A new generation of protesters

By GREG ANSLEY

High-school students were an integral part of the anti-war protests in Sydney. Picture / Reuters

Political activists are organising the schoolyards of Australia, radicalising a new generation angry at war, big business and a similar raft of issues to those that pushed their parents into the streets three decades earlier.

High-school students are now an integral and controversial part of the protest movement, targeted and recruited for campaigns that have ranged from racism and Pauline Hanson to globalisation and the war in Iraq.

Two weeks ago teenagers battled police in central Sydney in a riot that appalled mainstream protest groups and prompted even the militant university-based National Union of Students to distance itself from what happened.

Last week they were back in a nationwide high-school strike organised by the Books Not Bombs group.

Police were ready and short on tolerance, armed with a ban on a planned street march and tactics that had earlier contained thousands of protesters while pitched battles were fought with dozens of others.

But although the growing presence of school students in demonstrations has been attacked by political leaders from Prime Minister John Howard down, the movement has continued to gain steam.

School authorities generally accept student participation so long as they provide notes from their parents giving permission to attend the protests.

Many teachers and headmasters believe their students have the right to express their views, especially as the Gulf crisis deepened political awareness.

The genesis of the new teenage movement lay in the reinvigoration of socialist activism through international anger at the process of globalisation, and burst into Australian consciousness at the World Economic Forum's regional conference in Melbourne.

Socialist groups organised high-school protesters for the three days of violent confrontation that followed, and have since recruited heavily for anti-globalisation and anti-war campaigns at schools around the country.

Front-page pictures of schoolgirls with "make love not war" - the battlecry of their parents' generation - painted on their abdomens helped to popularise the movement among an age group heavily opposed to the war.

A Newspoll in The Australian showed that while their elders are now almost evenly split over the invasion of Iraq, 59 per cent of 13-19-year-olds are firmly opposed, 29 per cent in favour and 18 per cent undecided.

Australia's Books Not Bombs organisation is an offshoot of an American idea, launched in the United States by the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition.

The American campaign enlisted students from 400 high schools and colleges for nationwide "strikes", walkouts and class boycotts to protest at the war, defying threats of expulsion and suspension.

Books Not Bombs has now spread to Australia, Canada, Spain, Britain and Europe.

The American coalition includes black radicals, the Muslim Students Association, environmentalists, student anti-globalisation groups, socialists and the Young Communist League.

In Australia it has been organised by Resistance, the youth wing of the Democratic Socialist Party, which has recruited heavily in high schools.

Its spokespeople include Resistance national co-ordinator Simon Butler, fellow Resistance official Kylie Moon, and Leigh Hughes, who writes for the Green Left Weekly, a paper championing human rights, peace and environmental issues launched more than a decade ago by the DSP.

"We fear that our futures will be shaped by today's actions by people with whom we have little or nothing in common," Books Not Bombs' manifesto says. "This is a war about corporate greed, not about fighting terrorism."

In Australia, as in the US and across Europe, young people can play a key role in mobilising opinion. "We can be the conscience of the nation, as we've done before, campaigning against another unjust war in Vietnam some decades ago."

The DSP grew out of Vietnam, organising first as the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in 1972 but later, through a series of splits, emerging as a party promoting mass grass-roots activism but supporting democratic elections.

The party wants electoral reform and admires New Zealand's MMP system.

The DSP has also tried to heal the rifts that have traditionally splintered the Left, mending fences with communists and working through the Socialist Alliance, which has unsuccessfully fielded candidates in federal and state elections over the past five years.

But recruiting tactics and the violence in Sydney have backfired on the group, with widespread condemnation from other anti-war organisations, both sides of politics, police, student groups and school authorities.

The Books Not Bombs organisation targeted Arabic and Muslim high-school students, many of them angry at the backlash that followed a series of brutal gang rapes by Lebanese youths in Sydney two years ago.

Youths hurled themselves at police, chanted slogans and screamed at "racist Australia", sparking tough retaliation.

Books Not Bombs claimed in turn that the violence was provoked by the police, especially an alleged attack on a Muslim teenager during which her hijab was pulled off and she was punched in the face.

Last week's protest was far more peaceful, with trouble confined to a small group that broke away from the main rally to confront police.

But politics is now part of Australia's schoolyards.

Herald Feature: Iraq war