HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK ---------------------------Tense World Marks May Day
By Tony Czuczka
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, May
1, 2002; 10:21 AM
BERLIN –– Demonstrators rallied against the right in Germany and France, merchants boarded up stores to guard against attacks by anti-capitalist demonstrators and riot police turned out in force as Europeans marked a tense May Day on Wednesday.
Police in Berlin used tear gas to quell overnight clashes with anarchists who threw rocks, set street fires and looted a supermarket, the worst violence on the eve of May Day for years. An estimated 5,000 police turned several parts of the German capital into restricted zones, including a main thoroughfare through the landmark Brandenburg Gate.
Scores of anarchist protesters were detained in several cities overnight, and police said two people were injured seriously in Berlin. May Day in the German capital has regularly degenerated into street battles between police and anarchists over the past 15 years.
In France, as many as 500,000 people demonstrated nationwide against extreme-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, the largest turnout so far against the ultra-nationalist politician since he qualified for this Sunday's presidential runoff.
Earlier, Le Pen led several thousand supporters through central Paris. They chanted "Le Pen, president" and waved tricolor flags and signs that read, "I'm proud to be French."
Some 700 supporters of a far-right fringe party marched through a Berlin suburb, escorted by nearly 2,000 police who kept them apart from heckling counter-demonstrators shouting "Nazis out!" At least one marcher was detained by police for making the banned stiff-arm Nazi salute.
"We're demonstrating because we love our country," declared far-right marcher Wolfgang Kuehl, 34.
At Berlin's city hall, labor leaders rallied a crowd of about 10,000 behind Germany's first industrial strike in seven years, due to start next week.
In Moscow, at least 140,000 trade union supporters holding up pictures of President Vladimir Putin rallied downtown. The Communists marked the occasion separately, drawing mostly elderly people who carried red carnations and proudly displayed World War II medals on their lapels.
In Greece and Turkey, protesters proclaimed solidarity with the Palestinians in their bloody struggle with Israel.
"A thousand greetings to the Palestinian resistance," read a slogan at a rally in Istanbul, Turkey. In Athens, about 6,000 people marched to the U.S. and Israeli embassies to protest Israel's military incursion into Palestinian areas.
In the economically struggling former Yugoslav republic of Croatia, workers marched through the capital, Zagreb, to protest government plans to trim labor rights. Polish officials laid flowers at a monument in the city of Poznan to workers killed in 1956 anti-communist protests, but the capital, Warsaw, was calm as many people left for the countryside for a five-day weekend.
Workers in Macedonia handed out platefuls of hearty cooked brown beans – considered a laborer's staple – in the capital, Skopje, as they demonstrated for an end to poverty. The country has the highest jobless rate in the Balkans.
In London, more than 100 noisy demonstrators on bicycles blocked intersections in the busy Oxford Street shopping area. Some of them, representing a variety of groups from environmentalists to anti-capitalists, went to the U.S. Embassy bearing a banner reading "Capitalism doesn't work."
Cuba's communist authorities called out more than 1 million citizens for a May Day march to protest Latin American criticism of its human rights record. President Fidel Castro was to head the annual workers march in the Havana.
In Asia, police clashed with protesters in at least three nations while elsewhere, workers demonstrated peacefully for better working conditions and higher pay.
In the Philippines, thousands of demonstrators were met on the streets by riot police amid coup rumors and terrorist threats. Police said they thwarted two possible terrorist attacks, including one that might have targeted President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.
Activists in Sydney, Australia, used May Day to highlight the plight of thousands of asylum seekers kept in detention centers for up to three years while their cases are reviewed. Police on horseback charged demonstrators after 500 people blockaded offices of a company that operates five of the detention centers.
In Singapore, police arrested two prominent opposition party officials and civil rights activists as they tried to stage an unauthorized rally outside the tightly controlled city-state's presidential palace. Police later arrested an additional activist who refused to leave a police station where one of the other activists were detained.
Malaysian police arrested 17 people as hundreds of plantation workers marched toward the world's tallest buildings in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, to demand better pay. Riot police backed by water cannon were on standby at the Petronas Twin Towers.
In Hong Kong, about 700 workers – including maids from other Southeast Asian nations – marched in downtown areas demanding that the government create new jobs, set a minimum wage and limit the working day to eight hours.
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