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Volume 39, Issue 10
February 12, 2002

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Utah campus becomes forum for Winter Olympic protesters

U-Wire

The Olympic Games are both target and backdrop for protesters this February.

On the University of Utah campus, activists' plans peak just as the Games commence. For several days prior to Feb. 8, Orson Spencer Hall will host the Global Justice Conference, which culminates on the day of the Opening Ceremony with a march against poverty.

These events will focus on social and economic justice, a call more or less aimed at the Olympics, according to Amy Hines, Student Green Party member and a representative of the Citizen Activist Network, the organization sponsoring the conference.

The anti-poverty March for Our Lives ends with a rally in Presidents Circle. Here, CAN and the Greens have planned a mock Olympic torch run-weighing down an activist/torchbearer with various products in a protest of the corporatization of the Games.

However, not all groups involved with the conference and the march will share this slant.

"CAN is the only group that is specifically targeting the Olympics, every other group is a single-issue group," Hines said.

But she sees a definite connection exists between poverty issues and the Olympics funds spent on hosting the Games would be better spent elsewhere.

Cheri Honkala, spokeswoman for the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, agrees. She said she arrived in Utah to see an enormous amount of tax payers' dollars spent on Olympic accommodations, parking lots and other frivolities.

"The same time, here in Salt Lake City, I watched a family go into a car to sleep because they could not get into a shelter," she said.

Some local chapters of the national organization Honkala represents are sending members to join the demonstration.

She's not sure how many.

"We're expecting 10 to 10,000," she said. Members include farmer workers, those in public housing, homeless people and formerly homeless people, like herself.

These visitors will stay in private homes and churches, and will not deplete city resources. And they will not disrupt the Games or linger in town after the Olympics have departed, despite rumors, said Heather Muse, a member of the Philadelphia chapter.