RP militants join global calls for US troop pullout from Iraq

Around a hundred protesters marched to the US Embassy along Roxas Boulevard in Manila yesterday to demand that the United States pull its troops out of Iraq, joining worldwide protests marking the third anniversary of a war that has claimed countless lives.

Members of a left-wing coalition called Iraq Solidarity Campaign carried placards saying, "End the US occupation of Iraq" — the same message delivered by hundreds of thousands of peace activists who took to the streets of Asia, Europe and the US over the weekend.

Some solemn, others noisy, many of the protests drew smaller-than-anticipated crowds — far short of the millions who protested the Iraq invasion in March 2003 and the anniversary in 2004.

Anti-war protests on Sunday included a 1,000-strong rally in Seoul, where demonstrators urged the South Korean government to bring their troops home.

In Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur, about 600 people protested peacefully, unlike a gathering last year when police used a water cannon to disperse demonstrators. In Tokyo, about 800 demonstrators took to the streets, after some 2,000 protested a day earlier.

Hundreds of anti-war protesters marched silently and carried symbolic caskets through the capital of Puerto Rico, the US Caribbean territory.

The march Sunday was led by the families of Puerto Rican soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dressed in black and marching behind the families, demonstrators carried 49 caskets, representing the number of soldiers from the island who have been killed in the two countries.

"We wanted to do something simple, something so simple and solemn as a funeral march through our towns," said Wanda Colon, a spokeswoman for the coalition of more than 30 community groups that organized the march.

In Australia, where 500 people chanted anti-war slogans in Sydney on Saturday, the respected Age newspaper said in an editorial Monday that the anniversary should cause the Australian government to contemplate the cost of the country’s longstanding security pact with Washington.

"On the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, we have a chance to reflect whether part of the price means being involved in an ill-conceived war," the paper said in an editorial.

The paper did not call for an end to the pact, and said withdrawing troops too quickly would be wrong. But it urged Canberra to be more stringent in questioning Washington’s motives and talk on Iraq.

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld answered critics of the war in a guest column in Sunday’s Washington Post newspaper, asserting that if Americans were to turn away from Iraq now, it would be "the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis." — AP