Italian Women Lead Grassroots Campaign Against US Military Base

People poured in from all over the country. The marchers, dancing, chanting, singing, laughing, encircled the picturesque city with rainbow-colored peace flags, flags saying NO to the Dal Molin Base, and the red flags of the various Communist parties. Music blasted from trucks with stereo equipment. Unlike US marches, there was plenty of alcohol: everyone seemed to have a bottle of beer or a glass of wine in hand.

It was a glorious, sunny day, and the atmosphere was festive and 100 percent peaceful. The crowd was so huge for this small town of just 120,000 residents that the march began an hour early just to alleviate the overcrowding. The lead banner, held by the women, said, “The Future is in Our Hands” and warned the politicians that the protesters would not give up. For hours, the women marched for four miles, singing and shouting chants like: “Vogliamo la terra, senza basi di guerra (We want the land, without a base for war) and “Vicenza no se usa, per una base USA” (Vicenza will not be used for a US base). The march snaked outside the walls of the old city, ending with a rally, a presentation by Nobel playwright Dario Fo, and a concert in the city park.

Silvio Berlusconi called this grand show of people power “an anti-American march” that represented a “sad day for Italy.” He obviously didn’t see the crowd’s reaction to a group of Americans who participated in the march holding a banner reading “Not in Our Name—Americans Against War.” “We could hardly move because everyone kept stopping us to applaud and take our pictures,” said Stephanie Westbrook, organizer of the Rome-based Americans for Peace and Justice. “I’ve never seen anything like it. People were hugging and kissing us, giving us flowers and glasses of wine. It was an extraordinary outpouring of love and sympathy.” As a representative from the United States, I had an opportunity to address the crowd. I was greeted with thunderous applause when I said that the march was pro-American because the American people in the last election rejected Bush’s policy of war and aggression. When I noted that the US already had 737 foreign bases and we certainly didn’t need another one, the crowd roared and joined me chanting, in English, “1,2,3,4, No More Bases, No More War.”

Gina Masi, a seventeen-year-old from Vicenza dressed in punk-style black with lots of spiked metal, came running up to me afterwards, in tears.