Activists promise ‘hell’ at summit
GERMANY: Thousands of activists massed in Hamburg yesterday for a ‘‘Welcome To Hell’’ demonstration on the eve of what promises to be a fractious G20 summit.
At least 10,000 activists, holding banners with slogans such as ‘‘Smash G20’’ and ‘‘G20 mafia’’, gathered in a square by the city’s fish market and tried to march towards the summit.
The streets surrounding the square were lined with police vans and water cannon. Many shops had been boarded up, and some streets were closed to traffic.
Hundreds of activists from the so-called ‘‘black bloc’’ of protesters marching at the front of the demonstration refused to obey a police order to remove masks and hoods, which are illegal at protests in Germany.
Police then used water cannon and pepper spray to disperse the crowd. Protesters hurled bottles and smoke bombs at police. At least one demonstrator was hospitalised.
As that protest another erupted Reeperbahn nearby.
Protest organiser Andreas Blechschmidt said between 10 and 20 demonstrators had been detained.
Demonstrators accused police of stoking tensions in what had begun as a peaceful protest. Chadly, a 25-year-old German demonstrator from Frankfurt, said: ’’The police response was totally over the top. They used a pathetic excuse to stop the demonstration after just a few hundred metres and then they triggered a mass panic.’’
Kemal, another protester from Hamburg, said: ‘‘In the name of died down, on the humanity, we call on all people to resist this fascist, capitalist system that has produced [United States President Donald] Trump.’’
The demonstrators had teams of doctors and lawyers on hand. One was distributing booklets with legal advice for protesters should they be arrested.
The main G20 protest is scheduled for today and is expected to bring together 100,000 protesters from a web of civil society, environmentalist and political groups.
Blechschmidt said German authorities had conducted a ‘‘massive campaign’’ to deter people from taking part in the demonstrations. A bus full of people hoping to head to the protests was turned back at the Dutch border, police said.
Germany’s highest court has backed the demonstrators in their call for a protest camp on the sidelines of the summit. But Hamburg police have taken a stricter line, saying protesters are not allowed to camp overnight or set up cooking and toilet facilities.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel faces what many see as a mission impossible at the summit to push for meaningful progress on free trade and climate change. Nations are more divided now than at any point since G20 meetings began in their present format.
German officials, confounded by Trump’s intransigence on free trade and global warming, have been courting China and Japan in advance of the summit.
– The Times, DPA