Protesters in Neuhof, during some of the first clashes between police and protesters at the NATO summit.
– By Scott Sayare –
STRASBOURG, France — Anarchists rise before dawn.
They wore black, the skinny, pale 20-somethings, tattooed and pierced, in masks or balaclavas – the “Black Bloc,” they were called. They were German, French, British, Turkish, all rallied around the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-government cause. They carried red flags marked with the hammer and sickle, Che Guevara banners, rocks, glass bottles, metal pipe. They marched on Strasbourg at 4 a.m.
There were also the peace-niks, of course, those vegans and feminists and humanist activists from across Europe, draped in rainbow flags, cooking up hummus and baking whole-grain bread at the communal anti-NATO camp. They were there to protest, not to fight. They were quickly overshadowed.
In the end, they all intermingled in marching groups of hundreds and then thousands and the police made little distinction between the peaceful and marauding. It had been decided: no one would be marching on Strasbourg, at least not without a fight.
They filed out of the camp in the early morning dark, the straw damp and cold underfoot, into the suburban streets where the previous afternoon they had already clashed with riot police. They stepped gingerly around shattered glass, uprooted lampposts and burned-out makeshift barricades.
They flowed in and out of side streets, hundreds, thousands passing along wooden fences outside darkened single-story houses, groups splitting, reforming in the wide abandoned boulevards, following the tram rails up nine kilometers from Neuhof to Strasbourg. Police helicopters shined searchlights from above, rotors thumping a dull reminder of the blockades, the paddy wagons, the riot gear and concussion grenades to come. When, no one could say, marching in the dark, watched.
And then they were there, dozens, a few hundred meters up a long, wide avenue, blue lights flashing, waiting. They spread in a line across the road, and then a few echoing pops broke the pre-dawn hush.
Tear gas stings more before sunrise.
Later in the morning it was sunny and warm in the Rue de la Paix in downtown Strasbourg. Protesters sat about in clusters on the pavement, puffing cigarettes, grazing on sandwiches and coffee over the morning paper, sleeping in the sun. An organizer announced to cheers and applause that NATO was running an hour behind schedule. He said he only hoped it had something to do with the protests. Residents pedaled bicycles up empty, sunny boulevards.
Riot police massing in Neuhof.
A dozen protesters from the “Clown Army” danced and sang and blew kisses at the riot police encircling the lounging group; they polished the officers’ shields with rainbow feather dusters. One well-coiffed young officer blushed.
The sun came out and it was a warm spring day. Toward noon they were throwing rock and pipe and bottles and Molotov cocktails at the hundred-odd police blockading the Pont de Vauban in the east of the city, advancing behind a mattress and an uprooted yellow street sign, charging, falling back, and charging again.
The roads behind the barricade were littered with hundreds and hundreds of empty plastic gas canisters. Riot officers crouched behind white police vans in the side streets, frantically unwrapping more. Local residents cursed the police, filmed the protesters, ducked under the constant trickle of hurled rocks.
Then the police stopped the tear gas and the flashbombs and parted to make way for the marchers. The rioters wandered slowly over the bridge, cautious at first. But in between the Pont de Vauban and the next bridge, the Pont de l’Europe over the Rhine, between France and Germany, there was nothing: no police, no firemen, no one to attack or resist.
At the Pont de l’Europe, a few neighborhood preteen girls in track suits and sneakers waved at the thousands of marchers flowing by in the road.
“Fuck Sarkozy! Fuck Obama!” they cried, pleased with themselves.
Around 1:30, protesters set fire to the customs office, a long one-story box of offices on the French riverbank. Boys in black threw rocks at the plate-glass windows, sprayed graffiti on the walls (“The state needs you, you don’t need the state”), looted computer parts from inside to throw through the windows. They grabbed a table, took it apart and beat the walls with the metal legs. Some lay on a patch of grass in front of the building, watching and pointing and talking.
The customs station near the Pont de l'Europe.
Then the fire took, and dense grey smoke rolled out from under the eaves and black smoke and flames billowed from the windows and rose up over the Rhine. Glass shattered and beams melted and collapsed and the fire hissed as the white humanitarian relief flyers that hadn’t been used for kindling fluttered about in the empty street.
The protesters had already moved back down the road. They set fire to the Ibis hotel and the shopping center across the way.
“I think a majority of protesters are disappointed,” said Pierre, one of the pacifist clowns, resting on a patch of shaded grass near the Pont de Vauban. He would not give a last name out of fear for his safety.
Neighbors of the Ibis peered out from a second-story window at the firemen outside the bakery “La Chocolatine.” The blaze in the hotel popped and burst like gunfire and pumped a black haze out over the pavement and the tear gas canisters and shattered glass and scuffling feet and barked orders.
It all bore on into the warm early evening twilight.
Note: Elements of this text originally appeared in The Associated Press on April 2-5, 2009.
1 Comment
04.21.2009 at 14:39
Wonderful entry, Scott. Love the contrasts you establish between sunny weather and the grey smoke of the fires, between waving children and bottle-throwing protesters. I look forward to reading more.
Ben