Plans under way to actively celebrate MLK

By John Mason
Register Star

ALBANY -- "The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today [is]
my own government ... [for] the sake of the hundreds of thousands
trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent." -- The Rev. Martin
Luther King Jr.

The suddenly burgeoning area peace movement will be celebrating
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday this month in a way that would
no doubt make him proud, with marches and rallies against an impending
war with Iraq. There will also be public information sessions, talks,
breakfasts and more marches.

The main event is mass demonstration against the war on Jan. 19 in
Washington, D.C.

Representatives of peace groups from around the Capital District
convened Thursday at the Social Justice Center in Albany for a press
conference announcing the schedule for the weekend of Jan. 18 through
20.

Joe Quandt, of Schenectady, recently had a month-long stay in Iraq.

Recalling King's "absolute condemnation" of the Vietnam war, Quandt
said, "We can only imagine his response to the hypocrisy of vilifying
other nations as the axis of evil when so much of the world, rightly
or wrongly, considers the U.S. the epicenter of evil."

He criticized the Bush administration for utilizing the mass media to
"spread fear among its citizens and beat the drum of war, war with a
nation the size of Idaho, war with a nation debilitated to a pitiful
state by 12 years of economic sanctions, a war to punish and victimize
a people for the transgressions of their leader, in willful disregard
of the 1979 Additional Protocols of the Geneva Convention and Articles
1 and 24 of the U.N. Charter itself."

Quandt also criticized the United States' use of depleted uranium in
weapons used in the Gulf War, Serbia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, "all
without our government warning American service people about the
inherent toxic dangers associated with DU ... and the liability of its
use again in Iraq, despite its shelf life of 4.5 billion years, and
its potential to render vast stretches of the Earth uninhabitable.