Protest Threat Looms Large Over IMF Meeting
Sept. 20 -- The potential of violent riots at next week’s meetings in Prague of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have organizers and officials scrambling into action.
They fear protests such as those in Seattle and, to a lesser degree, Washington, D.C., where small groups of extreme militants disrupted World Trade Organization meetings by clashing with police and causing immense property damage.
Czech President Vaclav Havel is at loggerheads with his interior minister, Stanislav Gross, on how to avert such scenarios.Havel, who spent years in jail as a dissident, is anxious not to muzzle peaceful protesters.
Meanwhile, the IMF’s head banker has outlined broad reform measures in order to mollify critics. These measures include promises to give poor countries a bigger voice in globalization.
Thousands at the Ready
Havel has told Czech media he wants Prague to “welcome all those people who arrive with the willingness to contribute to solving world problems.” He will host a debate of 300 IMF and World Bank delegates together with NGOs, human rights activists and alternative economists in Prague castle on Saturday.
But his interior minister favors the tough line. Gross has a “blacklist” of several hundred militants that has been compiled with the help of the FBI and European police forces.
Protest groups, including the Initiative Against Economic Globalization-Prague 2000, have compared the measures to the repressions of the communist era, from which the Czech Republic emerged only 11 years ago.
Gross has 11,000 police, plainclothes secret agents and riot troops on standby in the event demonstrations get out of hand. Today, another 1,500 police were sent into Prague, according to the CTK news agency. They will be deployed at 15 strategic sites around the city, the agency added.
The riot police, including a squad of sharp-shooters, are equipped with tear-gas launchers, armored vehicles borrowed from the army, water cannons and helicopters. Gross says that he is willing to break up even peaceful demonstrations if they block access to the delegates.
