Two student activists arrested Sunday in D.C.
Warren '09, O'Brien '10 protest Darfur genocide outside White House
Joanna Wohlmuth
Issue date: 4/15/08 Section: Campus News
|
The protest was one of the many held around the world for the "Global Day for Darfur" to mark five years of genocide in Sudan. It was organized by STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition, the national umbrella organization for more than 700 high school and college programs, including Brown's Darfur Action Network.
The primary goals of Sunday's protest were to put pressure on President Bush to intervene in Sudan and to get press attention for their cause, said Warren, the national student director and founder of STAND.
After standing in front of the White House holding signs bearing protest slogans for about 15 minutes, federal law enforcement arrested the students one by one using plastic handcuffs. They were driven to a jail and spent about two hours in holding cells while they were fingerprinted and paperwork was processed.
Both students and police knew that the protest and arrests were going to take place beforehand, Warren said. Students were told what would happen once they were arrested and instructed on how to behave during the process, he said.
"We wanted to make sure we were doing it as peacefully as possible and not provoking any altercations with police," Warren said.
Everything was going according to plan until an officer began to go over the holding procedures, said O'Brien, STAND national high school outreach coordinator. The officer told the students that they would spend the night in jail and would be taken to a judge in the morning. "After 30 seconds of really awkward silence he started cracking up," O'Brien said. "For those 30 second I was about ready to die."