War Protesters Keep Their Powder Dry

By IRVIN MOLOTSKY

WASHINGTON -- In the debate over NATO's bombing of Serbia, the voice of the American anti-war movement has not been heard to any great degree. Once it was so loud that it helped end the Vietnam War.

But it may be heard soon if the war widens. Many protests so far have included mostly Serbian-Americans.

"It took the commencement of the bombing to jar me into opposing it," said Tom Hayden, an anti-war leader in the 1960s and '70s who now is a state senator in California.

Hayden drew a parallel between the engagement in Vietnam and that in Yugoslavia, saying the United States was "in the shadow of a prolonged and divisive and bloody war in a place no one had heard of -- in one case Vietnam and in the other Kosovo."

Hayden said more protests would occur if the bombing continued and ground troops were sent in.

"The predictable sources of dissent are in the coalition" supporting President Clinton, he said. "It's a liberal war, a Democratic Party war. People don't want to go against their own president." Another reason is the lack of a draft, Hayden said. And then there is Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. "Nobody likes Milosevic, making it initially difficult to get worked up about it," he said.

Some in the anti-war movement like Jane Sammon, an editor for The Catholic Worker, say it is too soon to draw parallels with Vietnam. "Are you saying that a month into the Vietnam war that a reporter from The New York Times was asking where the protests were?" she said. "I don't think that, in the beginning of Vietnam, that most people were jaded enough to think that America could violate international law."

Joanne Sheehan, the New England coordinator of the War Resisters League and chairwoman of War Resisters International in London, said the Internet and e-mail enabled the movement against the bombing in Serbia to grow faster than it did in the days of Vietnam.

Christopher Ney, disarmament coordinator at the War Resisters League national headquarters in New York City, said, "There have been a lot of protests by different groups." A rally in New York at Washington Square Park, he said, demanded "an end to the bombing, no ground troops and an end to the expulsion of Kosovars." The International Action Center is planning a march in Washington from the Vietnam War Memorial to the Pentagon on June 5.

"The person that I talk to in the street is just overwhelmed," Ms. Sheehan said. "As activists, we're overloaded."