Europe Features
Welded fence to keep out anti-G8 demonstrators
By Jean-Baptiste Piggin
May 30, 2007, 11:05 GMT

Hamburg - The welded-mesh fence, topped with barbed wire and video cameras, begins in the water and wends its way 12 kilometres through the countryside till it ends back in the water, further down the beach.

Designed to keep demonstrators out of the Group of Eight (G8) summit in the German seaside resort of Heiligendamm, the steel fence is supplemented by a 3.5-kilometre offshore net floating on the water to ensure protesters do not row or swim into the event.

Both barriers are to be removed after the leaders of the seven main western countries and Russia finish their June 6-8 summit.

German police have spent two years planning for a cat-and-mouse game with demonstrators.

Anti-globalization groups, who contend that western leaders devise free-trade and investment policies to impoverish traditional societies, have scheduled a rock concert for June 7 in the nearby city of Rostock to urge the G8 to help Africa.

More radical anti-G8 protesters are keeping their plans secret.

'Block G8' flyers have been pasted up in recent weeks in German cities with strong leftist and anarchist counter-cultures.

The leftists cried foul after police raids on their offices in Hamburg and Berlin on May 9 and seizures of computer drives.

Prosecutors said they were investigating two groups for 'terrorism' but lacked evidence to arrest any of the 21 persons they suspect were involved in more than 15 recent petrol bombings of homes, offices and cars of industrialists and officials.

Police, who say they are mounting the 'biggest police operation in the history of Germany,' costing nearly 100 million euros (135 million dollars), expect up to 100,000 protesters at the summit.

Peaceful demonstrators are likely to keep to Rostock. The physical conflict is likely to be played out in the fields, woods and country lanes surrounding the Heiligendamm summit venue.

Police privately estimate that 3 to 5 per cent of protesters are set on invading the summit. Some have rioted in the past. Others, barely out of school, have been training to resist riot police.

The authorities have prohibited marching close to the fence, which cost the German government 12.5 million euros (16.6 million dollars).

The militants do not imagine blockading the roads will stop any world leaders.

'They'll all be using helicopters to reach the enclosure,' shrugged a leader of the Block G8 group. But lesser officials, journalists and emergency services could be hampered in their work if roads are cut.

Knut Abramowski, the commander of the police's Operation Kavala, comments curtly, 'We won't let them block anything.'

His ad-hoc force of 16,000, using police loaned from all over Germany, will have back-up from 2,000 border police, 1,000 soldiers and an unknown number of security agents from the other G8 nations.

The police raids have led to debate inside Germany about whether the police are trying to scare a broad swathe of critics who include trade unionists and veteran environmentalists in the Greens party.

The Left Party, which is part of the administration of Mecklenburg West Pomerania state where the summit is being held, supports the protests and contends that the G8 should be abolished, with the United Nations settling world economic policy instead.

The anti-globalization group Attac has said it expects 50,000 demonstrators in Rostock or closer to the summit.

An Attac spokesman, Peter Wahl, said anger at the police crackdown could mobilize significantly more. Critics are angry that police have built holding pens just in case there are mass arrests.

But the police say public safety has to be their priority, including catching the petrol-bombers before somebody is burned to death. An illegal Hamburg magazine, Radikal, recently published a guide to 'better ways to burn a posh car.'

In other attacks, stones have thrown through windows and paint-bombs hurled at house facades. Anonymous claims of responsibility said the 'radical left' was defending itself against repression.