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March 30, 2003
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Sunday
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Muharram 26, 1424
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Protests turn violent
ISTANBUL, March 29: Another wave of demonstrations against the US-led war in Iraq rippled around the world on Saturday with protesters continuing — sometimes violently — to show their anger and frustration at the continuing conflict.
In Turkey one of two anti-war demonstrations taking place in Istanbul turned ugly when a group of about 150 left-wing protestors refused police orders to disperse.
Riot police used batons and tear gas as they moved in to break up the group while the protestors retaliated by hitting policemen with sticks, the Anatolia news agency reported. Thirty-two protestors were detained.
There was also tension in the South Korean capital Seoul earlier when demonstrators burned the US flag and scuffled with riot police after more than 2,000 South Koreans marched on the US embassy to oppose the dispatch of 700 South Korean troops to Iraq.
Chanting “No war, no war,” many protestors carried portraits of US President George W. Bush showing a mock chest X-ray that portrayed a Nazi Swastika in place of a heart and an Iron Cross. Elsewhere the protest at the continuing US-led war was more peaceful.
In Italy anti-war protestors draped black banners over 16 bridges on the Tiber river in the capital Rome in an expression of grief at the mounting civilian death toll in the Iraq conflict.
The banners, ten metres (33 feet) long and three metres (10 feet) high, were put up by pacifists from the “Stop the War” organisation on bridges between the Tiber Island in the centre to the Duke of Aosta in the north.
In Germany 40,000 people formed a human chain in protest at the US-led war in Iraq, while a further 50,000 crowded into the capital Berlin.
The 50-kilometre (31-mile) chain stretched between the historic towns of Munster and Osnabruck in the northwest of the country where the two treaties to end the Thirty Years War, which took place between 1618-1648, were signed.
Meanwhile in Berlin the crowds gathered at the Victory Column at the heart of the city, according to police.—AFP
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