Town Hates Idea Of Hate March -- Coeur D'alene Wrestles With Best Way To Respond To Neo-Nazi Parade

COEUR D'ALENE, IDAHO - When neo-Nazis schedule a march through your tranquil little resort town, all the choices seem bad:

Bring a picnic basket and plastic lawn chair, and settle in for the parade? Naive, some folks argue.

Abandon town for the weekend, and drive 50 miles to a rally on racial harmony? "Denial" and "apathy," the stalwarts charge.

Stage a counter-demonstration to challenge the marchers? Dangerous, fret civic leaders.

At the Coeur d'Alene Resort, an immaculate complex in the heart of downtown, the startling blue water of the namesake lake shimmers in the heat and thousands of red geraniums poke sun-soaked heads out of planters. On the eve of tomorrow's white-supremacy march - with the national media and local police on full alert for a riot - the source of this collective Angst still seems distant.

In geography, the Aryan Nations compound is not far, barely 15 miles north, past fields of baled hay and grazing cattle, in the community of Hayden Lake.

But in spirit, say many in Coeur d'Alene, the compound is another world.

A self-proclaimed religious establishment called the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, Aryan Nations is run by a retired aerospace engineer, Richard Butler, and espouses a white-separatist, anti-Semitic ideology.

Earlier this year, Butler sought a permit to march down the main street of town, a route that would goose-step his trained and uniformed contingent of neo-Nazis past bagel shops and bookstores, within easy view of the resort's guests, who pay as much as $350 a night to gaze at deep-blue tranquility.

Probably fewer than two dozen followers regularly attend services at the compound, and Butler, 80, has health problems. Already, what he has promoted as a "100-man march" may draw half that number.

But as he did a decade ago, when he gathered skinheads from around the country to his compound in a show of white-power strength, Butler has once again sent civic and civil-rights leaders scrambling to react.

The town's strategy

Mayor Steve Judy is 28, a medical-company administrator whose smooth face already shows the strain of his six-month tenure in politics. He says he searched frantically but in vain for a legal halt to the march.

The permit is valid, for 10 a.m. tomorrow, for 15 blocks.

So town leaders plotted their best-choice strategy. Code name: "Lemons to lemonade."

Civic leaders say the sour anticipation of tomorrow's march, which will be covered by national and international news crews, has been sweetened by the generosity of local residents. To date, a counter-march pledge drive has garnered commitments of more than $900 for each minute of the demonstration, according to Norm Gissel of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations. That tallies to better than $54,000 if they march for an hour.

Judy proposes using the money for a statue in the city park memorializing Holocaust victims - and a plaque crediting the Aryan Nations for its part in the fund-raising.

City officials and police have urged businesses to close for the morning and citizens to leave town.

"Go out on the lake, go mountain climbing, to the parks - go do something positive," urges City Councilwoman Nancy Sue Wallace.

Movie theaters are offering free first-run movies starting at 10 a.m.; businesses are donating or discounting everything from Lazer Tag to books. The mall will host an Elvis impersonator and a fashion show. A local Neighbor Days celebration will feature a "Human Race" marathon.

Local civic and human-rights leaders also have encouraged residents to drive to Gonzaga University in Spokane for a peace rally tomorrow that will include members of the Coeur d'Alene Tribe, a Holocaust survivor and a local NAACP representative. An interfaith prayer service will be held back in Coeur d'Alene on Sunday.

"We have chosen to take the high road," Judy says. "We're not doing nothing - our response is so deafening it screams."

But not everyone in town likes what they hear.

"I don't want to be run out of town by the Nazis," says Gretchen Albrecht-Hellar, an artist, former sociology professor and Buddhist who heads the Bonner County Human Rights Task Force in Sandpoint, 48 miles north.

She plans to be on the sidewalk in Coeur d'Alene tomorrow morning, standing with Buddhists, Quakers, Native Americans and other human-rights activists. She expects her group to be nonviolent witnesses and display huge banners that read: "Citizens of North Idaho Declare this a Hate-Free Zone" and "Turn Your Back on Bigotry."

"I feel it is an obligation not to allow them to march in this city, this state, the country, in the world, without another group to say, `You're not a majority, you don't represent us and we abhor what you stand for,' " Albrecht-Hellar says.

`This is how Hitler took over'

Skip Kuck lives just outside of Coeur d'Alene in Hayden. She will join protesters on the sidewalk, but is not looking forward to the duty.

"I just know I have to do it. If I don't, I can't live with myself," says Kuck, a volunteer who arranges housing for foreign-exchange students and whose ancestors fought on the winning side in the American Revolution and Civil War. "To see some of these guys trying to take over - No! Their idea of America is not what I foresee for my grandchildren."

Yontan Gonpo, a Buddhist priest from Spokane, will stand on the sidewalk to protest apathy - evidenced by trends like low voter turnout. "This is how nickel-and-dime power brokers take over," he says. "This is how Hitler took over. This is the thing we really have to fear: people not standing up in their own communities for what is right."

Others who plan to be on the sidewalk make no assurances of nonviolence.

At least one anti-Klan group says its members may commit civil disobedience. Some small Jewish organizations have posted Web sites vowing confrontations. The Jewish Defense Organization subtitles its page "Death to Nazi Scum"; its leader promises to collect names of neo-Nazis and Klansmen at the march and to harass them.

Irv Rubin, national president of the Jewish Defense League, arrived in Coeur d'Alene on Wednesday from Los Angeles, talking tough and criticizing more mainstream Jewish organizations - like the Anti-Defamation League - for what he considers dangerous apathy.

"I feel with every ounce of energy that I have that the establishment's approach to this cancer is not appropriate," Rubin announced to reporters at the airport. "When Nazis are marching through your town, you don't run to Spokane. You don't have picnics elsewhere. You do what has to be done: You stand up like men and women and defend your town."

Rubin scoured Spokane and surrounding communities earlier in the week to recruit allies with his bullhorn-enhanced patter. He threatens to confront the neo-Nazis and crash their compound if he can.

"We're going to take the battle to Butler himself," he says. "We're asking all the decent people in the Northwest . . . to come with us. I think tolerant people cannot tolerate intolerant people for one minute."

The plotting and posturing by counter-groups provoked a derisive response from Butler's followers, who earlier this week faxed a dare to the Kootenai County task force, suggesting members "don't have the nerve to face us."

And the pre-parade tension has put the local police and sheriff's deputies on full alert. Authorities plan to block access to Butler's compound. And while the city issued Rubin a bullhorn permit to speak at the parade, it is restricting him to one corner and a decibel limit. And police made it clear they will arrest Rubin - or anyone - who causes trouble.

The costs? `It's going to hurt'

Such things as police overtime, riot training and riot gear are expected to cost the city more than $75,000, according to council member Wallace. That doesn't include support efforts from state and county police.

Business owners also will pay by shutting down - in what amounts, many say, to a forced boycott - during a peak tourist weekend.

"It's going to hurt," grumbles Sean Thompson, who says he had planned to keep his family's bagel business open until the Sheriff's Department convinced him violence was a real possibility.

"I wasn't going to let the Nazis or anybody dictate my business," he says. "But when it comes down to the safety of my employees, I have no choice."

Down the street, Tom Robb refuses to close his Iron Horse Restaurant, a cool, dark hideaway where antique gas pumps greet customers en route to the cavelike bar. "We open every Saturday," he growls. "Nobody's going to change what we do here. Nobody sets our agenda but us."

The conflicted feelings that rage through North Idaho have deep roots. "It's complicated," says Skip Kuck, the determined grandmother.

These forested mountains are freckled with communities so small, and neighbors so well-known, that few road signs are needed. Coeur d'Alene, the commercial hub, has only 24,500 residents, though many more come to vacation near the breathtaking lakes and rivers. Its name, "Heart of the Awl," harkens back to French traders who decided the hard-bargaining natives in this region had hearts as hard as awls.

There are still people in North Idaho, says Kuck, "who have never ever talked to a minority person in their lives. People are hesitant to talk to (minority) people because they're afraid."

Kuck, now with a Bonner County human-rights group, is a former member of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations. A decade ago, local activists hosted a series of educational efforts, pulling together local residents, tribal members, Hmong immigrants.

"It seemed like the proper thing to do, and it probably was," she says.

But the past decade has proved tough on North Idaho's reputation. Survivalist and former Green Beret James "Bo" Gritz preached off-the-grid politics from the Idaho hills. Former Los Angeles police officer Mark Fuhrman fled here after the O.J. Simpson trial. Randy Weaver and federal agents had their fatal standoff and shootout in the neighboring mountains.

Minority friends, even from nearby Spokane, have confided to Kuck that they are afraid to visit.

Area's isolated, hard-hit

The geography here isolates people, and the loss of timber and mining jobs leaves them scratching to get by. The state spends below the national average on children and the poor.

That leaves fertile ground for Butler's message of selectivity.

"He's an old man," Kuck says. "He talks like an old man. He wanders when he talks.

"But he's still dangerous, because he's a figurehead."

So local folks are bracing for tomorrow's march with apprehension, no matter what their course of action. They had no really good choices, Kuck sighs.

Except, perhaps, one.

While outsiders flock to Coeur d'Alene to watch the show - or jump in the middle of it - the people who call this place home share an oft-repeated vision that is as elusive as it is delicious.

When Saturday dawns, they manage, somehow, to empty this place. Businesses, tourists, reporters, teenagers, Buddhists and bullhorn preachers, the curious and the clueless - all gone. The hot, dry wind whistles through the pine trees, whips down Sherman Avenue as if through a ghost town.

The Nazis march, dressed in their blue uniforms and swastikas, goose-stepping and chanting their politics of exclusion.

And they are all alone.

Carol M. Ostrom's phone message number is 206-464-2249. Her e-mail address is: cost-new@seatimes.com