Activists poured onto the world's streets on Saturday in mass protests against a possible attack on Iraq as United Nations (UN) arms chiefs headed to Baghdad to tell Iraq's leaders that cooperation was the only way to avoid war.
Thousands demonstrated in San Francisco and at smaller protests in Chicago and Tampa, Florida, throughout the day. Organizers said the US demonstrations would be the largest showing of US anti-war sentiment since President George W. Bush last year started making his case for attacking Baghdad.
With Washington massing troops and equipment in the Gulf and Baghdad declaring itself mobilized for battle, tens of thousands of demonstrators in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Americas beat drums, clogged traffic and chanted slogans denouncing a US-led war on Iraq.
"There's been too much capital invested in this war for it not to happen. But we're making our position clear. We're saying 'No'," said Adam Conway at southwest Ireland's Shannon airport, where more than 2,000 people protested against a government decision allowing US military aircraft to use the airport en route to the Gulf.
Anti-war protesters, some dressed in white overalls with "UN Weapons Inspector" daubed on the back, gathered at the airport a short distance from where US transport planes have been coming and going with increased frequency in recent weeks as Washington gears up for a possible confrontation with Iraq.
Irish peace campaigners argue that the Dublin government has breached the Republic of Ireland's traditional neutrality - established since 1939 - by allowing use of the airport as a staging post for Gulf-bound US aircraft, which they say are carrying arms and munitions.
On the same day, protesters took to the streets from Cairo to Tokyo in mass anti-war demonstrations fired up by speculation that a strike on Iraq was drawing near.
In the Middle East, protests sounded an ominous note.
Thousands of demonstrators in the Lebanese capital Beirut carrying Palestinian and Iraqi flags chanted: "Sign your name on a suicide attack on US interests so we can fight an American attack along with Iraq."
(China Daily January 20, 2003)
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