Tanks, tear gas
can't stop protests
Thousands in Prague
say:
'Smash the IMF!'
By
Bill Dorr
Prague, Czech Republic
They
came to wreck and destroy. From Washington and Wall Street, Frankfurt, Tokyo,
the Bourse in Paris and the City of London, silk-suited bankers, financiers
and economists descended on this beautiful Central European city to consort
with and dictate to finance ministers from over 100 countries at the annual
meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Behind
the bankers' smooth professions of concern for the 2 billion people on this
planet who go to bed hungry was an ill-concealed hidden agenda--cut wages, raise
prices, shut down plants, schools and hospitals, eliminate jobs. And make sure
that interest payments continue to flow from the world's poorest countries to
the world's richest
banks.
But
these global economic tyrants could not carry out their agenda in peace or
silence. They had to hide behind armies of police and walls of tanks as
thousands of protesters from all over Europe filled the cobblestoned streets of
Prague Sept. 26.
The
bankers had to travel to their hotels in special guarded subway cars as
activists fought armored police onbridges and intersections leading to the
Prague Congress Center. IMF-WB delegates who dared travel the streets in
chartered buses found themselves surrounded by angry
crowds.
Democracy,
capitalist
style
Czech
President Vaclav Havel sent tanks into the streets of Prague to intimidate the
anti-corporate protesters. He sent 15,000 cops and 2,000 soldiers to gas them,
beat them and spray them with water cannon. Teams of FBI agents sent from the
United States supervised the Czech police forces.
Havel,
a former anti-communist dissident and darling of the Western corporate media, is
a longtime servant of capital. After the overthrow of socialism in
Czechoslovakia in 1989, he rented out the wall of his home to Campbell's Soup
for an
advertisement.
Massive
police force managed to stop three columns of protesters from actually reaching
the IMF-WB meeting. But it failed to intimidate the marchers, who repeatedly
charged police lines in an effort to break through and confront the bankers. On
the Gottwald Bridge, demonstrators fought the police hand to hand for hours amid
chants of "No
pasaran."
'Capitalism,
a shame
and
disgrace'
The
rest of Prague belonged to the demonstrators, and anti-capitalist slogans in a
dozen languages echoed through its winding streets: "Smash the IMF," "Cancel the
debt" and "Capitalism, a shame and disgrace."
The
Prague metro was shut down for a day so the bankers could travel without being
confronted, and many shuttered businesses bore signs saying "Closed Until the
IMF Protests Are Over."
Throughout
the night, street fighting continued in and around Wenceslas Square.
Demonstrators surrounded the state opera, forcing the IMF and World Bank to
cancel a dinner they had planned to hold
there.
Mass
arrest of Czech
citizens
Late
in the night, having failed to break the protests, police began rounding up and
arresting ordinary Czech citizens on streets around the city center. While the
corporate media claimed the majority of protesters were foreign, of the 422
people arrested, 392 were Czech citizens. They are being held in the city of
Plzen, far from Prague, and have so far not been allowed to speak to
lawyers.
Tuesday's
battle was the climax of a week of protests. These included a 3,000-strong Stop
the IMF march on Sept. 23, organized by the Communist Union of Youth and backed
by trade unions and the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia.
That
same day there was a 1,000-strong antifascist march to counter a rally by the
neo-Nazi National Alliance. Racist skinheads who try and terrorize Roma and
other people of color found the tables turned as protesters chased them through
the streets. A few of the racists escaped
unharmed.
Most
of the protesters who came to Prague were young, many of them students, many of
them teenagers. But there were also construction workers from Greece,
steelworkers from Germany, railroad workers from France, public employees from
Britain and dock workers from Seattle.
The
contingents from Italy and Spain were especially large and militant and took the
front line in fighting the police. Marchers from Germany and Scotland carried
flags demanding justice for Mumia
Abu-Jamal.
A
delegation from the International Action Center in the United States distributed
a statement headlined "Abolish NATO, the IMF's strike force!" It called the IMF
and NATO "partners in genocide" and demanded "U.S.-NATO Hands off Yugoslavia."
The statement also exposed the racist U.S. prison system and urged international
support for
Abu-Jamal.
Hundreds
of Czechs joined the protests despite months of hysterical violence-baiting by
the government and media aimed at turning the population against the protesters.
Eighty percent of the Czech Republic's media is owned by foreign
corporations.
Members
of the Czech Communist Youth Union and the Socialist Youth of Slovakia marched
behind a banner saying, "Stop the dictatorship of the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund." They chanted "Black and white, unite and fight"
and "Prague, Seattle, take it all the way, we will expropriate
capital."
Marching
with them was Mario, an 18-year-old Roma man from Slovakia. "In the past 10
years everybody in Slovakia has become poor, but the Roma are the most poor.
Under socialism most Roma people worked in heavy industry, but now we are
90-percent unemployed. The government tries to make us scapegoats, and there is
a growing racist movement. We have to fight
back."
Dragan,
a 35-year-old Serbian construction worker, said he would stand on the front
lines of every demonstration. "I've lived in Prague for nine years," he said.
"People here now have more freedom to travel abroad, but that's the only thing
that's better. Life has become much harder--there is no social security. The
Czech Republic is being walked like a poodle by international monopolies and has
been dragged into the aggressive NATO alliance."
He
was particularly outraged at the campaign against Yugoslavia. "It's all lies,"
he said. "I'm Serb but Croats, Bosnians, Albanians are my brothers. We are a
multi-ethnic country. They call Milosevic a nationalist but all he wants is an
independent
Yugoslavia."
Labor
supports
protests
At
Saturday's rally Petr Simunek, president of the Trade Union Association of
Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, explained why his union supported the protests.
"IMF and World Bank policies have destroyed most of the social gains we had
under socialism and they want to take the rest. The biggest blow is the
destruction of heavy industry.
"There
is 10-percent unemployment in the Czech Republic today but in industrial areas
like north Moravia and north Bohemia it is 25 and 30 percent. For those who are
working, prices and rents have gone up much faster than incomes. But it is not
only here.
"Throughout
the world 9,000 people are plunged into poverty every day because of policies
dictated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund." Simunek condemned
U.S. and European Union economic sanctions against Yugoslavia, Cuba, Iraq,
Libya, Sudan and north
Korea.
Also
taking part in the protests or applauding from the sidewalks were older Czech
people who remembered the mass labor demonstrations of 1948 that overthrew
capitalism in Czechoslovakia.
Since
1989, when socialism was overthrown here and the country divided in two, the
Czech Republic has been held up as a supposed "success story" of capitalism in
East Europe. It might seem that way in Prague, where there is a lot of tourism
and foreign investment. But since the economic crash of 1998 much of the country
has been plunged into poverty.
A
Czech worker from Plsen told Workers World how he now works 120 hours a week to
support his family. The extent of the desperation here is shown by the fact that
Prague has become the center of prostitution in Europe. The World Bank's own
figures, released shortly before the meeting, admitted a drastic rise in poverty
and inequality throughout East and Central Europe in the past five
years.
At
press conferences and in media statements IMF and World Bank officials decried
the poverty they have helped cause and threw around phrases like "humane
investing." And some of the protest organizers spoke of "reforming" the IMF and
World Bank. But as several protesters put it, "A tiger will never become a
vegetarian."
The
feelings of most of the protesters who spoke to WW were summed up in a slogan
chanted by young Czech Communists: "Why are we here? Stop the IMF! What do we
want? Smash the IMF! What will we do? Unite and fight! What will we win? A world
for
us!"
(As
of Sept. 27, protests are continuing in the streets of Prague.)
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