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Anti-Trade Protesters Smash Davos Shops, Cars

By Reuters
DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) - Anti-free trade protesters tried on Saturday to force a way through police lines to disrupt the Davos conference of world business and political leaders and smashed windows of shops, cars and a restaurant.

Waving banners denouncing the annual gathering of the World Economic Forum in this normally quiet Swiss mountain resort as a ``meeting of murderers,'' the protesters were headed by men in black ski masks, some wielding sticks.

With them was militant French peasant leader Jose Bove, who had been invited, but refused, to take part in discussions at the Forum, which President Clinton addressed on Saturday as the protesters gathered.

Police equipped with water cannon halted the marchers some 500 yards from the Davos conference center.

Two or three policemen were injured, one when some demonstrators pulled off his helmet and began beating him around the head, witnesses said.

Police used pepper spray and rubber bullets against a handful of hardcore protesters.

Many of the demonstrators, who numbered between 1,000 and 1,500 according to witnesses, came to Davos by special bus and or by train. Three came down a mountainside by paraglider.

Police said many were believed to have entered Switzerland from Italy for the protest, permission for which had been denied by Davos city authorities on security grounds during Clinton's six-hour visit.

Permission has been given for a protest on Sunday, and as the demonstration petered out, many of the marchers said they would come back again then.

ECHOES OF SEATTLE

At a World Trade Organization (WTO) ministers' meeting in Seattle last month, thousands of anti-WTO demonstrators created havoc near the conference center, preventing ministers and negotiators from getting to meetings on the first day.

The window-smashing in Davos was small-scale compared to the attacks on property in Seattle, where marchers caused damage worth millions of dollars to shops and restaurants belonging to chains they accused of exploiting workers.

In his Davos speech, Clinton expressed strong support for the 135-nation WTO -- which the protesters have labeled the ''World Terror Organization'' -- but appealed to developing countries in the body to take note of the Seattle protests.

Mexico's President Ernesto Zedillo, speaking at the Forum on Friday, dismissed the protesters as an incoherent coalition of ''globaphobes.''

Participants in the week-long Davos meeting, which opened on Thursday, said the demonstrators would not change the course of discussions.

``It won't have any effect whatsoever,'' London Business School dean John Quelch said. ``I think this is a very unfortunate distraction. I hope it does not knock the very positive messages of the president (Clinton) off the front pages.''

Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company

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