STREETS OF PRAGUE FILLED IN PROTEST OF GLOBAL CAPITAL

Activists face off against a police line on a bridge in Prague, Czech Republic.

Compiled by Eamon Martin

Prague, Czech Republic, Sept. 27— Tuesday September 26 (S26) saw the outbreak of massive demonstrations against the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank annual meeting held at the Prague Congress Center in the Czech Republic this past week. Protesters from around the world collectively besieged the summit with up to 20,000 people maintaining a circular blockade of the conference facilities, and some even gaining access to the heavily-guarded complex itself. Protests were not only city wide, but worldwide with solidarity actions occurring around the globe and reportedly in 59 US cities alone. Both peaceful resistance and active confrontations occurred with a single united voice: Shut down the IMF - Shut down the World Bank.

Confrontations between Czech security and civil society began before the day of demonstrations. In the days leading up to the confrontation, Czech authorities at the border stopped and prevented from entering the country, almost 300 people with arrest records from previous anti-globalization rallies. On Sunday a video crew of journalists arrived at the Independent Media Center –a news-gathering office for independent journalists— to find police illegally insisting on checking the passports of everyone who arrived. The independent media refused and responded by putting a dozen cameras in the face of the officers and forcing them to leave.
Also that day, protesters carrying white crosses staged a mock funeral, saying thousands of children die every day because of IMF and World Bank policies (pictured left).
“Fifty years of oppression was enough,” said Sam Kobia, an activist from Kenya calling for abolition of the big international lending institutions. “Global economy is a global apartheid.”

The demonstration, launched by anti-poverty/social justice group Jubilee 2000, was intended to draw attention to its claims that 19,000 children die each day as a result of policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

On Monday, plainclothes officers hauled away three protesters - an American and two Poles - who had chained themselves to a bridge after unfurling banners that read: “No IMF, WB, WTO! End Corporate Rule!” (pictured right)

Earlier that day 1,500 people aboard a train which had been stopped at the Czech-Austrian border for about 19 hours finally arrived in Prague that morning at around 2am. Protesters from groups across Italy, including Ya Basta!, explained that Czech border police had initially tried to arrest four people on board. The specially commissioned train had collected passengers in Naples, Rome, Milan and Venice. The train had passed without delay through Italy and Austria but encountered difficulties in the Czech Republic when officers in riot gear attempted to arrest four people whose names had appeared on a “black list.” Fellow activists successfully challenged the action by forming a defensive human chain to ensure that police officers were unable to remove the four people. After 300 protesters affiliated with the umbrella group Initiative Against Economic Globalization marched to the Interior Ministry and said they wouldn’t leave until Czech officials allowed the Italians to enter, the police complied.

On Tuesday in Prague, people started gathering in Namesti Miru square at 9am. The square was packed with a great variety of groups from many places, speaking an equally great number of languages. Various artistic events unfolded including a massive sound system, a vast inflatable globe and numerous, multilingual banners expressing discontent with the IMF/World Bank. Surrounding them, however, downtown Prague was deserted, with schools and many shops closed and boarded up, and police on every street corner.

At around 12 o’clock, the demonstration split into three different groups - yellow, blue and pink - and started to approach the conference center where the IMF/World Bank meeting was taking place. The ‘yellow’ march took the main route to the big bridge leading to the conference complex. Led by Italian and Spanish groups linked to the Ya Basta! movement - dressed in white foam-padded overalls and carrying heavy shielding - they approached lines of heavily armored riot police occupying the bridge. About 60 protesters, well protected in improvised gear made out of painters’ jumpsuits padded with foam rubber and cardboard, formed the front lines (pictured below). One woman even wrapped a doormat around her waist for protection, while others wore motorcycle helmets or hard hats. These demonstrators positioned themselves immediately in front of the riot gear-clad police.
They tried four times to push through police lines. Police responded with batons, while protesters used inner tubes to shield themselves from their blows. For more than two hours, groups were pushing against police lines, but the narrow bridge, which was covered entirely with armored police vehicles, proved to be too difficult a location to break through to the conference center. In the afternoon, an assembly held by Ya Basta! decided to leave the bridge and to join the other marches.

The blue march moved down the valley separating the city from the center and met heavy police resistance. Stones and other objects were thrown at police while the latter unleashed a combination of concussion grenades and tear gas. A number of protesters managed to climb up a hill and got close to the conference complex, while down in the street massive confrontations between demonstrators and police were continuing until the late afternoon. Meanwhile, at one of the bridge entrances hundreds of Greek activists joined a Turkish bloc to confront the police. Some previously jaded witnesses viewed this unusual alliance as nothing less than a miracle.

The pink group (pictured below), mainly comprised of Germans, Spanish, French and Americans, including a samba band, managed to get around the conference complex to approach from the other side. Changing locations and directions quickly and spontaneously, a large group of protesters took the police by surprise several times and finally got close to the center. Some protesters managed to occupy parts of the complex before the police responded with heavy charges, using tanks, concussion grenades, hundreds of tear gas rounds, pepper spray, water cannons, unleashing German Shepherds and brutally clubbing people outside of the convention center. However, as helicopters circled overhead and sirens wailed, peaceful blockades remained around the center until the early evening, locking some 14,000 delegates from the 182 assembled nations in for several hours.

In what appears to have been an aberration during the largely peaceful, carnivalesque -- yet militant -- demonstrations, eyewitnesses said one faction of protesters threw stones, bottles and several home-made “Molotov cocktails” at the police. Some officers were set alight before the flames were doused by colleagues, Reuters news agency reported.

As it got dark, thousands of people were blocking Opera Square and other locations where the delegates were planning to spend the evening. In some instances, cars were overturned and used as barricades. There were confrontations between riot police and large groups of protesters all over the city with some protesters engaged in targeted property damage (banks, McDonalds ). The police retained control in some locations but looked completely out of control in others.

The following day in Prague saw even more spectacles of protest, resistance, solidarity, and confrontations with state authorities. Their patience perhaps worn out from the previous days’ exploits, police both tactically (ie. street medics) and randomly (individualistic attire) rounded up civilians in mass arrests or for deportation, numerous reports said. Reports of police brutality are continuing to flood news wires. The day’s events began when dozens of people scuffled with police outside a hotel where IMF and World Bank delegates were staying. Authorities quickly pushed the crowd away from the building, and police spokesman Jiri Suttner said about 100 activists were detained - raising the overall number of detentions to more than 500.

Seven people released from jail said that they had been tied up for more than twenty hours and beaten while in jail and that those still in prison have been denied access to lawyers and phones. Demonstrators on buses who were being readied for deportation claimed that the police beat them while they were trapped inside the buses. According to a legal team of lawyer-observers, there have been beatings and sexual harassment of the imprisoned women protesters.

Later on Wednesday, approximately 1,000 protesters began marching from a town square toward the police station, but were stopped by riot police. The activists retreated to a town square, where they began cheering when they heard the meetings were closing early.

Said one demonstrator, “Don’t worry about what you read in the papers -- S26 was a total success - what meetings they managed to hold, were backed by a chorus of concussion grenades and the whiff of tear gas. On the streets a well organized, hierarchy-free bloc did what they came to do -- and more. Unbreakable links have been formed. We have seen the future of international solidarity. There is no going back.”
Global Day of Action Answering a call to what some protest organizers named A Global Day of Action in solidarity with the demonstrations in Prague, citizens rallied around the world to voice their collective opposition to corporate globalization. Stockholm, Sydney, Moscow, Madrid, Mumbia, Melbourne, Dakka, Montreal, and other cities too many to name had thousands of people take to their streets in protest. In Tel Aviv, demonstrators successfully shut down the central business district for two hours and held a moment of silence in support of the Prague actions. In Johannesburg, 200 protesters invaded the South African headquarters of mining giant Anglo American Plc. Thorough coverage of all “S26” solidarity actions, alone could easily fill this week’s Asheville Global Report.

In the United States — where if the truth were to be told in the corporate media, most US citizens would probably be shocked -- a veritable tidal wave of Prague-solidarity actions have occurred across the nation –reportedly 59 cities in all. To name just a few: Chattanooga, Boston, Pittsburgh, Boulder, Providence, New York, Tacoma, New Brunswick, Denver, Berkley, Duluth, San Francisco, Buffalo, Washington, DC, Gainesville, Los Angeles, Asheville, and again, too many others to mention.
In Portland, Oregon, 500 protesters shutdown a rail line in the face of riot police who fired pepper spray and which resulted in the arrest of 15 people (pictured below).

In Tucson, Arizona, a small group of demonstrators attempting to gain entrance to a BankOne building in order to talk to employees of the National Law Center were pepper sprayed by police.
In Washington, DC, around 400 people, most of them union members, stretched a boisterous picket around an entire city block. At one point, around 35 activists – eventually arrested — ran into the street and sat down to form a street blockade during the height of rush hour traffic.
In Hartford, Connecticut, Connecticut Global Action Network, Janitors for Justice and their supporters blocked downtown streets of for nearly 4 hours. When ordered to disperse by police, approximately 20 people refused and were subsequently arrested.
In Chicago, Illinois, 200 people gathered in front of the Board of Trade in Chicago’s south loop to stage a series of rolling pickets of ‘Corporate Crime Centers’. “Our fight here is the same as the fight in Prague!” said Steelworkers’ organizer Bruce Bostick.
In Boise, Idaho, about 100 demonstrators blocked street intersections(pictured below).
And in Hadley, Massachusetts, some 300-500 demonstrators, including Teamsters and members of Earth First! descended on a Wal-Mart with a colorful assortment of puppets, placards and banners to speak to the many issues affected by global corporate hegemony.

Why is this happening?

Critics of the IMF/World Bank single out these Bretton Woods Institutions, created in the aftermath of the World War II, as promoting an unjust and unsustainable world economy.

For years, human rights and environmental activists have fought (and sometimes halted) destructive World Bank projects such as the Polonoreste Project in Brazil and the Narmada dam project in India. Yet today, despite some progress, the list of potentially disastrous projects is still long. In Prague, activists denounced dams in Guatemala and China, gold mines in Kyrgyzstan, oil pipelines in Chad, Cameroon and Hungary and a proposed offshore natural gas pipeline in Nigeria, Benin, Togo and Ghana, to name just a handful. Critics say it is oil giants like Chevron and Exxon/Mobil, power companies like Enron, and often-corrupt government officials who continue to reap the benefits of Bank investments, not citizens in the countries where it operates. Instead, communities continue to be displaced and the environment threatened, they charge.

In addition to such specific lending projects, critics maintain that the World Bank and IMF have a profoundly negative impact on social, environmental and economic conditions in many countries. The scenario goes like this: the World Bank lends poor countries money and the IMF conditions those loans on “structural adjustment programs.” In other words, the IMF tells governments to cut spending by gutting health care, education, transportation, environment and other public programs, while opening up their markets to foreign investors. Countries sink deeper into unemployment, poverty and more debt, trying to pay off their loans. It’s not that the debtor nations or even Bank officials don’t know this, it’s just that the World Bank and IMF are often quite simply the only loan shark in the global village.

“These institutions are responsible for destroying our economy,” explained Rogerio Mauro of the Landless Peasant Movement (MST) in Brazil. “We want to fight this hypocritical globalization of capital and instead globalize our struggle to determine the future of our own country.”

Or as one Prague protester said: “We are people who are governed by the policies of the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and a myriad of other economic institutions, with no voice in them. We do not govern ourselves- we are governed by the tyranny of unaccountable economic institutions. We want to make decisions about our lives for ourselves- as a community, as families, as people, as children. The people on the streets yesterday were demanding a right to their own political power- not just for debt cancellation, not just for the reform of the IMF and the World Bank. S26 was about realizing a new day, a day when the people can choose the kind of society that we want to live in.”

Sources: Indymedia: www.indymedia.org,Corporate Watch, Associated Press, Reuters, 50 Years Is Enough

cartoon by Barry Deutsch www.teleport.com/~ennead/ampersand/vanguard