Protesters with black hoods and bandanas covering their faces showered police with rocks and beer bottles before the heavily armored officers drove them back with water cannon and tear gas during a rally against an upcoming G8 summit.
Black smoke from burning cars mingled with the sting of tear gas in the harbor-front area of the northern German town of Rostock on Saturday, where tens of thousands of people had gathered peacefully at the start of the day. The clashes broke out among hundreds of stone-throwing demonstrators and police on the edges of the crowd as the rally progressed.
Some 146 police were hurt, 25 of them seriously. Police said they made 17 arrests.
PHOTO: EPA
It was an unruly start to what is expected to be a week of rallies against the three-day G8 summit beginning on Wednesday in the fenced-off coastal resort of Heiligendamm, 22km from Rostock.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel will host the leaders of Britain, France, Japan, Italy, Russia, Canada and the US for discussions on global warming, aid to Africa and the global economy. The summit, like past ones, is attracting protesters opposed to capitalism, globalization, the war in Iraq and the G8 itself.
Police have surrounded the summit site with a fence topped with barbed wire and closed the surrounding waters and airspace, fearing terrorism or disorderly protests like the ones that marred a 2001 summit in Genoa, Italy, where police and protesters clashed for days and one demonstrator was killed. Protests near the fence have been banned.
In Rostock, the officially permitted demonstration began peacefully on Saturday with two groups of marchers gathering at the waterfront. Clashes broke out near the end of the scheduled four-hour rally, as some people pried up paving stones and broke them into smaller pieces.
Eventually, five large green police trucks with twin water cannons mounted on top moved in to blast the rioters. A police car was destroyed and several parked cars burned, spreading black smoke over the area.
Police spokesman Frank Scheulen estimated the number of violence-minded demonstrators at about 2,000. Police put the size of the demonstration at 25,000, while organizers said it was 80,000.
Werner Raetz, anti-globalization activist with Attac, one of the organizing groups, distanced himself from the violence.
"There is no justification for these attacks," he said.
As for the demonstrations planned over the next few days, Raetz said both sides should try to get the "emotional situation" under control.
There are several camps in the area for protesters, and marches and other events are planned. Some protesters say they intend to try to block roads leading to the summit site.
Peter Mueller, who was among the demonstrators, had tears streaming from bloodshot eyes after the tear gas was released.
"As long as the police were in the background it was OK, but as soon as one took a step closer, it went out of control," he said. "What can you do? So ends the peaceful protest."
The protest was organized by several dozen groups under the motto "another world is possible."
Also see story:
Bush catches Europe off guard
SUPPORT: Elon Musk’s backing for the far-right AfD is also an implicit rebuke of center-right Christian Democratic Union leader Friedrich Merz, who is leading polls German Chancellor Olaf Scholz took a swipe at Elon Musk over his political judgement, escalating a spat between the German government and the world’s richest person. Scholz, speaking to reporters in Berlin on Friday, was asked about a post Musk made on his X platform earlier the same day asserting that only the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party “can save Germany.” “We have freedom of speech, and that also applies to multi-billionaires,” Scholz said alongside Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal. “But freedom of speech also means that you can say things that are not right and do not contain
FREEDOM NO MORE: Today, protests in Macau are just a memory after Beijing launched measures over the past few years that chilled free speech A decade ago, the elegant cobblestone streets of Macau’s Tap Seac Square were jam-packed with people clamouring for change and government accountability — the high-water mark for the former Portuguese colony’s political awakening. Now as Macau prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of its handover to China tomorrow, the territory’s democracy movement is all but over and the protests of 2014 no more than a memory. “Macau’s civil society is relatively docile and obedient, that’s the truth,” said Au Kam-san (歐錦新), 67, a schoolteacher who became one of Macau’s longest-serving pro-democracy legislators. “But if that were totally true, we wouldn’t
Two US Navy pilots were shot down yesterday over the Red Sea in an apparent “friendly fire” incident, the US military said, marking the most serious incident to threaten troops in over a year of US targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels. Both pilots were recovered alive after ejecting from their stricken aircraft, with one sustaining minor injuries. However, the shootdown underlines just how dangerous the Red Sea corridor has become over the ongoing attacks on shipping by the Iranian-backed Houthis despite US and European military coalitions patrolling the area. The US military had conducted airstrikes targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels at the
MILITANTS TARGETED: The US said its forces had killed an IS leader in Deir Ezzor, as it increased its activities in the region following al-Assad’s overthrow Washington is scrapping a long-standing reward for the arrest of Syria’s new leader, a senior US diplomat said on Friday following “positive messages” from a first meeting that included a promise to fight terrorism. Barbara Leaf, Washington’s top diplomat for the Middle East, made the comments after her meeting with Ahmed al-Sharaa in Damascus — the first formal mission to Syria’s capital by US diplomats since the early days of Syria’s civil war. The lightning offensive that toppled former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad on Dec. 8 was led by the Muslim Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is rooted in al-Qaeda’s
RSS