UF expert available to comment on fifth anniversary of Iraq war

March 11, 2008

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — As the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq approaches, anti-war groups are turning to tactics designed to provoke authorities to make arrests as a substitute for the kind of mass rallies they organized in the past, says a University of Florida researcher.

“The leaders of the movement want to demonstrate a stronger intensity of opposition to the war and they believe that getting arrested signals a greater commitment than simply showing up for a march,” said Michael Heaney, a UF political science professor who has studied the anti-war movement since its inception.

The strategy of staging mass rallies has not worked as well as protest leaders had hoped, Heaney said. Hundreds of thousands of people have marched on Washington, D.C., in opposition to the war, yet Congress continues to fully fund President Bush’s war requests, he said.

On March 19 in Washington, D.C., a much smaller group of protesters is expected to perform such civil disobedience acts as surrounding buildings and blocking intersections, said Heaney, who will conduct studies of the demonstrations.

As a result, anti-war leaders have scheduled their main protest for March 19, the anniversary of the actual date the war began, rather than on the closest Saturday, as they have in the past four years to attract larger numbers of working people who otherwise would have been unable to attend, Heaney said.

Heaney and Fabio Rojas, a sociology professor at Indiana University, surveyed 288 leaders and 2,087 participants of the country’s four largest anti-war rallies in 2007, three in Washington, D.C., and the fourth being a coordinated event in New York, San Francisco and Chicago. They finished their analysis this week, finding that participants were overwhelmingly white, nearly equally divided between men and women and rarely between the ages of 30 and 50.

While there has been discussion in the media of fewer minorities participating in peace group activities, the new survey results actually document the low numbers, Heaney said. Eighty percent of the rally participants were white, compared with nearly 7 percent African-American, 5 percent Hispanic and 3 percent Asian Americans. The remaining percentage did not fall into any single racial category.

There was nearly a perfect gender balance, with 51 percent females and 49 percent males, Heaney said. “That was a surprise to us since women’s groups historically have emphasized that peace is a women’s issue,” he said.

Although the average age of the participants was 41, there were actually few people around this age, Heaney said. There was a clump of people in their late teens and early 20s and another clump of people in their 50s and 60s, he said.

“This movement is both a movement of young people of a new generation involved in anti-war activity for the first time and one of a group reliving the Vietnam anti-war protests of the past,” Heaney said. Twenty-seven percent of the participants and 48 percent of the leaders said they had demonstrated against the war in Vietnam, he said.

In all, 74 percent of the people surveyed had previously participated in anti-war rallies and 26 percent reported attending their first anti-war rally, he said.

Fifty-two percent of the participants said they traveled more than 100 miles to the protest, with the average distance being 460 miles, Heaney said. “This strikes us as a fairly large commitment on the part of these people when you consider they are traveling an average distance of 460 miles one way to attend one of these events,” he said.

Michael Heaney is available for interviews about the anti-war movement and the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq.