Opinion: The Prague Post Online

E-MALE
Doing the police in many voices

By Christopher P. Winner

Before Ezra Pound changed the T.S. Eliot manuscript of the poem that would later be known as "The Waste Land," Eliot called his rambling work "He Do the Police in Different Voices."

The title was borrowed from Dickens' "Our Mutual Friend." The English novelist was variously intrigued, like Eliot, by the nature and limits of civil authority. As e-mails concerning the anti-globalization protests, and their aftermath, jam my mailbox, it is worth distilling what people are saying -- or trying to say. The vernacular of protest is rooted in physical law; action is often met by an equal and opposite reaction. Chaos is the rule, not the exception. There is little absolute good or evil, although both exist. Versions of events are often spoken by many voices at once, and the many rarely see one event.

What might be said in summation, and I advance it tentatively, is this. Violent attackers were in the minority, but their minority acts were extremely grave and visually suggestive. Their near-atrocities sabotaged not only the meaning of the protest (whose focus was plight of the dispossessed) but led to an inevitable reaction by the police, which spoke in two voices. The first was too passive: it allowed fringe groups -- anarchists or hooligans -- to pelt the police without immediate response. This voice was a consequence of Seattle, where crowds went swiftly mad after they were themselves attacked. This "police riot" was perhaps the gravest shortcoming of the World Trade Organization meetings in 1999.

Prague was different. Here, small groups of "demonstrators" invented the riot. The Molotov cocktail that tumbled on a line of riot troops in the early going could have killed three, even four, officers. Had they not been alert, and lucky, they risked immolation. The images speak clearly.

But there are other images. They suggest the police infiltrated the crowds, a tactic that has been rightly denounced by rights groups, along with alleged abuses of detainees.

But let's back up. Unlike Seattle, where the police panicked not once but regularly, the Prague contingents seemed to keep their rage in check at the moment of greatest peril -- on Sept. 26, when the challenge of violent rioters was frontal and persistent. An American Civil Liberties Union probe into the Seattle riots faulted police for quelling "disturbances the police themselves had provoked. The level of force was simply not proportionate to the threat."

In Prague, the police did not visibly provoke; they did react, and clashes are never pretty. The level of force was about equal to the threat. The rioters, in Eliot's words, were guilty of "forcing the moment to its crime." Afterward, in jails, the innocent suffered for the actions of the few. This is inexcusable but fathomable. Human nature abides turmoil recklessly; known rules are too often discarded. Moreover, despite the overthrow of communism, this is not a Bill of Rights nation.

Did Czech police make mistakes? They undeniably did. But the greatest error still rests with the protest organizers, whose plans were thwarted by roving bands. The few undid the many. For the many, who had political statements to make in Prague, that should remain a cause for regret and reflection.

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The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.