The protest was very peaceful, although slightly sill at times. For the 3.500 protesters, there was 13.000 policemen in the city. They were everywhere, on every street corner, in every side road. Police choppers kept flying overhead. The only thing that was thrown at them were rolls of toilet paper. The only cases of violence I saw, or heard about, were soccer hooligans, who tried to start a fight with the police, but where separated by the antiglobalists themselfes from the rest of the protest, and journalist, who got into a fist fight for some reason, when they waited for the demonstration to come to the American embassy. It was funny to see the expression of the riot policemen’s faces, when a group of photo reporters, with large cameras hanging from their necks, started fighting right in front of them.
As far as ideology is concerned, there was a lot of different stuff there. There were some antiwar protesters, anarchists, anti globalists, who think that money should be abolished, laid off miners from poor regions of the country, a leftist political party. The whole thing looked more like the love parade in Berlin, with huge platforms towed by trucks, music blasting from the speakers all the way through the city. Every store front was boarded up. The demonstration took over six hours to get from one end of the city to the other, so you can only imagine the scale of things. People expected a huge fight, but in the end the whole thing turned out to be a huge, city wide picnic, with over 10.000 local citizens coming out to take a walk on the closed main city streets, with numerous bikers and rollerbladers taking advantage of the whole situation.
Summing up, the city was prepared for a war. They had snipers on roof tops, military special forces hiding in ambulances (I saw this when I took a turn into a side street from the demonstartion), and so on. Instead, the city got a picnic, and, with the great weather we have here over the last few days, the people made the best of it. Did anti globalists win me over with their ideas? No, not really. It’s a colorful youth movement, with some radical ideas, but as long as it’s this way, I don’t have anything against them, and I’ll go to the next demonstration, because it was fun.
Want pictures and movies? Here are some URLs for you:
http://serwisy.gazeta.pl/fotografie/...6,2048867.html
http://banery.zw.com.pl/esg/ (gotta admire the fake logo, which has nothing to do with what happened)