Reflections from the scene of this weekend’s G8 protests 5

Michael Levitin is a freelance journalist living in Berlin. He has written for Newsweek, Slate, and the Los Angeles Times, among others.

Tuesday, 5 Jun 2007

ROSTOCK, Germany

If you dress head to foot in black, set cars on fire, launch stones and beer bottles at police, and brave hand-to-hand scuffles amid clouds of tear gas with choppers thundering overhead, best bet is you'll make the evening news. Which is too bad, because in the case of Saturday's late-afternoon riots in Rostock, the images of unrest have obscured and altered what most of us adults would have called the real story.

Menace or blessing?

Photo: Irene Pascual

I say adults because the couple of thousand sullen-eyed, peach-fuzz-faced rabble-rousers who formed the Black Bloc averaged, say, 20 years old. Middle-class adolescents still living at home with mom and dad, the young anarchists weren't the ones who'd spent thousands of hours organizing the Alternative Summit that's running counter to the official G8 meeting, which starts Wednesday in nearby Heiligendamm. They didn't arrange Bono's concert here; nor did they coordinate the peaceful blockades against G8 delegates arriving at Rostock airport; nor set up large-scale encampments around the city; nor promote dozens of lectures and workshops on subjects ranging from immigration and agriculture to militarism, feminism, and global energy strategy.

In short, the Black Bloc lacked the legitimacy to turn a peaceful, well-planned protest into mayhem -- yet that's exactly what they did. But let's look at it another way; by admitting, for example, that some of us -- OK, many of us -- go to demonstrations like these nursing the secret hope that things might turn a little rowdy. The hope of feeling, beyond all the costumes, music, and speeches, a greater whiff of excitement. Of being somehow in the fray.

I went to Rostock, I confess, with some pretty big expectations. The media had so fixated on the G8 Summit -- from criticism of the seven-mile-long fence built to keep out protesters to speculation about Chancellor Angela Merkel's standoff with President George Bush over his last-minute climate policy proposal -- that the demonstration against it had to be sensational, right?

I had arrived (with my own little global retinue of amigos, which included a Spaniard, a Brazilian, an Englishman, a Mexican, a Colombian, and myself, an American) packed body to body with other protesters on the morning train from Berlin. Chartered buses and trains were pouring in from cities across northern and central Europe, like Zurich and Cologne, Vienna and Munich, Stockholm and Copenhagen. Base camps had materialized around the Rostock region as demonstrators carrying rucksacks and tents and a week's worth of supplies flooded in.

Putting a face on politics.

Photo: Irene Pascual

A whole cross-section of the continent appeared to have shown up: old men calling for just labor laws, young mothers with strollers marching against climate change, students appealing for fair trade and an end to the Iraq war. Actors dressed in elaborate costumes hoisted masks parodying the G8 leaders. Trumpeters blew horns, drummers beat out rhythms, and trance-music revelers danced as thousands of bodies kept rolling past.

All the big NGO players were represented -- WWF, Oxfam, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth -- as were the vast array of antis: anti-racists, anti-capitalists, anti-fascists, anti-G8s, anti-about everything you could get your hands on. The wavy, rainbow-colored sea of signs, balloons, and placards -- "Down with the G8," "Stop Privatization," "International Solidarity" -- reflected the position stated simply on one flier: "The world shaped by the dominance of the G8 is a world of war, hunger, social divisions, environmental destruction, and barriers against migrants and refugees."

Despite the tensions and global concerns prompting the march, up until 3 p.m. the mood was still bright. Heading toward the harbor where concerts were already under way, the protesters continued their relaxed march, by the tens of thousands, in what looked from a distance like a slow, musical, serpentine dance. But the anxious buzz of helicopters overhead was mounting. The green-clad cops were encroaching. Then suddenly, somewhere out of view, a provocation occurred. Instants later, acrid, dense, gray gas filled the streets.

Bodies started running. Police units multiplied, emerging from all corners of the city and sprinting in neat lines toward the harbor where the flare-ups were taking place. There was something epic about the scene: on the waterfront, under the port's looming cranes, with sirens wailing, music blaring, giant banners and balloons bobbing, the sky threatening rain, and the authorities with their armored vehicles threatening injury.

It didn't take long for the mainstream crowd to disperse, leaving several thousand young guys and girls clothed in black to engage in the fight. They hurled bottles and fireworks and chunks of concrete that they'd pried up from the street. They smashed bank and car windows, destroyed parking-ticket machines, and lit several cars on fire in what the German magazine Der Spiegel called "an orgy of violence." Only after many hours and injuries and arrests -- after the air became choked with smoke and gas, and after the Black Bloc tired of their showdown with water cannons -- did the police restore order.

Close to 1,000 people, nearly half of them police, were reported injured, 50 of them seriously, before the day was through. Some 125 arrests were made. Sunday brought a rest for both sides, but on Monday and Tuesday they were back at it, with street skirmishes and armed conflicts between youth and authorities that led right up to President Bush's arrival with his entourage. Needless to say, the Alternative Summit's well-planned schedule -- of concerts and lectures, seminars, marches, and non-violence training workshops -- was vastly overshadowed by the more media-grabbing conflict.

Give peace a chance.

Photo: Irene Pascual

The Alternative Summit organizers had tried very hard, and almost with success, to show the orderly and thoughtful face of the anti-globalization movement. But what they, and what we all, now have to ask ourselves might be this: If those late-afternoon images of chaos and confrontation hadn't occurred -- if the estimated 80,000 protesters had marched peacefully, vocally, and jubilantly to the demonstration's conclusion as planned -- would the world have even noticed?

It may be, in fact, that the anarchic, violent spirit is already so embedded in the anti-globalization movement that it has become unthinkable for a G8 protest to conclude otherwise.

This spring, in recent weeks especially, the German government seemed to be almost purposefully stoking the public's anger in the build-up to the summit. After police raided many activists' homes and offices for information last month, it became known that the collection and use of "scent samples" to track down suspected agitators, a method practiced by the secret police in the former East Germany, was suddenly back in vogue.

Fanning the public's paranoia, an administrative court ruled last Thursday that demonstrators would not be allowed to come within a four-mile zone of the razor-wire-topped fence that has been erected around Heiligendamm. "The German government has militarized security levels as though they wanted to build a new wall and close themselves in," said an indignant Renate Künast, Germany's Green Party chair. The decision overturned a lower court's ruling that protests could be banned within 200 meters of the security fence, which was built specifically to protect the Kempinski Grand Hotel, where the G8 leaders are scheduled to meet, but not around the entire town. Noting that security costs for the event topped $130 million and that more than 16,000 police officers have been engaged (the largest deployment in Germany since World War II), lawyer Carsten Gericke said the court's unconstitutional ruling marked "a black day for freedom of assembly in Germany."

Now I am wondering, as I think back to the cramped train ride Saturday morning when the energy in the air was so palpable but also so peaceful, whether the violence that day might have been foreseen -- and if so, how it could have been prevented. When tens of thousands of people are able peacefully to amass and speak, sing and dance with many voices -- and ultimately with one -- it is a testament to the power and the potential of democracy. But unless we decide clearly, and discover a way to steer our fellow black-clad protesters into the non-violent fold, their actions will continue to define the anti-G8 agenda: fighting, rather than talking about the issues that matter to us most. After all, our heads of state and their policies may still pose our best chance of staving off the serious long-term effects of climate change.

Then again, maybe negotiating calmly with our leaders, on their terms -- which is to say, voicing our complaints about poverty and our concerns about global warming, and being virtually ignored -- is not what many of us secretly want. In that case, so much for the days of peaceful protest.

Friday, 8 Jun 2007

CAMP ROSTOCK, Germany

The Real Gains

Klaus had tromped through forests and across fields, marching 15 miles back here to his ramshackle tent at 3:00 in the morning, so it's understandable that he was too beat to be euphoric. He'd taken whacks from billy clubs and swallowed pepper spray as he and more than 10,000 demonstrators -- who employed a kamikaze-like "five finger" tactic, in which their groups split abruptly and individuals sprinted in all directions -- broke through police lines, blockaded roads and railways, and claimed victory in their bid to disrupt the G8 summit.

The face of a new movement?

Photo: Marc-Steffen Unger

Today, as rich-nation leaders wrapped up their Baltic coast vacation -- in which posturing about fighting climate change and poverty in Africa replaced any of the nuts-and-bolts strategies required for doing so -- the image of those celebratory masses of young people parading by the thousands across Germany's rolling farmland, with hundreds of slender white wind-turbine blades spinning symbolically in the background, has somehow overtaken the official debate in its seriousness and importance. In a not-yet-quantifiable way, the anti-globalization movement has been reignited in Rostock. Reinjected with passion. Reinforced with solidarity; with organization, with clear-marked acts of bravery, and with what author and activist Susan George called the public's "invincible" will to bring a more socially just world into being.

George, the former vice president of Attac and current chair of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, encouraged the direction the anti-globalization movement is taking alongside author John Holloway in one of several hundred panel workshops that took place at the Alternative Summit in Rostock. "Everyone knows that capitalism is raping the planet, this is absolutely clear," said the 73-year-old American-turned-French citizen. The public's first task, then, is "to denounce, to challenge, and expose [those in power] through detailed arguments, and to find spectacular, persuasive ways" to put issues like climate change and debt cancellation at the top of the agenda. "This movement is still very young and it has its best days ahead of it," she said.

Using a more blunt -- and in America, it would seem, unthinkable -- language of revolution, Holloway, who has been described as the poetic voice of the anti-globalization movement, spoke about "a moment of rupture," describing a vision of global social struggle filled with hope. We need "to think of revolution -- of the possibility of creating another world -- not in terms of a breakdown, but as a breakthrough," he said. He likened the weeklong events of protest in Rostock, and in Seattle and Genoa before it, as a "crack through which the seeds of a new society are pushing. We [the anti-globalization movement] represent a force that is pushing through and, like cracks in an ice floe, can spread with incredible and unpredictable speed."

Sound like over-the-top anarchic Euro-speak? Well maybe, coming from the intensely capitalist system we in America have embraced since our inception as an all-or-nothing option. But the point is that change is afoot, and that Klaus and his army of merry pranksters who lit up the Rostock region this week -- proving themselves unrelenting in their blockades and peaceful demonstrations despite the violence of tear gas, water cannons, and beatings police waged against them -- are the latest incarnation.

Protesters on parade.

Photo: Marc-Steffen Unger

Look also, if you haven't already, at Thursday's jaw-dropping, made-for-Hollywood high-speed boat chase that occurred a few hundred yards offshore from Heiligendamm, providing the biggest drama of the summit. Three rubber speedboats operated by Greenpeace succeeded in breaching the Navy-patrolled security zone. They intended to carry a petition demanding substantial carbon cuts to the heads of state, but instead got engaged in a 15-minute, hair-raising adventure at sea. Dwarfed and out-horsepowered by the armored German military vessels that pursued them, the maverick pilots made risky maneuvers at top speed that could have easily lost them their lives; when the chase was over, in the moments before they were gathered into custody, they hoisted the banner "G8 Act Now" defiantly into the air, facing the helicopter cameras as their tiny boat rocked on the waves. It was bravest act of idealism -- putting the planet over their lives -- that I have ever seen.

As for the ways the G8 leaders did not act -- specifically, the way George Bush once again bucked scientific consensus and global political and public pressure in failing to come on board with specific targets to cut carbon emissions -- it's nothing we haven't heard. Merely agreeing to begin discussions in Bali in December on the road toward creating an international climate framework that can work as a successor to Kyoto was, apparently, enough a concession by the U.S. for embattled Chancellor Merkel to herald the "deal" a success. Depressing stuff.

But wait, there's an upside to the last six and a half years of criminal, irresponsible Bush leadership: the world, in the meantime, has gotten busy. At the Alternative Summit in Rostock, which went under the slogan "Another World Is Possible," I saw numerous examples of movements and initiatives that have sprung up virtually in direct response to American actions -- and may now be leading the rest of us with their progressive vision.

One is the modern peace movement in Europe, which Jan Tamas, chair of the Humanist Party in the Czech Republic, announced at a panel session on the G8 and war is "just being born." The cause: America's aggressive approach to installing anti-missile bases in Eastern Europe, rekindling what many perceive here as old Cold War rhetoric. Tamas helped found the No To The Bases initiative last July; in February, his party ushered the Europe for Peace Declaration into being; and on Tuesday, he demonstrated with some 2,000 people during Bush's visit to Prague to protest the proposed missile defense sites.

"Everything was going fine after the Berlin Wall fell," he said, "and now [they're saying] we should be stuck again in the armament race? The perception of the U.S.," he added, a country that formerly championed his people's right to freedom, "has definitely changed among Czechs in the last five years." (A note: After Bush's tummy-ache at the summit on Friday morning kept him out of meetings with China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa, he flew off to Poland to further his calls for a missile base in that country. But not before hearing out Russian Premier Vladimir Putin's proposal to form a joint U.S./Russian anti-missile platform in Azerbaijan instead, an offer that surprisingly perked up his ears.)

If peace campaigning is on an upswing thanks to aggressive U.S. policies, so is economic planning in countries where U.S. and World Bank strategies have failed, or have been absent altogether. In Latin America, for example, a transnational finance initiative known as the Bank of the South has been worked on by the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt, a Belgian NGO, along with the Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez, and could go online as an institution as early as this month. Speaking to an audience of about 40 crammed into a stuffy room on the third floor of Rostock's Nikolai Church, the group's spokesperson, Virginie de Romanet, described the mega-cooperative as a Latin American counter to heavy hitters like the World Bank and IMF. The Bank of the South will give grants for social projects, housing, education, and health care in the poorest countries, she said, with the intention of "paying off the social debt the governments have toward their peoples. We talk about financial debts, but not about the social needs that have been abandoned in Latin America since neo-liberal plans have been imposed there [by the North] in the last 20 years."

And then, of course, there were the workshops on the topic of the day, which the U.S. administration has disregarded, to the world's detriment, more than any other: climate. At a discussion called "Mobilization for Global Climate Action," activists, city council leaders, and students from around Europe brainstormed strategies to raise awareness for an international demonstration for climate to be staged December 8 during the talks in Bali. Given the mushrooming in recent years of so many groups focused on the one game in town -- Climate Alliance, Climate Action Network, Stop Climate Chaos, and Climate Forum, to name a few -- the issue confronting these NGOs now is how to "be concrete" with their message.

"We must be explicit in our goals" as groups and as a movement, said Klaus Milke of the research institute Germanwatch. For example, he said, Europe needs to turn its attention toward its less developed members like Poland and Romania, reaching out with something akin to "climate ambassadors" who will help bring those countries up to speed with carbon reductions and renewable technologies.

The climate movement, without question, has become a global driver bringing people and communities together. But some are worried that too much emphasis is going toward organizing protests for climate awareness and accumulating followers, rather than working on the hard-and-fast science and policy aimed at solving the crisis. "The strategy is to get bigger climate demonstrations every year. 'We'll have a demo, we'll make it bigger than the last one.' But I don't see a plan," says James Lloyd of the U.K. student environmental group People and Planet. "I think there needs to be a debate on what strategies for public awareness have the most impact. It's not a campaign we can fuck up -- and I'd hate to think five years on we're still organizing rallies."

Neither rallies nor blockades nor conferences among the world's elites will be enough to save us from the impending climate disaster. It will take, as Greenpeace said so simply from its boat at sea, Action Now. Already next week, a "Midnight Sun Dialogue" in Riksgransen, Sweden, among environment ministers from 20 countries will pick up in the area where Heiligendamm left off: by beginning to lay the groundwork to launch formal climate negotiations in Bali at the end of the year. Clearly, global leaders have heard the call and are now hustling to put one foot after the next in the glacial process toward writing a sound climate policy for the future.

Americans should learn from this week's large-scale, peaceful, and professionally organized turnout against the G8 in Rostock. They should be emboldened by European activists' efforts and should pick up where the blockaders on the Baltic left off. "We got sprayed, we got hit, but they didn't stop us," Klaus told me as he sat with sunburnt face, rolling a cigarette the morning after the all-night blockades. He was one of 6,000 who'd made Camp Rostock his home for the week, and who walked away feeling that "with this political message, we made protest history in Germany. We said we'd block them and we blocked them. The rest is details."

As Tycho Boender, a Dutch activist and founder of the climate awareness group Inside Collective, told me, a lot about his and his country's future is riding on our world leaders' decisions about cutting carbon levels and developing renewables -- namely, in the kind of legislation they write and how quickly it can be made into law and enforced. Some parts of his country already sit six meters below sea level, he said. "I might need a snorkel to sit in my house soon."

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