Millions in global rally against Iraq war
NEW YORK: Millions of protesters marched in dozens of countries around the globe - many in capitals of America's allies - demonstrating against U.S. plans to attack Iraq.
In a global outpouring of anti-war sentiment Saturday, Rome claimed the biggest turnout - 1 million according to police, while organizers claimed three times that figure.
In London, at least 750,000 people demonstrated in what police called the city's largest demonstration ever. In Spain, several million people turned out at anti-war rallies in about 55 cities and towns across the country, with more than 500,000 each attending rallies in Madrid and Barcelona.
Spanish police gauged the Madrid turnout at 660,000. Organizers claimed nearly 2 million people gathered across the nation in one of the biggest demonstrations since the 1975 death of dictator Gen. Francisco Franco.
More than 70,000 people marched in Amsterdam in the largest Netherlands demonstration since anti-nuclear rallies of the 1980s.
Berlin had up to half-million people on the streets, and Paris was estimated to have had about 100,000.
North of the United Nations headquarters in New York, demonstrators packed the streets, filling police-barricaded protest zones for more than 20 blocks as civil rights leaders and celebrities energized the banner-waving crowd.
"Just because you have the biggest gun does not mean you must use it,'' Martin Luther King III, son of the slain civil rights leader, told demonstrators in New York as he stood before an enormous banner reading: "The World Says No To War.''
Police in Athens, Greece, fired tear gas in clashes with several hundred anarchists wearing hoods and crash helmets who smashed store windows and threw a gasoline bomb at a newspaper office.
Four youths were arrested in the Athens demonstrations, which included thousand of protesters unfurling a giant banner across the wall of the ancient Acropolis - "NATO, U.S. and EU equals War.''
London's marchers hoped - in the words of keynote speaker the Rev. Jesse Jackson - to "turn up the heat'' on Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has been Europe's biggest supporter of U.S. President George Bush's tough Iraq policy.
Rome's legions were showing their disagreement with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's support for Bush, while demonstrators in Paris and Berlin backed the skeptical stances of their governments.
Tommaso Palladini, 56, who traveled from Milan to Rome, said, "You don't fight terrorism with a preventive war. You fight terrorism by creating more justice in the world.''
Organizers of the New York rally, who had hoped for 100,000 people, estimated the crowd at anywhere from 375,000 to 500,000. NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly said about 100,000 people were in the crowd, which stretched 20 blocks deep and spanned three avenues.
Fifty arrests were made and two protesters were hospitalized - one with an epileptic seizure and another who had diabetes, Kelly said. Eight officers also were injured, including a mounted police officer who was pulled off his horse and beaten, Kelly said.
Police estimated that 60,000 turned out in Oslo, Norway, 50,000 in bitter cold in Brussels, while about 35,000 gathered peacefully in frigid Stockholm.
About 80,000 marched in Dublin, Irish police said. Crowds were estimated at 70,000 in Amsterdam; 20,000 in Montreal; 40,000 in Bern, Switzerland; 30,000 in Glasgow, Scotland; 25,000 in Copenhagen; 15,000 in Vienna; 5,000 in Cape Town and 4,000 in Johannesburg in South Africa; 5,000 in Tokyo and 2,000 in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Security in New York was extraordinarily tight, with the city on high alert for terrorist threats. All along the streets around the U.N. headquarters on Manhattan's East Side, authorities deployed a new security "package'' including sharpshooters and officers with radiation detectors, hazardous materials decontamination equipment, bomb-sniffing dogs and air-sampling equipment able to detect chemical or biological weapons.
Several leaders of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's government took part in the Berlin protest, which turned the tree-lined street between the Brandenburg Gate and the 19th-century Victory Column into a sea of banners, balloons emblazoned with "No war in Iraq'' and demonstrators swaying to live music from the stage.
"We hope that the United States will listen to Mexico, a country so close to its borders,'' said Guadalupe Harpo, a 25-year-old housewife who marched with thousands in Mexico City. "We don't want war. The world does not want war. We want the government in Washington to know that.''
Protests were held across the United States, from Maine to Hawaii, and from Texas to Minnesota.
At a statehouse rally in Boise, Idaho, Iraqi immigrant Azam Houle said she fled the "suffocating police state'' 27 years ago, but that invading her homeland was not the solution.
"We seem to think we can destroy a country and then build a democracy,'' she said. "Democracy at gunpoint isn't democracy.''
In Little Rock, Arkansas, Vietnam veteran Gary Gish of San Antonio yelled at about 500 anti-war demonstrators marching on President Clinton Avenue.
"Clinton and his administration let Iraq go for eight years,'' he said. "We should back our leaders.''
In Baghdad, tens of thousands of Iraqis, many carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles, demonstrated to support Saddam Hussein and denounce the United States. - AP