N.Y., Calif. Activists Protest Iraq War

NEW YORK – Anti-war activists marched in the streets of New York and other American cities on Saturday, stopping traffic and lying down alongside flag-draped cardboard coffins to mark the second anniversary of the war in Iraq.

Some of the demonstrators were arrested in New York as they demanded that U.S. troops be brought home.

“This country was founded by acts of civil disobedience,” said David McReynolds, 75, of New York, as he marched along 42nd Street. “We have an obligation to make our resistance public and to say as clearly as we can that the war is illegal.”

Organizers encouraged civility in San Francisco, where protests just after the war began were among the most vocal and angry in the country, with thousands of arrests and frequent conflicts between police and demonstrators.

“We are telling people to bring their families, their mothers, their children. We’re taking the security and the integrity of these demonstrations very seriously,” said Bill Hackwell, a spokesman for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, the main march coordinator.

About 350 people in New York listened to anti-war speeches at the United Nations, then marched along 42nd Street across Manhattan to Times Square, where police penned them in on a sidewalk.

A small contingent of protesters then knelt in front of a military recruiting station and lay down on Broadway next to the flag-draped coffins. Traffic was stopped for about five minutes before police moved in and arrested 27 protesters.

“It’s such a small act in light of over 100,000 Iraqis dead and 1,500 American soldiers dead,” Anna Brown, 40, of Jersey City, N.J., said before she was arrested.

Besides the Times Square event, there were rallies in Harlem, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. At least nine people were arrested at the other sites, according to an unofficial police count.

Veronica Momjian, 24, carried a handmade “Give Peace a Chance” sign in the Manhattan demonstration.

“I’m here to chastise the government for putting us in the middle of a bloody and disgusting war,” she said. “Things are looking worse and there’s no foreseeable end to this.”

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Associated Press Writer Justin Norton contributed to this report from San Francisco.