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from the Montreal Gazette
Wednesday 25 October 2000
KATE SWOGER and LEVON SEVUNTS
The Gazette; CP contributed to this report
(photo caption) DAVE SIDAWAY, GAZETTE / Protesters rally one block from the Sheraton Centre, site of yesterday's G20 meeting.
Hundreds of riot police drew a hard blue line around the downtown site of the G20 meeting yesterday, sweeping protesters away from outside the Sheraton Centre, where they had a permit to demonstrate.
The crackdown on a perimeter outside the site where world leaders are meeting to rework the global financing system came one day after police and protesters clashed violently during a similar demonstration against the G20.
About a half an hour before yesterday's protest was scheduled to begin, baton-wielding police in visored helmets moved in on several dozen people milling about in area in front of the Sheraton Centre on Rene Levesque Blvd., which had been cordoned off with metal barricades.
A line of riot police slowly moved east on Rene Levesque, pushing the demonstrators back toward a barricade.
Several of the seven protesters arrested yesterday were quickly pulled behind the police line and handcuffed.
Soon afterward, an officer with a megaphone told the demonstrators to get out of the vicinity or face arrest. His orders were met with shouts of "Fascists" and "Where's democracy?" from the growing crowd as sirens blared in the background.
The police then pushed the protesters - whose ranks had grown to about 200 - behind the barricade, the two sides staring each other down for several hours as the crowd slowly dispersed.
Of the seven arrested during the evening, four were charged with unlawful assembly and three with mischief. Two of the seven were arrested after officers were assaulted or obstructed and one protester was arrested over the vandalizing of an unmarked RCMP car during the Monday riot, said Commander Andre Durocher of Montreal Urban Community police. All seven were expected to be released last night, Durocher said.
Union leader Arthur Sandborn, one of the protest organizers, denounced the police decision to move in on the demonstration.
"We invited people here, we had a permit," he said, adding that the participants in the closed-door G20 meeting have to share the blame for the shutdown.
"Things are like this because there's something wrong on the other side, too," said Sandborn, head of the Montreal council of the Confederation of National Trade Unions.
"They do want to privatize education and health care, and they're talking about that inside without a mandate. If they come clean and let people know what they're really doing, then there could be public debate on these issues."
Activist Anna-Louise Crego, who took part in both yesterday's protest and the previous day's demonstration at which 39 people were arrested, said she was angered but not shocked by the police tactics.
"It's not surprising that when a group of people try to protest for their rights as citizens to a world in which people and the environment come before profit that repression is extreme and severe," she said.
Police say they decided to move in on the crowd because protesters who took part in clashes with police the previous evening were spotted on the scene.
"We were very tolerant, we allowed people to gather in front of the hotel, but when we had reason to believe that this gathering was going to get out of hand, we simply pushed them on the other side of the barricades," Durocher said. "After that, everything was calm and smooth, and we hope it's going to be like that tomorrow."
Monday evening, the riot squad broke into a crowd of about 500 people demonstrating outside the G20 conference site. Police on horseback and on foot charged the protesters after they threw paint bombs at the Sheraton Centre and tried to set fire to a garbage can. The protesters retaliated by throwing pylons, rocks and debris at the officers in full riot gear.
A large number of the demonstrators were later chased through the downtown streets by the police, who used pepper spray to subdue some of them.
While police say some in the crowd lobbed canisters of tear gas at them, the protest organizers denied that charge.
"There was no provocation whatsoever of the police on our part," said Mathieu Houle of the G20 Welcoming Committee, adding that any destructiveness at the demonstration was the work of a small minority.
"Ninety-five per cent of the people who were in front of the Sheraton were dancing, being festive. It was a street party - that was the principal tone of the protest," he said.
Yesterday, members of the committee denounced the riot squad's action Monday evening, decrying it as "repression and police brutality."
"Why do people continue to constantly be arrested at demonstrations in Quebec?" Houle demanded. "People have all sorts of ways of demonstrating. People have a right to express themselves as they wish."
Demonstrators will attempt to do just that again today. Another protest is planned for this afternoon, to coincide with the departure of the delegates to the G20 conference and a press conference by Finance Minister Paul Martin, chairman of the two-day meeting.
Martin told a press conference yesterday that globalization won't work "if it is limited to a privileged few."
He also said globalization is pointless unless it helps to narrow the gap between the world's rich and poor.
Tuesday 24 October 2000
KATE SWOGER and LEVON SEVUNTS The Gazette
PHOTOS: GORDON BECK, GAZETTE / Mounted MUC police charged demonstrators protesting against globalization yesterday at site of today's G20 meeting at the Sheraton Centre on Rene Levesque Blvd.
PHOTOS: GORDON BECK, GAZETTE / Police arrest demonstrator at G20 protest rally yesterday. Police response to protest was decidedly hard-line.
MUC police officer went eye-to-eye with a protester in one confrontation yesterday. Three police officers were injured in the fracas, none of them seriously.
It was an evening when no one felt welcome.
Anti-globalization protesters, who dubbed themselves the G20 Welcoming Committee, found their tactics met with a decidedly hard-line response from police yesterday. Thirty-nine demonstrators were arrested as they were chased through the streets by baton-wielding officers.
For their part, the police riot squad did not seem to appreciate demonstrators who hurled rocks, pylons, assorted debris and at least two canisters of tear gas at them; in response, police on horseback charged at the protesters and squirted them with pepper spray.
Three police officers were injured, none of them seriously, said Commander Andre Durocher of Montreal Urban Community police.
Police said they had no reports of protesters being taken to hospitals.
It was the activists' hope that the world leaders from industrial and developing nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund meeting here today and tomorrow would feel their outrage at the G20's efforts to regulate world commerce, as they chanted, sang, danced and threw paint bombs outside the meeting site yesterday.
But even the melee that followed through the streets of downtown Montreal won't stop those involved from forging ahead with their missions again today.
Protesters will return to the Sheraton Centre - the site of the G20 meeting - to voice their dissent against the "capitalist-style globalization" agenda they say is being hammered out by the finance ministers and bank governors inside.
Police are not making any predictions about what they are expecting or how they will react.
"Tomorrow is another day," Durocher said. "Our response depends on what happens with the protests."
Demonstrators set the tone for the protests yesterday afternoon, arriving outside the Sheraton Centre on Rene Levesque Blvd. at 4 p.m. in street-party style, some decked out in costumes and clown noses.
Protesters waved placards as they danced to music piped out of a rented truck. Some of the 500 demonstrators brought drums or tambourines, and others wrote slogans in chalk on the pavement.
Soon the writing was on the walls of the hotel - messages like "Jesus loves revolution" and "Capitalism kills." Some protesters began tossing eggs and paint bombs at the conference site.
Shortly afterward, a handful of demonstrators on the Drummond St. side of the hotel set a fire inside a garbage dumpster.
The riot squad then moved in on the crowd, playing a game of cat and mouse with about 100 of the protesters.
For about 20 minutes, the police would push forward on foot with batons and shields or on horseback, driving the demonstrators back. After the police retreated, the protesters would return, shouting and throwing objects. Then police circled in on a line of seated young people, arresting them and loading them into a police bus.
Demonstrators in front of the hotel decided to leave soon afterward, moving east on Rene Levesque Blvd. and weaving through traffic, followed by the police.
"Don't be afraid of their icy glare. Imagine them in their underwear," someone yelled through a megaphone perched on the protesters' truck, as some demonstrators sought refuge from the police behind an on-air TV anchorman.
But the clash ensued through the downtown streets, the riot police pepper spraying and chasing the protesters almost to the edge of Old Montreal.
A group of about 300 protesters was chased by the riot police on horseback and on foot. As some of the demonstrators tried to escape, a full cavalry charge by about dozen mounted police backed by two dozen riot police on foot confronted them, sending them into panicked flight. As they tripped over each other and fell in the frantic chase, they were arrested by the police.
Some protesters tried to slow down the mounted riot police by erecting a semblance of a barricade from trash cans and road-construction signs, but to no avail. The dwindling group of protesters was chased right to the gates of Chinatown and into Place d'Armes metro station.
The police and the protesters were both pointing the finger at the other for the clashes.
"No one was planning to go to church to pray. People were coming at us with two-by-fours, with masks, with tear gas," Durocher said. "Obviously, we were not dealing with very peaceful people here."
Joe Allen, a John Abbott College student at the protest, said the riot squad's use of force was a heavy-handed overreaction.
"People are here voicing their concerns," Allen said.
"Most people are not here to cause trouble," he said, adding that he feared the violence would detract from the protesters' message.
Yesterday's protest was the latest in a series of raucous street demonstrations at meetings of the bodies that lay the ground rules for international financial systems.
In the past year, such protests have taken place in Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Prague.
"There is resistance, let's not forget about resistance," activist Jaggi Singh told the crowd gathered outside the Sheraton Centre yesterday, rhyming off recent popular protests against economic initiatives in Bolivia, Ecuador and Indonesia as examples.
McGill student Jeff Wilson said he joined the protest yesterday because he doesn't agree with the way the G20, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are facilitating the concentration of power into the hands of corporations.
"I think the G20 is a complete PR stunt. I'm here to let the G20 ministers know that I don't buy their spinning of what they're doing," Wilson said.
Blake McGreevy, another McGill student and an anarchist, agreed. He believes society should turn toward a grass-roots system, with people making decisions in their own communities.
"I want people to be able to communicate, to travel all over the world, not a globalization that corporations control," he said.
Reprinted under the Fair Use doctrine of international copyright law.
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