1,500 Demonstrate Against G8, and Bush & Merkel's pre-G8 meet in Germany

Jul 13
Around 1,500 people from the peace, counter-globalisation and anti-fascist movements in Germany protested yesterday against US President Bush and German Chancellor Angela Merkel's pre-G8 meeting in Stralsund, on the Baltic coast in northern Germany.

The pair were meeting ahead of this year's G8 meeting, which begins in St. Petersberg today. In part, the meeting was intended to help repair the relationship between the two countries, following their difference of opinion around the Iraq war which broke out whilst Germany was still governed by Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party (in coalition with the Greens).

President Bush spent Wednesday night in Kempinski Hotel in Heligendamm (in the federal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern), where the 2007 G8 summit will be held, before meeting Merkel in Stralsund and then retreating for a rural BBQ (at a total cost of 20-million Euro!)

Although the demonstration was smaller than many had expected, it was loud and powerful. Banners were carried expressing solidarity with the protests in St. Petersberg, and leaflets and newspapers about the mobilisaiton against next year's G8 summit were distributed.

Many of those who took part in the demonstration were planning on further solidarity actions over the weekend, in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and elsewhere.

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(Friday 14 July, 2006) Then, today, around 70 people took part in a spontaneously organised demonstration outside the Russian embassy on Unter den Linden in Berlin. The protest was against the G8 meeting in St. Petersberg, and in solidarity with those protesting against the summit and the world it represents all over the world.

Around 70 people gathered, at 12:00 today in front of the Russian Embassy in Berlin. With a samba band, flyers explaining our reasons for opposing the G8, newspapers about the mobilisation against next year's G8 summit here in Germany (see: www.g8-2007.de), and banners, people tried to show solidarity with the protesters in St. Petersberg, as well as articulating their own opposition to the G8 and the world it represents.

The police, whose numbers grew throughout the hour and a half demonstration, did their best to keep demonstrators away from the Embassy itself, and on the other side of the street -- including nearly pushing a number of people into oncoming traffic.

A speach was held through a megaphone, describing the repression in St. Petersberg and the need to show solidarity with those protesting in Russia, as well as that police repression is not something entirely specific to the Russian context. Everywhere the G8 (IMF and World Bank, World Trade Organisation and so on...) have met over the last few years they have been met with resistance which has, in turn, faced repression.

The demonstration was noisy and lively, hopefully sending a clear message to those inside the Embassy: we will resist the G8 wherever they meet, and those subject to repression will not be left alone!

A further demonstration, for which anti-fascist and anti-capitalist groups in Berlin have been mobilising for sometime, will take place on Sunday (meeting point: 2pm, U-Bahn, Eberswalder Strasse. More info: http://www.aw.antifa.de/).

For more information, in both German and English, check out: http://presse.gipfelsoli.org

G8 2006 Info and Press Group
- e-mail: g8-int@riseup.net
- Homepage: http://presse.gipfelsoli.org