New Brunswick, NJ – “Yes to peace! No to war!” rang out in Arabic over the campus of Rutgers University as more than a thousand students walked out of classes on March 27 to protest five years of the occupation of Iraq. The walkout came a week after over 90 SDS chapters and progressive student organizations held demonstrations denouncing five years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

The chant was led by student leader Sumia Ibrahim. In a speech strongly supportive of Iraq she told the crowd that in 1991, when what she called the war against Iraq started, Iraq had a really good educational system. Now bullets are piercing classrooms forcing students to duck, a symbol of national destruction.

She spoke of the more than one million Iraqis killed in the war, more than four million displaced from their homes and one third of Iraqi children who suffer from malnutrition. The crowd chanted thunderously with her, “Iraq for Iraqis! Troops out now!”

Tiffany Cheng from Rutgers Against War said the students had jumped through hoops to get information about university investments in companies like Exxon Mobil, Raytheon and Halliburton. She raised the demand that all information of this kind be made freely available to the public and called for divestment. She pointed out that a vibrant divestment movement against South African companies in the 1980s had contributed to the end of apartheid. She quoted Frederick Douglas’s statement, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will!”

Erik Straub, one of the organizers of the rally, said the crowd were not just people who knew enough to oppose the war, they knew enough to walk out in protest. He said that evil is organized; it has billions of dollars at its disposal and means to use its money. He called for systematic political organizing to build people’s power.

Chemistry professor Larry Romsted, who is also a member of the People’s Organization for Progress, told the rally about anti-war actions in Washington D.C. the week before. Recalling the Vietnam War, he said Nixon had pledged to end the war in 1968 but it went on many years more. “I would like this to end a lot sooner,” he said, and urged students to be creative in finding many different things to do to end the war.

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Last week, students at over 90 campuses responded to a call from chapters of Students for a Democratic Society and organized protests to mark five years of U.S. occupation of Iraq. Across the United States, high schools and universities became sites of demonstrations and dissent against the war. Classes were interrupted as marchers chanted slogans and urged their classmates to join them. The demonstration at Rutgers will be continuation of this wave of protests.

Last year on March 20, over 500 Rutgers students walked out from their daily routines in protest of the occupation of Iraq, marched through downtown New Brunswick and on to Route 18, temporarily shutting down the major highway. Named the biggest action on the east coast on the anniversary of the war last year, organizers for this year’s Walkout Against the War expect an even larger, more spirited demonstration. Already more than a thousand students have indicated to organizers that they will participate.

“Education is only meaningful if it translates into action,” remarked Hoda Mitwally who plans to attend the rally. “Students feel that if we take what we’re learning seriously, we have an obligation to speak out. These are our peers that are dying in this war. Just recently, 91 Rutgers-Newark students were recalled to active duty from reservist status in the National Guard. They will be in our thoughts on March 27.”

Adriel Bernal, a Walkout Coalition organizer agrees: “The Walkout shows that for one day we’re willing to disrupt our everyday lives to show that there will be no business as usual until all the troops come home.”

“I think it’s great that they’re protesting,” says Rutgers student Rafay Siddiqui, an Iraq War veteran and member of Iraq Veterans Against the War who recently testified in the Winter Soldier Hearings. “A lot of Marines I know have serious doubts about why they’re in Iraq. Most of them just want to be home with their families.”

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