Campuses divided as anti-war lobby grows

Peace Campaigners

It may be premature to call it a fully fledged anti-war movement, but voices are being raised across the United States, and elsewhere, urging George Bush and his military to show restraint in punishing those responsible for attacks on the World Trade Centre.

In scenes reminiscent of the peace protests during the Vietnam war, thousands of students rallied on more than a hundred US campuses on Thursday, the first of many more gatherings planned. Some of the protests drew counter-demonstrations demanding military retribution.

Some of the energy that has driven the anti-capitalist demonstrations at recent world trade and financial meetings is almost certain now to be redirected into the anti-war effort.

A peace protesters' gathering has been called for 30 September, in Washington DC. Many activists had been planning on that day to go to the city for a meeting of the World Bank – now cancelled.

Kit Bonson, a director of the Washington Peace Centre, which is planning the event, said: "I think there'll be a surprisingly large peace response to this crisis. I don't think the Bush administration understands that yet."

Mr Bonson, who said arrangements for the event would be finalised this weekend, echoed the feelings of many of the students who demonstrated on Thursday, when he added: "Violence begets violence and there are alternatives to open-ended war against an unidentified enemy."

Meanwhile, a coalition of business, religious and entertainment leaders has formed to denounce any military response to the atrocities. Those who have signed a document urging caution include the actor Martin Sheen and the civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks. The group says military action will "spark a cycle of escalating violence, the loss of innocent lives and new acts of terrorism".

A statement from the group, which also includes Harry Belafonte, the actor Danny Glover and the co-founders of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, added: "The carnage of terror knows no borders. Our best chance for preventing such devastating acts of terror is to act decisively and co-operatively as part of a community of nations within the framework of international law."

The forum for such co-operation would be the United Nations. But so far the UN has been sidelined by the US, the group says. Ted Turner, the UN's most generous private benefactor, used an appearance at its headquarters on Wednesday to join those expressing concern. He warned Washington not to "indiscriminately start bombing countries". And he added: "I think that since we have had terrorism for more than 30 years in both Israel and Ireland, just by killing people, we have got to be awfully careful we don't hurt innocent people".

But just as recent polls have shown 90 per cent support among Americans for military action, there is no shortage of pro-war sentiment among the students, too. Some campuses in the US are showing signs of deep division. At Harvard, for example, the debate is being conducted through scrawled messages left on sheets of brown paper taped to common room walls.

"Find those responsible, their friends and accomplices, their families and neighbours, and destroy them," The New York Times reports one student writing. Next to it was the written rejoinder: "How does this make us better than them? You don't answer evil with evil."

By far the biggest turn-out for the anti-war contingent has been at the University of California at Berkeley, which was the cradle of the peace and free-speech movements that developed in the Sixties.

About 2,000 anti-war protesters turned out to be met by a few hundred counter-demonstrators chanting "USA" and waving American flags.

Groups planning to switch, for the time being, the focus of the anti-capitalist movement to the anti-war effort, include Britain's Globalise Resistance Movement, based in London.

Guy Taylor, a spokesman, said: "We will be campaigning primarily against the war because you can't have global justice without a globe – that is the way a lot of people are seeing it. We don't see any action against Afghanistan remaining just that, it will very quickly generalise and become a much wider proposition."