Please Circulate Widely
IMF, World Bank Demonstrators Subject to Widespread Police
Abuse
New Accounts Detail Gross Mistreatment in Jail and in the Streets
New reports of peaceful protesters
beaten by police and U.S. Marshals,
denied food and water and stripped of their basic constitutional
rights
give the lie to early accounts of police restraint during massive
protests against the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund
(IMF).
 Detainees have
deen denied food, water, toilets, medical
attention, and access to lawyers.
 One instance was
reported of an interrogator posing as a member
of the Midnight Special Legal Collective, the volunteer lawyers
representing the activists.
 One non-violent
protester had 3 ribs broken while he was
arrested.
 Another protester
was beaten in the face and then loaded into a
patrol wagon, leaving a pool of blood in the street. A police
official
told the drivers not to offload him at the jail but to drive him
around
for several hours, and then to drop him off near a hospital.
 At midnight on
Monday, many activists still reported being
denied food and water. Some were arrested at 4 AM, 20 hours earlier.
Rachel Weber, a recent Harvard graduate from Boston, watched as
one
woman in her cell, who has hypoglycemia, began to throw up from
lack of
food. Police denied repeated requests for food or medical assistance.
 One group of men
was taken into a basement, put into a cage,
and told by a U.S. Marshall, "There are no cameras here.
We can do
whatever we want. Anyone who looked up while the Marshall was
speaking
was punched in the face.
 Another activist
saw a U.S. Marshalls slam people,s faces into
a wall.
 Jennifer Kirby,
a housing advocate from Washington D.C., was
part of a group of activists who took over an abandoned home to
protest
unfair evictions and social service cuts in the District of Columbia.
"The police came in and dragged us out of the house. As
the police
dragged the last person out of the house, one officer was kicking
him
and saying stop attacking my foot, and then all the police slammed
him
against a wall, saying stop attacking the wall., They dragged
him into
a six-inch deep puddle and left him in it got five minutes while
they
kicked him, said Kirby.
Officers also used a variety
of abusive tactics to pit activists in Jail
against each other and to break "Jail Solidarity, cooperation
between
activists designed to ensure fair treatment by police.
 Black Echo a spectator
at the arraignment of several hundred
activists, heard the presiding commissioner Ringelle imply that
if
activists did not cooperate he would place them with the general
jail
population, where they they would be raped. "He told us
For a day or a
week or a month [Jail] is not a pleasant place. People get sodomized.
The inmates run the D.C. Prison. In the prison, the weak are
preyed
upon, said Black Echo.
 Another group of
activists was also threatened with
incarceration with the general population, and told "they
love to kill
white boys over there, you pussy-faggot protesters.
 Detainees are taken
into solitary confinement and lied to, told
that they are the last ones in jail, that they won,t be released
before
their court date in July, that they have no rights.
The Midnight Special Law Collective
is asking all concerned to call as
many of the following numbers to help them in their efforts to
gain
justice for the remaining 200 IMF/WB detainees. Giving no names,
express concern that detainees are being abused, and demand their
immediate release.
All area codes are 202.
DC Mayors office: 727-2980
DC Chief of Staff: 727-2643
DC Public Advocate: 673-4421
Dept. of Correction: 673-7316
DC Chief Judge: 879-2770
DC Executive Officer Ulysses Hammond: 879-1700
Police Academy: 645-0055 (detainees held here)
Central Holding: 727-2894
1st Dist. Substation: 727-4655
Superior Court Chief Judge Eugene Hamilton: 879-1600
Clerk of the Court: 879-1401
US Atty. For DC: 514-2000 (insist on an investigation and
prosecution on
abuses, civil rights violations, and homophobia)
Cell Blocks B & C: 727-2392
--
Antonia Juhasz
Director, International Trade and Forest Programs
American Lands Alliance
726 7th Street, SE
Washington, DC 20003
phone: 202-547-9230
fax: 202-546-9213
antonia@americanlands.org
http://www.americanlands.org
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