by Seattle Times news services
PRAGUE, Czech Republic - Unleashing a fresh round of fury against economic globalization, protesters disrupted a meeting of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank yesterday. Some threw Molotov cocktails, sticks and rocks. Police responded with clubs, tear gas, water cannons and stun grenades.
Demonstrators - police estimates ran to 9,000 - have vowed to halt the meetings, continuing an anti-globalization drive that disrupted trade talks in Seattle last year and prompted violence in London in May.
"London, Seattle, continue the battle," chanted a group of demonstrators meandering through Prague's Wenceslas Square, the focal point of peace protests a decade ago that helped topple communism.
Prague became a smoky battle zone. At least 69 people were injured, and 44 were hospitalized, in the fighting, police said, including 34 police officers who were attacked by waves of protesters clad in motorcycle helmets, gas masks and homemade riot gear.
Czech President Vaclav Havel, a former jailed dissident himself, appealed for calm.
After nightfall, 200 anarchists moved through the streets, smashing bank windows and demolishing two McDonald's outlets and a Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Police spokeswoman Eva Miklikova said at least 34 people had been arrested.
Protesters achieved their goal of disrupting the three-day gathering's opening session by trapping the 14,000 delegates inside. The delegates eventually were evacuated by special subway trains. Their gala evening at the opera was canceled.
But it was an empty victory for the protest's main organizers, who had called for nonviolence. The vast majority of protesters behaved peacefully. But small groups of anarchists, hard-line leftists and vandals were responsible for the clashes.
The protesters reflect a swelling tide of resentment against the World Bank and IMF, which are accused of spoiling the environment and propping up dictators. They argue that the IMF and World Bank are worsening the plight of the world's 2.8 billion poor and should cancel debts owed by the neediest nations.
"Those of us who came to Prague are saying it is time for these organizations to start putting people ahead of money and capital," said Olivier de Marcellus, head of the Geneva-based Global Action coalition. "We want them to live up to their responsibilities or go out of business."
Others who have latched onto the movement - and were largely responsible for the violence - go much further, charging that the capitalist system is exploitative and should be destroyed.
The agencies' top officials insisted the demonstrators have it all wrong - that the IMF and World Bank are the single biggest providers of government loans aiding countries in economic crisis and development loans to Third World nations.
Anti-globalization protests have become something of a worldwide institution. A traveling alliance of environmentalists, union workers and debt-relief crusaders now tries to undermine almost any gathering it feels brings together forces of multinational capital.
A calendar of events is propagated over the World Wide Web. Some protesters said they were arranging another rendezvous next month in Montreal for the Group of 20, an international gathering in which wealthy and developing nations exchange views.
Michael Morrill, a consumer activist from Reading, Pa., came to Prague because of what he called the "devastating impact" of globalization on his community.
"We've lost 7,000 jobs over the last five years that can be directly attributed" to the North American Free Trade Agreement, Morrill said. NAFTA opened markets between the United States, Mexico and Canada. High unemployment has increased the suicide rate and domestic violence, he said, adding: "I don't call that progress."
The turnout was not as large as the 20,000 that protest organizers had forecast, in part because Czech authorities turned back hundreds if not thousands of suspected protesters at the border.
Within the convention center, delegates and officials - many of whom had arrived at dawn to avoid the protesters - gathered on terraces to watch the demonstrators square off against police.
"I know what they're against but have no sense of what they're for," said Trevor Manuel, South Africa's finance minister, who chaired yesterday's session.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said those trying to turn back globalization are making a huge mistake.
"There can be no single development today with greater potential to set back the prospects of the world's poorest than a rejection of the goal of successful global economic integration," Summers said. "The world pursued that course with great vigor and great cost in the late 1920s and 1930s, and countries have spent more than 50 years undoing the effects."
But officials of both institutions scrambled to revamp the program to place greater emphasis on poverty reduction, hoping to blunt protesters' claims that the two giant bureaucracies exist mainly to do the bidding of rich countries.
"We live in a world scarred by inequality," said World Bank President James Wolfensohn. "Something is wrong when the richest 20 percent of the global population receive more than 80 percent of the global income . . . and when 2.8 billion people still live on less than $2 a day."
While deploring the violence in the streets, Wolfensohn said, "Many of them are asking legitimate questions, and I embrace the commitment of a new generation to fight poverty."Compiled from The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press.
Protesters march in U.S.
PORTLAND - About 80 people demonstrated in downtown Portland yesterday in solidarity with the protests in Prague.
At least 20 people were arrested after a police officer was assaulted and protesters painted an anarchist symbol on a billboard, said Lt. Mike Hefley, a police spokesman.
Rallies also took place in Hartford, Conn.; Washington, D.C.; Boston; San Francisco; Denver; and Indianapolis.
