Translated material
Under siege
Opponents of globalization transferred officials from cars to taxis
The plane on which the Russian delegation was due to leave Prague - the site of the annual meeting of shareholders of the IMF and the World Bank - was delayed for several hours, and Russian officials were forced to take the metro to leave the Prague Congress Center. This was due to mass protests organized by opponents of globalization near the Prague Congress Center.The hope that the Prague session of the IMF and the World Bank would cost little blood was not justified. Yesterday's events confirmed that even the most active dialogue with opponents of globalization does not guarantee against unrest. Despite the fact that on Saturday representatives of non-governmental organizations opposing the activities of the IMF and the World Bank were received by Czech President Vaclav Havel, street fighting could not be avoided. Yesterday, the Czech capital experienced perhaps its biggest shock in decades.
The city center was flooded with police who blocked all approaches to the Prague Congress Center, where the annual session of the IMF and World Bank officially opened yesterday morning. The task was complicated by the fact that Prague has a very difficult terrain, and it was not easy to prevent Protestants from entering the Congress Center. The security service warned all delegates and guests of the session that they would be guaranteed unhindered access to the building only until five o'clock in the morning. However, even at 9 am there was not a single Protestant on the streets - they began to arrive at the police cordons only at noon. It was only when IMF Managing Director Horst Köhler and World Bank President James Wolfensohn spoke at the session that the Protestants tried to break through the cordons. About three hundred radical Protestants launched a cannonade of firecrackers and firecrackers and pelted the police with cobblestones and paint canisters. The police, in turn, used water cannons and tear gas. The violent confrontation lasted more than an hour. After which the Protestants retreated for a short time.
By 5:30 p.m., demonstrators, having pushed back the police cordon, almost came close to the square where the Congress Center is located. When a group of Russian officials led by Mr. Kudrin tried to leave the building, demonstrators attacked Russian officials, among whom was a correspondent for the newspaper Vremya Novostei. Russian officials were forced to retreat and were later able to escape from the Congress Center by metro with the help of security forces. Representatives of other delegations also used this type of transport. So, for example, Mr. Köhler was forced to go down the subway.
“We want to lock the world’s bankers in the palace until they decide to dissolve the IMF and the World Bank,” Giuseppe Capati, one of the leaders of the “anti-globalists” gathered in Prague, decisively said yesterday.
For the second year now, the movement of fighters against the globalization of the world economy has brought real horror to the organizers of world forums of the largest economic and financial organizations. Protests against the anti-people essence of imperialism have accompanied similar meetings before, but only in the fall of 1999, at a session of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, motley fighters against injustice (from leagues for the protection of sexual minorities and animal lovers to trade unions and leftists) acted in a coordinated manner, turning an international forum into a grand demonstration. Large-scale clashes with the police and pogroms of surrounding retail outlets almost disrupted the course of the event itself; some participants in the meetings simply could not get to them. Everything was repeated on an even greater scale in the spring in Washington, at the annual session of the IMF and the World Bank. So the local police began preparing for the current forum in Prague several months in advance, immediately turning to the FBI for help - the sleepy Czech Republic, where they even managed to overthrow communism without a single drop of blood, was not too ready for such excesses. Demonstrators from all over the planet are confident that the global economy is leading to a sharp stratification of the world into a rich minority and a poor majority, and demand a fair distribution of wealth, which, in their opinion, is primarily hampered by the IMF and similar structures.