speech got disrupted anyway. Four banners were
> dropped from balconies as she spoke and received her degree. The first
> banner, displayed as she began her speech, read "Iraq sanctions = weapons of
> mass destruction"--one woman sitting next to the activists actually helped
> hold the corner of this banner. Next, a banner that read "Sanctions will
> kill fourteen Iraqi children during this commencement" was unfurled as
> Albright was finishing her speech, followed by "No Blood for Oil" as she
> received her honorary degree. The last banner, which read "Stop U.S. Guns to
> Colombia" was displayed just afterwards. Ten of the twelve activists
> inside were escorted out; no one was arrested. Three of the banners were up
> for thirty seconds or so, but one stayed up for several minutes before the
> police were able to confiscate it and eject the protesters.
>
> Security was the tightest one security guard had ever seen, even "tighter
> than [a] Clinton" visit. Two of the banners were smuggled in under womens's
> skirts (they have not yet gotten to the point where they are willing to
> strip search people to avoid embarrassing Albright); the other two were
> overlooked when the police searched bags--although one was hidden in a date
> book that the cops flipped through twice and somehow didn't notice the
> banner.
>
> The activists escorted outside were later interviewed by an Associated Press
> reporter, and speakers from the rally were broadcast live on local AM news
> radio. This action was part of a growing trend of actions, organized mainly
> by activists working against sanctions on Iraq, targeting Albright whenever
> she attempts to speak publicly, particularly at college graduations.
>
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