[Marxism] Report from Strasbourg

["Ivan D. Drury" <ivanddrury@xxxxxxxx>]

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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 201 .... April 10, 2009
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United Europe Represses the Right to Protest Against NATO

Ivan Drury

On April 4th the leaders of the NATO member countries met on the French-German 
border in Strasbourg France for the 60th anniversary of NATO. At this meeting 
the U.S. was to propose an escalation of the war in Afghanistan and ask for 
greater troop commitment from NATO countries. A major demonstration was 
organized to oppose this meeting, the occupation of Afghanistan, and to call 
for the dismantling of NATO. This demo also happened to coincide with the end 
of my time in Belarus, just days before my flight out of Germany back to 
Canada, so I was able to attend.

What Happened in Strasbourg

French President Nicolas Sarkozy had ordered every possible measure be used to 
put down the demonstration. But while he succeeded in stopping the protesters 
from setting foot in the streets of Strasbourg, the demonstration was all that 
was to be seen of the NATO summit in the news and the public imagination. In 
part, this can be seen as a victory of the demonstration: the state had pulled 
all the stops to suppress the voices of the street opposition to NATO, and the 
street had refused to be silenced. That the voice of this street appeared in 
the media stripped of criticism of NATO should not be surprising â it would 
not have been regardless of the specific behavior of some of the demonstrators.

Before the demo began its course was set. Nearly two thousand protesters, some 
Black Bloc, some Clowns, some independent activists, some organized socialists, 
had set up camp to the south of Strasbourg. This camp had been negotiated with 
the government by the International Coordinating Committee, because the 
government had refused better accommodations to the protesters. But from the 
beginning of the camp â on Wednesday night, four days before the demo â the 
police began to attack it, harassing and provoking the Black Bloc. From 
Wednesday night on, the police attacked the camp with tear gas, provoking 
fights with the Black Bloc, sealing the protesters in and harassing them in 
their temporary ghetto.

In official circles the International Coordinating Committee (ICC) also met 
with blocks from the state. Up until the night before the demonstration the 
government would not agree to a march route, a rallying point, or even to the 
legality of the demonstration. The state was maneuvering with the intention of 
shutting the demonstrators out of the NATO summit entirely.

The plan, which the ICC had set with the state months in advance, was that a 
German contingent would meet on the German side of the âEurope Bridgeâ (the 
open German-French border bridge symbol of a united Europe) and a French 
contingent would meet on the French side. The demonstration would begin with 
the two sides meeting in the centre of the bridge and then marching back to the 
French side for a rally and continued march. The organizers wanted the march to 
lead into the city of Strasbourg from there to oppose the NATO meeting 
happening at the European parliament. Protest as usual. But no.

The day before the demonstration the police sealed off the centre of Strasbourg 
â which is ringed with canals and accessible by foot and car bridges â with 
armed guards in riot gear, gates, and high fences. The morning of the demo they 
intensified this blockade and completely cut off the rallying point from anyone 
staying on the north side of the city, where I was staying. After scouting 
numerous routes, I settled for a two hour walk around the long periphery of the 
city to get to the rallying point. But long before reaching the Europe bridge, 
the sound of tear gas cannons already filled the streets. I have been going to 
demonstrations for about fifteen years, and the police repression at this demo 
shocked me. They were not only attacking Black Bloc participants either. As 
example, after the police had broken up the organized rally and driven the 
protesters back onto a train bridge, a group of mostly older peace activists 
stood facing the advancing
 police with their hands over their heads. The Black Bloc was no where around 
us. Even I was surprised when the cops fired a volley
of a dozen tear gas canisters high up directly at this line of people with 
hands in the air. These people turned and scrambled, slid, ran down the steep 
bank, through the blackberry bushes and to the street below.

The police were working very hard to provoke the Black Bloc as rationale for 
attacking the protest as a whole. Two fires were set: a border office and a 
government visa building. The police â completely in control of the area 
around the visa office â waited two hours before calling the fire trucks in, 
letting the fire
take over the building and spread on to burn a pharmacy and a hotel. Of course, 
the cops, the government, and the media blamed the protesters for the burning 
of the pharmacy and the hotel in a working class part of townâ but no one 
knows who started this particular fire. When I was asked by a media rep about 
the police claim that it was protesters, I said that I was very suspicious of 
such police claims.

The police were clearly herding the crowd. Firing gas from lockdown positions 
to drive the crowd down a certain street, easing off and letting the march go 
in the direction they'd driven it, firing gas again to stop us from moving down 
side streets, then easing off again. The march seemed completely out of the 
control of the organizers. My experience was that there were no organizers in 
sight, only the organization of some of the socialist groups who tried to hold 
together their contingents and the organization of the Black Bloc which rushed 
furiously around the periphery of the march in constant battle with the police. 
Finally the police herded us into their planned dead end: an industrial area 
with warehouses on each side with walls and fences bordering the street on each 
side.

A line of police cut us off at the front end, and the cops rolled a pair of 
freight train cars in to block the street behind us. They were so prepared for 
this trap that they had readied a train to barricade us into a blocked position 
in this street. They took position on top of and around this train and, with 
the crowd completely immobilized, began again to fire tear gas into the crowd 
from each end apparently with no other intention than to break the heart of the 
demonstration.

Continue reading: http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet201.html

 
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