Human rights by example

COEUR d'ALENE - Sustaining equal rights is worth a road trip.

Members of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations drove to Eastern Oregon this week to counsel residents of Grant County, who are rallying against Idaho Aryan Nations members threatening to relocate their national headquarters there.

"We won't tell them what to do about the advent of Nazis or Aryan Nations. We're just going to throw out numerous examples of how other people have responded," said Norm Gissel, Coeur d'Alene attorney who helped win the pivotal lawsuit that drove the Aryan Nations from Kootenai County in 2000. "We'll also go into our own experiences here in Coeur d'Alene."

Gissel is scheduled to give town hall meetings today in Grant County with Tony Stewart, a founder of the task force and also a key player in the 2000 lawsuit.

"It's very humbling but also very rewarding to know our wonderful community in North Idaho is looked upon as a community that helps support human rights, so we can go out and help other people," Stewart said. "We're extremely proud and we're taking (North Idaho's) message to Oregon."

The small town of John Day, Ore., was reeling last week after a visit from Athol Aryan member Paul R. Mullet, who called himself the national director of the supremacist group and said he was considering the rural community as a new headquarters for the Aryan Nations and a site for the 2011 national gathering.

Stewart said John Day residents had already taken the right steps in greeting Mullet with roughly 70 picketers, their signs flashing messages for equal rights.

Their next step was calling Gissel and Stewart for a hand.

"The people in Kootenai County are our first priority, but when we're asked to go somewhere, we can't say 'No' when they're interested in human rights in their own community," Stewart said.

The task force has helped in human rights campaigns across the country, Stewart said, and there are plenty of past successes the pair can point to.

For instance, when the task force helped the town of Pulaski, Tenn., in the late '80s prepare for a visit from the Aryan Nations, then led by Richard Butler, which planned to march through town with the Ku Klux Klan.

"We had every store hang huge wreaths in their windows that read, 'I'm for human rights,' and got them to agree on the day and hour of the march they'd close every single store and leave town, so it was a ghost town," Stewart said. "Butler and his people marched around, left and never came back."

Stewart also helped organize a statewide campaign in Wyoming in 1989, when Republicans and Democrats joined forces against a white supremacist running for Congress.

The campaign included massive, non-violent rallies, he said.

In Oregon, he thinks similar steps could be the answer.

"My advice to them is do like our community has done and many others in the U.S.," he said. "They need to send a message to those peddlers of hate that wherever they go, they will not be successful."

Stewart observed that Mullet isn't the leader he made himself out to be, as another Aryan member in Idaho, Jerald O'Brien, denied Mullet's authority in an e-mail sent to the Associated Press.

"There's a fight between them, and Mullet wants to come to Oregon," Stewart said. "This is a tiny group. I think O'Brien has two in his group, and there are three in the other (Mullet's) faction. The good news is this is nothing like when there was an Aryan Nations compound and they'd hold congress of 100 people."

He predicts that the Aryan Nations, which advocates white purity and the creation of an Aryan homeland, will never climb back to its peak in North Idaho in the '80s.

"Our communities in the Inland Northwest, over the years we've learned how to deal with the problem," he said. "We've been so successful with our police and prosecutors with hate crimes. Word is out that this is not the place."

Gissel and Stewart are scheduled to speak in Canyon City - near John Day - at 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. today. Between, they plan to meet with members of the business community.

"We want to share notes with one another," Stewart said. "Finding out what we know and what they know is helpful, too."

The Church of Jesus Christ Christian-Aryan Nations was based in Kootenai County for decades, until followers of the group attacked two people in front of the Aryan compound in 1998. A Coeur d'Alene jury ordered the Aryan Nations to pay the two people more than $6 million in 2000, forcing the group into bankruptcy. The compound in Coeur d'Alene was leveled, its location now home to the Human Rights Education Institute.

Stewart said the task force enjoys helping other communities take on the fight for human rights.

"When we go do these things, it says North Idaho stands up for human rights and helps other communities," he said. "It's very positive that an organization of Idaho is looked upon as expert in this field."