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G-8 DRESS REHEARSAL: Violence in Hamburg Streets During Monday Protest
A peaceful protest in Hamburg against a summit meeting of Asian and European foreign ministers turned violent on Monday afternoon after police turned a crowd of up to 5,000 protesters back from downtown streets near city hall. No one was killed, but demolished police vehicles and burning barricades gave Germans a taste of what to expect during the G-8 summit in early June.
The Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) in Hamburg, which continues Tuesday, isn’t linked to the G-8 summit, though some of the same personalities are involved. It’s a convention of 46 foreign ministers from Asia and the European Union who meet every year to discuss global issues. This year’s topics include global warming, nuclear weapons, and conflict in the Middle East.
Black-clad anti-globalization protesters carried banners that read “Attack the G-8, ASEM, and EU! Gate to Global Resistance” — a reference to Hamburg’s motto, “Gateway to the World.” The organizers belonged to Germany’s so-called Autonomen or “black block” radical movement. Tension was high because a string of police raids across Germany in early May had targeted similar left-wing groups suspected of plotting violence against the G-8 summit in Heiligendamm, on Germany’s Baltic Sea Coast. Some protesters on Monday wore bandages or tape across their mouths bearing protest slogans, such as “criticism = terror.”
The protesters marched peacefully from about 1 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., when organizers decided, abruptly, to end the demonstration. They’d planned to march past the ministers’ meeting at Hamburg city hall, but a German federal court gave police last-minute clearance to clamp down on the route.
“This mobile cordon (of police) is a disgrace,” said one organizer, Andreas Blechschmidt, according to the German news agency dpa. “It’s certainly not reducing tension.” Blechschmidt added that they weren’t going to march “inside a ring of police through an empty downtown.”
As the thousands of demonstrators scattered, violence broke out with police. Some protesters — police estimated about 2,000 were “violence-prone” — threw rocks, bottles and fireworks. The police used billy clubs and water cannons in response.
Violence lasted into the night, with two demonstrators and two police injured. In addition, a number of police vehicles and private cars were demolished, and 150 officers were treated for eye inflammations after they released tear gas. There were 25 arrests and 64 people taken into preventive custody.
Germany hosts the ASEM summit this year because it currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency — just as it’s hosting the G-8 summit in Heiligendamm because it holds the rotating G-8 presidency. Both protesters and police openly see the ASEM protests as a dress rehearsal for Heiligendamm. Hamburg police spokesman Ralf Meyer said one indication of the potential violence was the arrest of seven men on Monday who were assembling Molotov cocktails at a gas station.
msm/ap/dpa
[http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,485366,00.htm]