By Glenn Frankel and Peter Slevin
Washington PostNovember 21, 2003
This was the day the war on terrorism truly came home to Britain. It started with two bomb blasts in a distant land targeting British institutions: a consulate and a bank. It continued with an American president, wrapped in a blanket of tight security, standing side by side with a British prime minister to denounce the attacks, while tens of thousands of vocal but orderly antiwar protesters took to the streets to denounce the two leaders. Ian Barton, a kiosk vendor on fashionable Regent Street selling newspapers with headlines reading "Britons Die in Al Qaeda Bombings," said it was no coincidence that the bombs exploded during President Bush's state visit, resulting in split-screen television shots of Bush leaving Buckingham Palace on Thursday morning while emergency crews raced to smoky scenes of damage and death in Istanbul. Barton, 34, supported the Iraq war. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, he said, was "a danger to the world" and had to be defeated. But he wondered whether the war against terrorism was winnable. "Who are you really fighting?" he asked. "That's the worry. It's an invisible army."
While Britons have died in recent terrorist assaults -- including nearly 50 in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States and 28 in bombings last year in the Indonesian resort of Bali -- the Istanbul bombs marked the first time since in the two-year-old struggle that attackers targeted British civilian facilities. Lawmakers and officials expressed shock and outrage at the killings of British and Turkish staff members. "They posed a threat to no one," Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said in the House of Commons. His counterpart, the Conservative Party foreign affairs spokesman, Michael Ancram, spoke of his "horror, revulsion and condemnation." The Rev. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, noted the "generous and warm hospitality" he received from one of the dead, Consul General Roger Short, just two days ago in Istanbul. "I cannot easily express the shock and grief that I and my family and staff are feeling," Williams told reporters.
Addressing cheering demonstrators at Trafalgar Square this evening, a British Green Party official, Caroline Lucas, put the blame for the bombings squarely on Bush and his strategic partner, Prime Minister Tony Blair. "It shows that our world is anything other than more safe today," she declared. Bush, she said, was "a war criminal who has made this world an infinitely more dangerous place." Each side of the debate paid homage to the victims of the bombings, which claimed at least 27 lives. And each saw the attacks as justification for its own stand. But beyond the politics and posturing, there was a sense of sadness and anxiety, and a fear that the world was somewhat out of control and the future uncertain. "It just seems so dangerous to be alive right now," said Phyllis Gartell, 84, a retired newspaper reporter from Yorkshire in northern England, who took a bus to London to participate in the demonstration. She confessed she was rather glad she did not have grandchildren -- "I'd be so worried about their future," she said.
The protesters had hoped to shift the focus from the Bush visit with a show of strength that would demonstrate to the two leaders -- and to the public back in the United States -- that most Britons opposed U.S. policy despite their prime minister's steadfast support for the president. They massed near Euston railway station in north London, then snaked their way south to the River Thames in a route negotiated beforehand with Scotland Yard officials. Hundreds of policemen lined the streets, seeking to ensure that the protesters stayed to the script. The demonstrators chanted, blew whistles and sang, waving placards that read: "Bush Is a War Criminal," "Americans, Please Wake Up" and "Go Home Bush and Take Blair With You!" At Westminster Bridge, they crossed back to the north side under the gaze of Big Ben, then headed up the elegant Whitehall Street, the main artery of British power, past Downing Street. Scotland Yard officials estimated the crowd at 70,000 while demonstration leaders claimed twice that number. Either way, it was one of the biggest turnouts ever in London for a weekday protest, although considerably smaller than the crowd of an estimated 750,000 that came out to oppose the war on a Saturday afternoon last February.
Like that crowd in February, it was a varied group that reflected the fact that opposition to the Iraq war and to U.S. policy has spread from its traditional home on the political left to many in the mainstream. There were young and old, 15-year-olds in school uniforms playing hooky for the afternoon and elderly men and women navigating with canes and walking sticks. Hari Virk, 33, a lawyer from Brighton in southeastern England, took the train to London with his 2-year-old son, Roop, who nestled in his father's arms as they waited for the march to begin. Virk said that he did not normally attend demonstrations, but came so that "the American public understand that the British people don't support this war."
The march climaxed at nearby Trafalgar Square, where people listened to speakers and cheered as a papier-mí¢ché statue of Bush wielding a missile was toppled. Ian Campbell, 50, a civil servant in tweed jacket and tie who wheeled his bicycle through Leicester Square on his way home from work, said the bombings would harden attitudes, leaving those who support the use of force even more convinced that strong tactics are the only answer, while bolstering critics in their belief that the Iraq invasion was a mistake. "I don't think it will bring us together," Campbell, who did not attend the demonstration, said about the Istanbul violence. "I think it will force us apart, which is probably what it was intended to do."
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