MAY 8: Several hundred University of Otago students watched in near silence yesterday as a kerosene-soaked effigy of President Richard Nixon, swinging from a gibbet, was burned in protest against American military intervention in Cambodia.
A spokesman for the organising group, Mr M. Dunlop, told the lunchtime crowd gathered outside the University Union that the gesture indicated rejection of the invasion of Cambodia and Allied policy in Indo-China.
The group claims no political affiliations or links with any organisation.
As he read a statement explaining the burning, a few voices attempted to shout him down, and one youth rallied three weak cheers for President Nixon.
The dummy was destroyed in a few seconds.
The remains dropped into an empty drum to the accompaniment of a drum roll and a shortened burial service-"Dust to dust, ashes to ashes."
In the statement, the group said the burning was meant as a symbolic action.
"Even if President Nixon were here, we would not wish to see him actually burned. Rather we want the burning to stop - but burning of peasants by bombs and napalm in Vietnam, Laos and now in Cambodia," it said.
Mr Nixon was a fitting symbol for protest because he was the one man in the world most able to make the burning stop and to end this terrible war, it said.