March to start in Oakland

The Oakland portion of Fifth Avenue will be the starting point for several protests Friday,… The Oakland portion of Fifth Avenue will be the starting point for several protests Friday, including one march that will take a few thousand people and their musical instruments and giant politically charged puppets Downtown.

Members of the Thomas Merton Center, a local anti-war group, and the Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance Project will meet at Fifth and Craft avenues at noon tomorrow and walk to the City-County Building Downtown to protest the G-20.

Jessica Benner, a Pitt graduate student and member of the Thomas Merton Center’s Anti-War Committee, said she thinks the G-20’s intentions are destructive and exploitative.

“The G-20 is undemocratic,” Benner said. “The G-20 is unchartered. They have no transparency. They exist because they want to exist.”

The G-20 leaders represent two-thirds of the world’s population and 80 percent of its trade.

Pete Shell, another member of the Anti-War Committee, said he thinks the G-20’s secretive nature and lack of a published agenda contradict this statement.

He said the center’s demonstration, called the People’s March to the G-20, is a cry against global injustice.

The Center identifies itself as a group of “people from diverse philosophies and faiths who find common ground in the nonviolent struggle to bring about a more peaceful and just world.”

Reflecting this philosophy, Shell said he and the committee have worked to reduce the chances of confrontations during the People’s March. This task challenged the committee with a tangle of negotiations on all sides.

To avoid any confrontation with the police, Shell said the Center has been training “peace marshals” for the last month. Shell said these marshalls are trained to “keep our marchers calm and remind them that it’s a peaceful protest.”

The march had been scheduled to end at the edge of the Secret Service’s restricted-access zone. This would put protesters a few blocks away from the David Lawrence Convention Center Downtown.

Benner said the movement has a plethora of causes for which to march. 

With 70 organizations endorsing the march, according to a count on the event’s website Wednesday morning, causes include peace, economic justice, gender equality and health care.

“There are so many issues,” Benner said. “But we all fight for smaller pieces of a bigger puzzle.”

Shell said these issues are interrelated.

People from as far as Honduras, Zambia and Tibet will speak, Benner said. Like the protesters, speakers will represent a wide range of groups including feminists, steelworkers and American Indians.