The Sydney Morning Herald http://www.smh.com.au/news/0007/31/text/national14.html Protest groups prepare to head for Sydney, via Melbourne and Seattle Date: 31/07/2000 By ELLEN CONNOLLY Radical protest groups linked with the anti-world trade riots in Seattle will converge on Sydney on the opening day of the Olympic Games, bringing security concerns for police. The activists will arrive in buses from Melbourne, where they will have spent three days disrupting the World Economic Forum at the Crown Casino. The protest in Melbourne by the S-11 Alliance (named because the summit begins on September 11) will be made up of more than 70 groups, including student, union and environmental organisations. Some of the same international groups as those involved in the violent protests in Seattle last year will also attend. An Olympic security source said concerns were growing about the volatility of the 10,000-plus protesters bound for Melbourne, and as a result security was being stepped up to avoid a repeat of the violence that erupted in Seattle. Police in Seattle had been consulted to gauge an understanding of the possible actions of some individuals. "Nobody really knows how they will react or what they are capable of," the police source said. "The fact that they are drawing analogies with the overseas experience of Seattle and Washington is a worry." Others being watched by police security are the Anti-Olympic Alliance, Aboriginal activists, Greenpeace - which will have its flagship Rainbow Warrior berthed in Sydney - and Jewish Australian survivors of the Maccabiah Games bridge disaster. Three groups have applied for permits to protest at Homebush Bay but police - who have powers to move against demonstrators at Olympic venues and in designated areas of Sydney - would not disclose who they were or whether they had been given permission. Olympic security police also fear that extremists and anarchists from the United States and Britain are planning to protest. Victoria's Protective Service Division said it had spent the past six months preparing for the S-11 protest and had met several of the organisers to try to "stage manage" it. They are also keeping a close watch on the S-11 Web site, particularly discussions on tactics and strategies to storm the casino. The Web site, which has a clock counting down the days, hours and minutes to September 11, says the protests "will shut down the world economic forum" and trumpets that Seattle + Washington = Melbourne. The groups plan to form a picket line around the Crown Casino to prevent delegates from the world's top multinational companies entering. One of those groups is CACTUS, (Campaign Against Corporate Tyranny United in Struggle) a Sydney-based group whose aim is to "fight against the corporate priorities which dictate what happens in our society". Mr Vince Caughley from CACTUS said: "We're calling the Olympics 'the Corporate Games' because we believe they, the Olympics, have been hijacked by large corporations." This material is subject to copyright and any unauthorised use, copying or mirroring is prohibited. ************************************************************************* This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use." -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
