By Elliott Minor, The Associated Press
COLUMBUS, Ga. (AP) - Organizers of an annual protest expected to draw 10,000 demonstrators to Fort Benning next weekend are energized by a recent federal court ruling that bans police searches and metal-detector checks of the protesters. However, they’re not too excited about the 8-foot-high chain-link fences recently erected near the fort’s main gates.
The temporary fences were erected by the city of Columbus and stretch for a half mile on each side of the road where protesters will gather to call for the closing of a Fort Benning school that they blame for human rights abuses and exploitation in Latin America.
Local police asked for the fencing to provide better access control than the wooden barriers they have used for years. Columbus Mayor Robert Poydasheff said the fencing is necessary because some of the demonstrators break the law by trespassing on military property. Twenty-seven protesters were arrested last year, mostly for trespassing.
“The city is doing everything it can to protect the demonstrators, the citizens in an around the area and our public safety officers,” Poydasheff said.
The Rev. Roy Bourgeois, a Catholic priest who has been leading the demonstrations since 1990, said he believes the fences were put up “out of meanness.”
“They say they’re not worried about us, they’re worried about terrorists, provocateurs, but we have a long history of nonviolence,” Bourgeois said.
Actress Susan Sarandon will join Sister Helen Prejean, author of the anti-death penalty book, “Dead Man Walking,” during the two-day protest, Nov. 20-21, Bourgeois said. Sarandon won an Oscar for her portrayal of Prejean in a movie based on the nun’s book.
The demonstration are held each November to mark the Nov. 16, 1989, slayings of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter in El Salvador. A congressional task force found that some of the soldiers responsible for the massacre had been trained at the School of Americas, which moved to Fort Benning from Panama in 1984.
The school is now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.
Army officials deny the group’s allegations and say the school is no more responsible for the actions of a few graduates than Harvard University is for one of its graduates, Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski. Human rights courses are now a mandatory part of the training.
After speeches by union and Latino activists, the demonstrators will march in a funeral procession to honor victims of human rights abuses in Latin America. Some will carry white crosses, others mock coffins, as a loudspeaker blares the names of hundreds of alleged victims.
In the past, Army officials have held news conferences during the protests, but none are planned this year, a Fort Benning spokeswoman says. Military supporters plan a simultaneous event in another part of town called, “God Bless Fort Benning.”
Resident of Columbus, a west Georgia city of about 186,000, are strong supporters of the military. Many are military retirees or civilian workers at Fort Benning. Some feel it’s discourteous to demonstrate while U.S. soldiers are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan in the war on terrorism.
It was that war that prompted the Columbus Police Department to start searching the protesters with metal detectors in 2001, following the deadly terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Bourgeois’ group, School of the Americas Watch, challenged the electronic frisks and won.
In it decision last month, a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, ruled that fear of a terrorist attack is not sufficient reason for authorities to search people at the protest.
“We cannot simply suspend or restrict civil liberties until the War on Terror is over, because the War on Terror is unlikely ever to be truly over,” Judge Gerald Tjoflat wrote for the panel. “Sept. 11, 2001, already a day of immeasurable tragedy, cannot be the day liberty perished in this country.”
Poydasheff, an attorney, called the ruling “silly,” noting that Americans already have to pass through security checks before they enter courthouses, board airplanes or attend some football games.
“Some of them come to break the law,” he said of the protesters. “They have deliberately gone over the boundary. What is wrong with doing a scan that is minimally intrusive?”
Bourgeois said the ruling affirmed the group’s right to dissent.
“It has pumped some new life into the movement. It has energized the movement,” said Bourgeois, who served as a Navy officer in Vietnam.
SOA Watch contends the basic mission of the school has not changed, even with the addition of human rights courses.
“We say you don’t teach democracy behind the barrel of a gun,” he said.