Inside the Land Forces protest

“Here’s some good news”, I announce. I’m standing on a planter box outside the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, one of many hundreds of protesters jammed into an awkward corner between cops, horses and the giant conference venue.

Inside, a cabal of war practitioners and war profiteers—the military and the monetary—is meant to be settling in for an exclusive breakfast buffet, the prelude to three days of wheeling and dealing in the tools of mass killing. It’s the first morning of Land Forces, the country’s biggest get-together and money-making opportunity for the booming business of war.

Usually, the masters of war get to waltz around every part of the Earth as if they own it. But today, they have a problem: us.

To counter the planned protests, the cops have done 90 percent of our job for us by constructing a vast ring of fences around the venue. The underground car park has been closed, along with the tram route that those staying at city hotels might use. Conference participants have to guess, second guess and triple-guess the activities of the protesters to gain access.

It’s just after 7am, and a rapidly growing crowd is determined to disrupt the conference’s opening day. We’ve already marched a couple of kilometres around the city, away from the cordon of cops and barricades at the front door, to another of the venue’s entrances.

Folks are a little hesitant at first, but we soon get ourselves organised to block the steady trickle of Land Forces participants coming through this particular gate. Police bring horses, but a row of planter boxes makes it difficult to clear the crowd.

It’s a standoff. It’s all a bit chaotic. No one really knows what’s happening or what we should be doing. It seems important to explain that this is what an effective protest looks like, so I clamber onto a planter box. The megaphone is creaky, but it does the job.

I’ve got some good news, I say. It’s just past 7am. Which means that the masters of war are supposed to be inside this venue, rubbing shoulders and gawping at tanks, settling themselves down to a profitable three days of buying and selling the tools for mass murder without a worry in the world.

Instead, they’re under siege.

This is a lot of things. Chaotic. A little confused, perhaps. But it’s definitely not business as usual for the people inside. And outside, we’re sending a message around the world that people in this town are prepared to disrupt the machine that wages war.

We’re doing great. And we’re only just getting going.

I repeat the short speech to a different section of the crowd, this time emphasising that we’re walking (literally) in the footsteps of many other protesters. Exactly 24 years ago, on 11 September 2000, tens of thousands of protesters blockaded a meeting of the World Economic Forum. The WEF is the exclusive club for the world’s billionaires and their political servants, usually held in Davos, Switzerland, but staged at the nearby Crown Casino 2000.

On the first day of these “S11” protests, the protesters were more powerful than the most powerful people on Earth—who couldn’t get into their own conference. The event continued on subsequent days, thanks to an extraordinary level of brutality from Victoria Police, urged on by Labor Premier Steve Bracks. But the protest contributed to a worldwide movement against corporate greed, which jumped from Seattle to Genoa to Melbourne to Porto Alegre and beyond. The WEF retreated to Doha, and then back to the hidey-hole in Switzerland.

Jump forward a couple of decades to 2019. Around 700 of us blockaded the front entrance of the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre—the same venue as Land Forces—to disrupt IMARC, the biggest mining and fossil fuel conference in the country. The conference went ahead, thanks to an extraordinary level of brutality from Victoria Police, urged on by Labor Premier Daniel Andrews. But civil disobedience as part of the climate movement was the talk of the town. IMARC moved cities the following year.

So even if our protest is five different sorts of chaos at any one time, that means ten different sorts of chaos for the conference participants and organisers as they try to work out what we’re doing and how to get around us. They’re relying on their drivers to get them through, but the cops have closed the car park and their limousine is stuck in traffic due to the protest. They’re expecting to get off a tram in their $10,000 suits to wander in unhindered to discuss the business of war and genocide—but the cops have blocked the tram route, so they end up lost and bewildered, wandering right through the protest. They’re usually the masters of war. Today, they have to contend with us. We should be proud that all over the world, people will see that there are thousands of us right here, stopping the “business as usual” so necessary for mass killing.

By the time I finish my speech, marshals had noticed the cops are moving to kettle us, so we were on the move. For a while, the crowd occupies one of the main intersections in the area. We try a rush one way or another but police horses are much quicker than us. Nevertheless, the mood is upbeat. No doubt plenty of Land Forces cars, buses and limousines are stuck in traffic.

I get talking to an old friend and comrade, another veteran of S11. He reminds me that years before S11, there were protests against US President George H.W. Bush, who visited Melbourne in January 1992. The Bush demo built on massive anti-war protests sparked by the US-Australian invasion of Iraq in early 1991. And just a few weeks earlier, thousands of protesters had blockaded the AIDEX arms fair in Canberra.

The police of Labor Premier Joan Kirner had turned the venue for the Bush visit—a convention centre just across the river from the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre—into an armed camp. So the protesters roamed the city. This forced George Bush’s motorcade to repeatedly change routes as more than 1,000 protesters marched, danced and finally ran around the CBD. Kirner’s cops gave us a beating with batons and horses, but we’d sent a message of resistance to the US-Australian war machine around the world.

Our reminiscences are interrupted by the crowd getting on the move again. As we return to the conference venue’s front entrance, there are probably a couple of thousand of us. Still intent on disrupting the war profiteers, a section of the crowd discovers that the sturdy-looking fence surrounding the conference venue is not so sturdy. A chunk of the fence comes down, with cops pouring out of the breach spraying everyone with OC spray and briefly separating a section of the crowd.

Meanwhile, the rest of us find an increasing number of conference attendees—military, monetary, and functionary alike—wandering around the protest area, trying to gain access to the conference.

Usually, the workings of capitalism are disguised under layer after layer of bullshit and mystification. Our rulers and their flunkies are special people, we’re told, with special skills, far beyond the comprehension of us mere mortals who do the work.

But a protest like Land Forces brings them down to earth. All of a sudden, the masters of war are up close, some aggressive but mostly bewildered, unable to function without all the protections they usually enjoy.

The more expensive the suit, and the more arrogant the attitude, the more pointed the crowd. A few of us position ourselves near one of the places where the cops let a trickle of Land Forces attendees through. It’s not often we can get in the face, or the ear, of someone actually engaged in the business of profiting from genocide.

“So, how many millions will you make from killing babies today? Or perhaps you’re more in the ‘munitions that slice up parents’ business? Ah no—got it—you’re one of those ‘loitering munitions’ people aren’t you—so you can keep counting the profits while your handiwork keeps killing.”

By this time, the cops had usually hustled the war profiteer through. The more we were doing this button-holing, the more work the cops had to do. Often enough, the cops did the blockading themselves with riot cops and horses.

By now, it is well after 9am, the official kick-off time for the giant conference. And still, hundreds, or even thousands, of delegates are clearly having a hell of a hard time even getting to the building. There is no business as usual for the usually smooth business of genocide and war.

The police use of OC spray is becoming increasingly frequent. I mainly dodge it, but need a bit cleared off my neck and face.

“Are you ok?” asks one of the medics. “Fuck. Yes. 100 percent”, I reply. “How often do we get to get in the face of, or in the ear of, someone who is organising and profiting from the business of genocide? How often do we get to send a message around the world—to Palestine and the places where the genocide is armed from—of thousands of ordinary, extraordinary, people totally wrecking the ‘business as usual’ of genocide, even for a short time?”

But most of the crowd seems to be feeling the same way. We are all standing a few inches taller. And, of course, the point isn’t just to feel good; the point is to build the power we need. The long history of civil disobedience shows that the direct action of disruption can change individuals, build movements and challenge our rulers.

Which is why the cops couldn’t just let it continue.

If there was a trigger, I didn’t see it. But the obvious bottom line was that we were succeeding way too much in disrupting the business of war, in building strength and spreading a message of hope and strength and solidarity—not just in sentiment but in the physical fact of disruption.

Rows and rows of cops filed out from behind the barricades—general duties cops, riot cops, horse cops, cops with a substantial arsenal including OC spray, guns (perhaps the “baton-round launcher”), and cops with grenades (perhaps the “stinger grenade”).

Then they charged.

I’ve seen the violence unleashed by the police of Labor premiers Joan Kirner, Steve Bracks and Daniel Andrews against disruptive mass protests. The cops of Liberal premiers Jeff Kennett, against protesters defending Richmond High School in 1993, and Ted Baillieu, who turned much of the city into an armed camp to crush the Occupy protests of 2011. Those moments were also milestones in police brutality against disruptive protest in this town.

But the brutality of Labor Premier Jacinta Allen’s police yesterday was something else.

Stun grenades. Plastic bullets. Oceans of OC spray. Batons. Fists. All unleashed on protesters trying to get the hell out of the way. An army of charging cops deploying the violence they judged necessary to ensure business as usual—both for the armies of war and genocide, and the army of profiteers that supply them.

We scrambled away as best we could. Pushed back a hundred metres or more, and facing overwhelming force, it was clear that the main business of the protest was done for the day.

Of course, already, everyone was talking about what we’d achieved.

After my planter-box speeches, a couple of younger protesters asked me how the day’s rally compared with the S11 protests of 24 years earlier.

S11 caught the rising wave of a global movement. We couldn’t control the timing of Land Forces. Perhaps if the masters of war had gathered in November or December last year, we could have got more protesters.

Regardless, that we put thousands on the streets despite an extraordinary media campaign against us, and despite the public threat of a police riot, is a testament to the organising groups and to everyone who turned up. We were easily twice or three times the crowd that had disrupted the fossil fuel profiteers at the same venue in 2019.

Despite an army of cops unleashed by Victoria’s Labor government, despite media lies and a string of defamatory articles—despite everything, the masters of war had to contend with mass, disruptive opposition to their agenda and their activities.

These are meant to be some of the most powerful people on Earth. On many days, they are. But on the streets around the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, thousands of us demonstrated in practice—to the world and to ourselves—that their “business as usual” can be challenged and derailed. That’s a win that can never be taken from us, and one that we can build on in the weeks, months and years to come.