Riviera rattled
Protests disrupt EU summit
By G.
Dunkel
Mass, militant and stormy protests greeted the opening of
a meeting of the European capitalists in Nice, France, Dec.
7.
The meeting was called to plan how to expand the European
Union from its current 15 members to 27 countries, including
most of the formerly socialist countries of Eastern Europe.
The meeting issued a final communiqué in the wee hours
of Dec. 11.
This was the longest meeting of the European Union ever
held. Its length testified to the intensity of the economic
and political interests involved in nearly doubling the size
of the EU.
Nice follows all the protests in the past year since the
anti-IMF protests in Seattle: Cincinnati, Prague, Montreal,
Seoul, Sydney and Washington.
Protests against the meetings where the world's capitalist
rulers hatch their machinations are growing sharper and more
politically focused, and they are drawing from a broad array
of progressive groups.
The protest in Nice appears to be clearly anti-capitalist,
not just opposed to globalization. A major slogan among young
activists--both from the more radical unions, the ecologists
and unemployed councils--was, "No to the Europe of
capital."
The decisions taken by the European leaders in Nice affect
the working class, the farmers and the poor of Europe in many
different ways. So the protests against them had to be broad.
Issues raised by demonstrators included Basque and Corsican
autonomy, health and environmental regulations, civil, labor
and immigrant rights, and special taxes on financial
transactions.
The most militant protesters tried to occupy and surround
the Acropolis, where the EU was meeting. The exchanges
between them and the CRS--the French riot police--were sharp.
The cops filled the air with tear gas.
French President Jacques Chiraq was seen wiping tears from
his eyes after gas circulated through the air supply of the
building.
Protesters set fire to a Banque Nationale de Paris office
a few hundred meters from the Acropolis, and then used sticks
and paving stones to fight off the firefighters who tried to
put it out. The protesters also used baseball bats to knock
rocks into the crowds of CRS, when the riot cops tried to
drive them from the area.
Slogans in Basque, French and Italian that read "Long live
ETA," "Death to money" and "Fascism equals capitalism" were
daubed on the bank's facade.
In a different part of Nice, 80,000 trade unionists from
all over Europe, together with a number of community action
groups, protested to demand a more equitable European social
policy. The Confederation of European Unions (CES) sponsored
this march and got its affiliates throughout Europe to
support it.
CES General Secretary Emilio Gabaglio indicated that his
organization wanted legally enforceable social rights, such
as full employment, written into the European charter.
A trainload of Italian unionists coming to the union march
was stopped at the border at a town called Vintimille. While
European borders are supposed to be open under the Schengen
treaty signed a few years ago, the French authorities
suspended the treaty for a day.
The Italian unionists got off the train and marched on the
French consulate, which had to be protected by the Italian
riot police. A dozen people were injured in this
confrontation.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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