Issue date: 2/14/03 Section: News

Media Credit: Jessica Brunacini Trey Smith, from the College Greens, stands outside of Johnson Center Thursday, with signs and literature protesting the Career Fair.

With his short hair, plaid shirt and wire-rimmed glasses, soft-spoken Trey Smith seems an unlikely leader of student peace activists.

But that is the idea.

"There's people who say, 'Well, I saw someone holding a sign about Bush being Satan,' and that sign alone is what keeps people from joining us," Smith said.

Smith, a junior in the Honors Program at UNM, organizes the campus Green Party, is a member of the steering committee of an Albuquerque activist group called Stop the War Machine and has also founded a new organization composed of about 100 high school and college students called the Albuquerque Student Alliance for Progress.

"I've been doing protests and activism for the past two years," he said. "I figured that being a leader needs to be my role, since I don't see any other students doing it."

His role as leader-by-default began when, after Sept. 11, 2001, he felt compelled to do something. He looked to campus organizations for groups he could join.

"There really wasn't much going on," he said.

Now the campus Greens regularly have a table outside the Student Services Building, where they gather signatures on petitions against a war with Iraq and for Albuquerque citizens to be allowed to conduct weapons inspections at Kirtland Air Force Base. Smith estimates that each week about 80 people sign an anti-war petition and 40 to 50 sign the one for inspections.

This week, Smith's groups were particularly busy on campus. On Wednesday, Feb. 12, he helped lead a rally outside the Air Force ROTC building, across from Dane Smith Hall, to bring attention to a tragic incident in the Gulf War, which occurred on Feb. 12, 1991. That day, he believes, U.S. fighter planes bombed a bomb shelter in Iraq and incinerated 408 people, mostly women and children.

Thursday, Smith sat outside of Johnson Gym to protest the job fair inside. He and other volunteers handed out pamphlets about some of the organizations inside, such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Honeywell and others.

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