Activists from across New England converged on Copley Square on Saturday to protest U.S. involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the demonstration culminating in an organized march through downtown Boston.
The anti-war rally drew approximately 1,000 participants, according to rally organizer and Tufts graduate student Rebecca Batorsky.
Over a dozen speakers and performers rallied the crowds for more than two hours in the 40-degree weather. Among the headlining speakers was Matthis Chiroux, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who, after an honorable discharge, refused redeployment to Iraq. Chiroux currently serves as a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War.
"We're not fighting terrorists; we're fighting people," Chiroux told the crowd amassed in front of Trinity Church. "Death is not a solution to terror. We cannot kill ourselves out of this problem."
The rally came at a time when President Barack Obama is considering sending more troops to Afghanistan, a strategy similar to the 2007 troop surge in Iraq. Obama was elected in large part due to his opposition to the Iraq war, but many at the rally felt betrayed by his desire to escalate the war in Afghanistan.
Chiroux said that any U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan is bound to fail, even if the military were to follow a strategy that places greater emphasis on development over combat.
"The idea of having U.S. military personnel distribute that aid to me is pretty asinine," Chiroux told the Daily after his speech. "Make no mistake: We are a bull in the china shop. And when you get a bull inside a china shop, you don't make him fix the broken china; you get him the heck out and write a check. Right now we're trying to force the bull to fix the china."
Brendan Curran, who is studying to become a priest at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, attended the rally and expressed his anger about Obama's first nine months in office.
"I thought he was going to be a peace candidate, and he's not following through," Curran told the Daily. "I danced in the streets when he got elected. And he's not following through on the war ... He's being spineless."
Curran, who is 25 years old, was part of a minority of young people in attendance; the crowd was mostly made up of long-time peace activists.
Batorsky was disappointed by the low turnout from college-aged students. She said a similar rally held last year saw large student involvement and was surprised by the small number of youths that came out on Saturday.
"This year, I can't imagine that people's sentiments about the war have changed, but maybe they're not as forceful as they were because they're not sure what to think about Obama … They're not sure how to make their voices heard," she said.
Cynthia Snow, a retiree from Brookline, emphasized what she saw as a misallocation of government resources.
"I don't think killing people is going to solve anything," Snow told the Daily. "If you put half the resources that are going into killing people into supporting education, better health care and well-being, here and around the world, it would do a lot more good than we're doing now."
Dave Tiffany, who traveled from his home in New Hampshire for the rally, is retired but keeps busy as a full-time activist. He has held weekly vigils for four years and attends several anti-war events a week in his home state. He prides himself on being the questioner who, in January 2008, pushed Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to say that he would be willing to keep American troops in Afghanistan for 100 years, which became a contentious campaign issue.
Tiffany, like most of those at the rally, rejected the notion of "the good war," a term which Obama has used to describe U.S. military action in Afghanistan.
"I understand that we have to do something about al-Qaeda, but nation-building in Afghanistan has nothing to do with that," Tiffany said. "I don't understand why we're expending all these lives."
The one-and-a-half mile march through Boston, which included a brass band and a puppet troupe, was punctuated by chants of "Our streets, their war," and "U.S. out of the Middle East — no peace, no justice."
The march was relatively peaceful, despite several shouting matches between marchers and a man wearing a dishdasha, a traditional Arabic tunic, who was carrying a sign with the slogan, "Obama is a Jewish puppet."
