Violence erupts in protest march prior to summit

ROSTOCK, Germany – Sporadic violence erupted Saturday in this port city as radicals – their faces hidden by hoods and bandannas – broke from a largely peaceful anti-globalization protest and attacked police with sticks, bottles and Molotov cocktails ahead of this week’s summit of leading industrialized nations.

Authorities said 146 police officers were injured, 25 of them seriously; 78 demonstrators were arrested or taken into temporary custody. About 14,000 police officers lined the streets and harbor as helicopters skimmed overhead and boats patrolled the waters in one of Germany’s tightest security operations since the end of the Cold War.

The city had been bracing for as many as 100,000 demonstrators, but police estimated the crowd at 25,000. Protest organizers said turnout was 80,000. Even that number would have been well short of expectations for an event billed as a kickoff to a series of protests leading to the Group of Eight meeting starting Wednesday in the nearby resort at Heiligendamm. President Bush and other world leaders have yet to arrive.

Carrying backpacks and banners, the protesters, including anarchists, peaceniks, unionists, communists and Boy Scouts, descended here under the motto: “Another world is possible.” Demonstrators criticized the U.S., Germany and other nations over war, global warming, exploiting Third World labor and failing to stop the spread of AIDS or relieve African nations of their huge debts.

“I’m not actually against globalization, but I don’t want a ‘Club of Riches’ like the G-8 to manage it,” said Gerda Finke, a pensioner from Rostock. “The way we have given foreign aid to the developing world for the last 30 years can’t go on like this. The African countries, for example, are being exploited by their debts.”

The demonstrators assembled in tent camps and fields and then moved toward Rostock, where they split into two groups before joining at the harbor for speeches and rock music. The scene was an ideological patchwork of symbols and icons streaked with tear gas and smoke from burning cars. Placards of Che Guevara bobbed amid signs that read: “Welcome to the Central Committee of Capitalism: Osama W. Bush and Gas Putin” and “Those who don’t take from the Rich can’t give to the Poor.”

Leaflets handed out by demonstration organizers accused G-8 members – the U.S., Germany, Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Japan and Canada – of being aloof from international problems. Security officials said 2,000 violent anarchists and radicals infiltrated the demonstration in Rostock. By dusk, police used water cannons to isolate gangs of stone-throwing demonstrators downtown. A police spokesman told German media that a number of protesters were “definitely seeking a confrontation with police.”