[Onthebarricades] Germany G8 Blockades 12 - profiles of activists

[Andy]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,486543,00.html

The Faces of Protest
On the inside of the fence, eight world leaders will be discussing the planet's most pressing problems. Outside, up to 100,000 demonstrators will be marching against them. But what do the protesters actually want? SPIEGEL ONLINE takes a closer look.

The faces of G-8 protest.
There will only be eight world leaders present at the G-8 summit in Heiligendamm this week. But as many as 100,000 protesters have decided to join them. People from all over the world are descending on Germany's Baltic Sea coast this week, with hundreds of different organizations staging dozens of sit-ins, marches, blockades and demonstrations. Anti-globalization organization Attac, with its 90,000 members from 50 different countries, is merely the largest among equals. 
The protests got started on Saturday in Rostock, with tens of thousands marching through the harbor city. The demonstration was marred by violence, largely from a small minority of stone-throwing anarchists. Now, the German police is concerned that the rioting could continue throughout the week.
An overwhelming majority of the protesters, though, say they have no interest in violence. And it is a colorful rainbow of groups: from Christians to anarchists, communists to human rights activists, environmentalists to politicians. Some want to block the summit, others just want to talk.
SPIEGEL ONLINE has put together the faces of protest for this year's G-8 summit. Just click on the menu below to see what the opponents of the G-8 want. 
  The Christian: Julia Bach, 31
 
  The Communist: Walter Listl, 59
 
  The Parliamentarian: Katja Kipping, 29
 
 
  The Idealist: Fabian Ekstedt, 19
 
  The Student: Rolf van Raden, 27
 
  The Retiree: Dorothea Härlin, 60
 
  The Socialist: Paul Wellsow, 29
 
  The Utopian: Lea Voigt, 21
 
  The Union Member: Christoph Ellinghaus, 37
 
Julia Bach's beef has nothing to do with US President George W. Bush or any of the other heads of state and government who will be meeting from June 6-8 in Heiligendamm. In the 31 year old's mind, they're all the same. 
For Bach, fundamental issues are at stake. As a Christian, she wants to make her position be heard: "Capitalism is anti-Christian," the religion studies student from Heidelberg says. "What room does this system have for solidarity among people?"
Since last week, she's been staying at a camp for G-8 opponents set up in the town of Reddelich, about 9 kilometers away from the site where the summit is to be held. Bach says she made the decision to travel to Heiligendamm more than a year ago. At first she planned to go alone, but then she decided to travel with friends from a Christian network. Her maxim comes straight out of the Bible: "Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy."
If you use this Bible passage as the measurement, Bach believes, then representatives of the G-8 aren't doing a very good job. "The G-8 makes decisions that affect the entire planet -- but they mostly help themselves with those decisions. What right do they have to do that? The G-8 has no democratic legitimacy."
Bach has a long history of attending protests. She's attended demonstrations against the transport of nuclear waste from German atomic power plants and she has protested at border camps to demonstrate against Germany's immigration policies. She has also taken to the streets in some cities to battle against right-wing extremism. She says, however, that she hopes there won't be an escalation or violence at Heiligendamm. "I don't believe in violence," she says.
Walter Listl is a busy man. Last week, he was in Munich showing his support for the striking workers from Germany's telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom. The next day, he headed for G-8-summit-site Heiligendamm, with flyers in the trunk of his car. 
The 59-year-old is the spokesman for the Munich branch of the German Communist Party (DKP) and he is helping to coordinate preparations and travel arrangements for the city's G-8 critics. "I have had an appointment almost every night over the past few weeks," says Listl, who works as a painter and decorator.
But it was worth it, "I feel the need to go to Heiligendamm, to be able to articulate what I think there." He wants to be able to show those back home watching TV "yes, you can do something." He won't use violence. "I am for peaceful militancy." Sit-in blockades, for example.
It is "primarily the police and the media" who are interested in violence. The former have to legitimize their deployment, the latter need the images. But the demonstrators' demands are pushed into the background: for example, that war should not be used to push through political aims or that developing nations have to be offered a way out of the cycle of debt.
Listl is a friendly down-to-earth guy from the post-war generation, and he talks a lot about justice. Many of his contemporaries made their careers in the public service and were involved in the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). "I want more fundamental changes than the Social Democrats, I am in favor of abolishing the capitalist system, of combating it -- not just reforming it," the communist says. Suddenly there is a glint of toughness in his eyes.
Compared with Attac's younger brand of protestors, Listl seems like a political type cast from the distance past. He was one of the founding members of the DKP back in 1968, experienced the historic collapse of East Germany ("I had a lot of hopes invested in that system"), has protested countless times against the Munich Security Conference, and stood as a candidate for Munich city council and then for the German parliament in 2005. It is a history of failure.
Listl is fully aware of this: "We won't upset anything -- we're just a handful of lefties." He no longer lives in hope of experiencing "any great revolutionary overthrows." But he wants to be a "spanner in the works." "I don't just live from day to day, I'm not one of those frustrated complainers -- it's good for me."
No, she won't spend the nights in a hotel outside Heiligendamm like other members of parliament. Katja Kipping has borrowed an old East German caravan from friends. "That's where I'll spend the nights in camp," she says. 
Katja Kipping, 29, from Dresden, is no ordinary demonstrator -- she's a professional politician, deputy leader of the Left Party in the Bundestag, Germany's lower house of parliament, and something of a figurehead of Germany's young leftists. She was one of the main speakers at Saturday's Rostock demonstration.
Ask her why she's protesting and against what, and she says: "I'm doing so for fundamental democratic reasons." The G-8 heads of state and government represent just 13 percent of the world population but get to decide on the fortunes of all people, she says.
"Hunger, climate disaster and war -- that's what the G-8 states stand for," says Kipping. She likes striking comments like these. The big industrial countries spent hundreds of billions of euros on arms each year rather than on development aid, they back the nuclear lobby, prevent the Third World from developing independently. The alternatives are similarly striking: "One should democratise and strengthen the UN , improve cooperation on energy and development, make debt forgiveness for the poor countries transparent.
Kipping has published a book which she says serves as a basis for discussion. It's called: "G-8 Summit of Injustice." "Unfortunately it's not on the bestseller list yet," she admits. She's travelled around Germany mobilizing opposition to the G-8 summit, and it will be hard to overlook her during the protests this week. The Left Party is erecting its own tent where it will hold debates in the market square of the town of Bad Doberan near Heiligendamm. Kipping will make a number of appearances there.
Fabian Ekstedt's goal for this week's G-8 summit is clear. "I don't want to be arrested," he says. On the Monday after the Heiligendamm summit he will be taking the exams for his high school diploma. "I hope the police will make it possible for me to be there." 
The 19-year-old is busy cramming for his exams, and the anti-G-8 protests will cost him a week's worth of study time. At least he was able to travel from his home in Bavaria to Germany's Baltic Sea coast cheaply: He managed to get hold of one of the much-in-demand €45 tickets for a special train that the anti-globalization group Attac had chartered from Munich to Rostock. He'll be returning next Saturday using German rail company Deutsche Bahn's special cheap weekend ticket, which allows the holder to travel on regional trains -- which tend to be slow. "I'll have 14 hours to study," he says.
It is a long way from Ekstedt's home town of Miesbach in the Bavaria foothills of the Alps to Heiligendamm on the Baltic coast -- politically as well as geographically. In the Bavarian state elections in 2003, the Christian Social Union (CSU) -- the conservative sister party of Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union -- won 66 percent of the vote. It's not exactly a very conducive atmosphere for criticism of globalization. But Ekstedt is defensive of the CSU. "Of course people sometimes say stupid things," he says. But there are also "tolerant members of the CSU," and he doesn't think that everything the party stands for is bad. "The good thing about the CSU is that they appeal to those voters who identify strongly with their homeland, which means these people don't get pushed in the direction of far-right parties like the NPD."
Homeland? It's a curious word for a G-8 protestor to be using. "People need their homeland," he says. As the son of a Swede and a German, he knows that from first hand experience. "When I finally breathe Swedish air again after a long time, then I feel really good," he says.
In the beginning, he saw himself simply as left-wing, Ekstedt says. Later he took to the Cuban variant of communism with its "national orientation." But the high school student has since lost his taste for Cuban communism. Now he sees himself as an "absolute democrat," he says.
When he was 15, he took part in a protest against the annual Munich security conference and formed political friendships that he still has today. "We sat together for hours, drinking beer and discussing politics," he recalls. "We debated the relative merits of communism versus anarchism, going back and forth." And the result of all those late-night discussions? "We are closer now because we talked about all these things. And democracy is the most obvious solution for us."
In March, Ekstedt and a friend started a Web site called Blick in die Zukunft ("A Look into the Future"), which he describes as an "unofficial association" for political discussions. He also wants to use a strategy based on dialogue in Heiligendamm -- he says he would like to speak to the radical anarchists, to "try to influence them."
The anarchists are sometimes open to manipulation, he says -- which is why he wants to "watch out that they don't get provoked into violence, for example from police in disguise." For Ekstedt, violence is only acceptable in self defense: "The word is worth more than the stone."
At first, it wasn't the big political questions of the day that motivated Rolf van Raden. It was his wallet. In 2003, university students across Germany took to the streets to protest against the introduction of tuition -- and van Raden was among them. "The beginning had to do with being personally affected," the 27-year-old says. Soon, though, the political science student -- who also studies literature and theater studies -- at the University of Bochum became much more political. He decided to take the path of resistance. 
His first step was that taken by many university students: He spent hours talking politics -- about government plans to cut education subsidies and to limit the country's generous social welfare system -- with others at the university. He also sought out contact with university employees whose jobs were in danger from the cuts. Soon, he was discussing unemployment initiatives. "At some point, it became clear to me that it doesn't make sense when each interest group only fights alone for a single issue," van Raden says. Even the national level isn't enough. "For a long time," he says, "there has been no movement that says 'no.'"
Van Raden's position is a differentiated one. He doesn't reject globalization out of hand. "I don't want to be seen as a critic of globalization," he says. Indeed, he thinks the label is misleading.
For him, the important thing is the policies being pursued by the G-8 nations. He is upset, for example, by the way Europe seeks to prevent Africans from immigrating via its southern flank using fences and razor wire. "Money can move freely but people can't," he points out. "People's living conditions aren't being globalized -- instead, the living conditions of many people are getting worse."
Van Haden is planning to protest in Heiligendamm with some 500 students. But still, the G-8 remains merely a symbol for him. "Really, one has to fight against the power structures."
Chiapas, Mexico, 1996. Dorothea Härlin arrived from Mexico City with a truck full of provisions at a village of the Zapatistas -- a guerrilla movement which had turned to weapons in the fight for the rights of the native population. What she saw there changed her perspective. "People there have nothing, and yet they build their own villages and their own world," Härlin says. "That really impressed me." 
The 60-year-old, who retired early from teaching for health reasons, has been married for 30 years, has two children, and lives in Berlin's Kreuzberg district. Since her trip to Chiapas, Härlin has been to four World Social Forums in Nairobi, Porto Alegre and Caracas, where globalization critics from around the world meet. Now she is an activist for Attac.
For the G-8 protest, she's organized the project, "Speak With Them." Among others, three women from the slums of Buenos Aires and Nairobi are taking part. Härlin collected foundation money for their travel and is putting them up in her apartment. "These are people who don't wait for the state to change something. They are doing it themselves," she says.
When she speaks, Härlin's hands move through the air as if she's trying to grab hold of the world. This happens often when she describes individuals who effect change by working together. She calls it the "bee sting tactic," where many small bees can slay a large animal -- like the G-8.
Härlin criticizes Germany's Left Party, though. Many don't see that the world is too complex to explain with simple slogans, she says. It is a lesson she has taken from her life.
In 1968, Härlin moved from her parent's middle-class home in Stuttgart to Berlin. As a teacher, she thought she could replace grades with self-determination, like the students at Berlin's Free University, where she studied history and political science. It didn't work. In 1968, she says she still dreamed of a great revolution, but today there are a number of mini-revolutions. Reversing the privatization of the Berlin water management was one small victory for Härlin.
"In order to look at myself in the mirror every morning, I need to rebel," she says. "Even if it's only in small ways."
He studied political science. He has been working for a while for a Left Party member of Thuringia's state parliament. And he runs his youth office in Erfurt. But for the next few days it wont be politics as usual for 29-year-old Paul Wellsow -- it will be about something much bigger: "I believe the summit in Heiligendamm and the leadership of the G-8 states are the focal point of wrong-headed policies," he says. "I want to deliver a clear 'No' to these policies." 
"These policies" -- for him they include "war worldwide, poverty and the basic dismantling of the welfare state." The Heiligendamm summit should become a summit for protesting "against the state of the world." To prepare, Wellsow has been traveling across Thuringia for the past few months, speaking, informing, and mobilizing. Even in cities where the left-wing politics tend to be sidelined, such as the deeply conservative Catholic Heiligenstadt: "There is now a certain receptive consciousness there," he says. "A big success for us."
Wellsow and other groups have set up a Thuringian anti-G-8 network. Several hundred members of this alliance are making their way to Heiligendamm to protest. Wellsow is going in the Left Party bus. "I want to see what happens there." Will there be violence? When a big group of people come together then there is always an increased likelihood of violence, he says, "like football games." But he adds: "I categorically reject violence."
The way Wellsow sees it, the G-8 states are pursuing a policy of violence. He doesn't want to use that to justify violence. "But it's important to think about it."
If you ask Lea Voigt what she does when she's not blockading the G-8 summit, she seems like a relatively normal 21-year-old student. She heads to the bar; she watches "Gilmore Girls" on television; she reads cheap romance novels. "'Block G-8' is the craziest thing I've ever done," Voigt, from Bremen, says. 
But the spokeswoman for the alliance "Block G-8" has, in reality, been preparing for this moment since she was in the sixth grade. Then, the issue was a budget cut for a local youth center. Later, when she was 15, she organized her first school strike. After that, she became the speaker for her school class in Bremen, joined the leftist youth group "solid" and backed a far-reaching school reform program. She is a politically engaged young woman -- indeed, the magazine Emma wrote a portrait of her a couple of years ago.
"I can imagine a non-capitalist society," Voigt says. "Materially, people must have the possibility to be free." At the moment, she says, this kind of freedom doesn't exist -- and the symbol for that lack of freedom is the G-8. Voigt is aware that what she has to say sounds a lot like the philosophy of Karl Marx where he talks about the ownership of the means of production. Which is why she's a bit hesitant to use Marxist jargon -- her vision for the world shouldn't sound like a stale, 19th century philosopher.
She first became aware of the "Block G-8" from a flier she saw at her university in Bremen. And at first, she reports, she was skeptical. "I never really liked the summit-hopping engaged in by G-8 opponents," she says. Then she uses another phrase that she doesn't really like to use: "form of protest," something G-8 opponents say constantly. "It fascinated me from the very first meeting that people from widely divergent backgrounds take part and each finds their own form of protest," Voigt says. In the mean time, she has become the group's speaker -- and at the end, she'll be there at the form of protest all G-8 opponents have agreed upon: the blockade.
For Christoph Ellinghaus, globalization is about how each individual is affected in his workplace, whether in Germany or India. The 37-year-old trade unionist is joining the G-8 protests in Heiligendamm because "the G-8 is the symbol of neo-liberal globalization. " Ellinghaus is the youth secretary for engineering and metalworking trade union IG Metall, and he's responsible for the eastern part of the state of Thuringia, in what used to be East Germany. 
"Working longer for less money," that's the impact of neo-liberal globalization that everyone can already feel in their workplace, says Ellinghaus. German wage negotiations for example are directly linked with the problems of India's metalworkers. And in exactly the opposite way than employers suggest: "They're using it to exert pressure -- on us in terms of lower wages, and on them in terms of quality." He calls it a "game played by the multi-national companies."
Of course a trainee in an eastern German steel plant is better off than his counterpart in India. But both are confronted with the same problem.
He wants to lobby for alternatives in Heiligendamm. "In the 1990s it looked as if there was no alternative to this development. But then the Seattle summit happened." Seattle sent a signal that it is possible to have a different world. That is the opportunity that Heiligendamm represents, he says.
There's been a lot of discussion in recent months, at seminars and conferences. Ellinghaus will camp out near Heiligendamm with around 40 other young IG Metall members. "We want to protest where the rulers can see us," as far as that is possible. Non-violently, of course, in the best trade union tradition. "But in the end the behavior of the police is a decisive factor in how these protests pan out."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070625/eshelman
Are We Disturbing? 
Robert S. Eshelman
 
Bad Heiligendamm, Germany

 
As the leaders of the G-8 nations met at the opulent resort of Bad Heiligendamm along the Baltic Sea in Northern Germany, an international assortment of social justice activists opposed to the group's policies took up residence in three protest camps in and around nearby Rostock, carrying out an ambitious agenda of daily protests and direct action blockades, as well as an alternative summit. 
Things kicked off dramatically on Saturday, June 2 when nearly 100,000 people took to the streets of Rostock for the "Make Capitalism History" march. As the crowd reached the city's hundred-year-old harbor, where the demonstration was scheduled to end, police attacked a block of protesters, setting off a full-blown riot. Demonstrators set cars alight and pelted police with cobblestones excavated from the city streets. For their part, the police beat and detained those they could get their hands on. More than 1,000 were injured, equally split between police and protesters, and over 150 were arrested. 
For days, much of the media ran with stories of violent protesters who would destroy Rostock, rather than discussing the police violence and provocation at Saturday's protest and leading up to the summit. Furthermore, this discourse avoided a substantive discussion of protesters opposition to the G-8 itself. 
On Wednesday, following three days of peaceful marches focusing on agriculture and food sovereignty; immigration; and militarism, thousands of protesters flowed out of the camps during the early morning hours and took up blockades of the Rostock-Laage airport, where G-8 leaders were arriving, and the gates that led through the 12 kilometer long, two and a half meters high fence surrounding Bad Heiligendamm. 
At Camp Reddelich--overflowing with 7,000 campers and a hub of blockade organizing activity--spirits where high. Around 9:30 am thousands headed for the fence, hiking under the hot sun and over rolling hills blanketed with fields of grain. When groups of protesters encountered lines of police along the way, some of them stopped, some kept moving forward, some squatted in the waist-high grasses, others ran. The squads of police, burdened with helmets, body armor, shields and batons, were no match for the fluid and improvisational streams of protesters and their overwhelming numbers. Within hours, the two gates into Bad Heiligendamm were blocked. 
"It was awesome. There were rivers of people flowing through the fields," said Lisa Fithian, an Austin, Texas-based activist and veteran summit protester shortly after she returned to the camp. "It was a realization of thousands of peoples' power." 
At the east gate into Bad Heiligendamm, some 5,000 protesters occupied the road leading up to the gate as well as the railroad tracks running parallel to it. People were resting and sleeping on the pavement. Some read. Underneath the hundred-year-old trees of the historic Lindenallee, others listened to music pumping from the sound truck. Frequent announcements about negotiations with the police interrupted the soundtrack. 
Among the blockaders was Nadine Fischer, an unemployed mother from Jüterborg, Germany, a small town outside Berlin. "I'm here because I want to do something against the G-8 summit," she said, her shoes and pants cuffs muddied from days spent at Camp Reddlich. "Hundreds of millions are spent for the summit and nothing is done for social services in Germany." 
The state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, within which Bad Heiligendamm and Rostock are located, is among the poorest in Germany. Unemployment tops 15 percent in many areas and promises of economic opportunities following unification have not materialized. 
The next day, over at the western gate, police violently broke up the blockade. Multiple water cannons doused the crowd with highly pressurized water that emitted a low mechanical hum as it was released from the vehicle's turrets. In front of the behemoth cannons were lines of cops, periodically pepper-spraying protesters and pulling them behind their lines. 
Karl Redrich, a protest medic from Dresden, summed up the day's casualties: a broken arm, one broken shin, many concussions and broken eardrums, and a lost eye. 
Yet in the face of this brutality, protesters remained steadfast in their non-violent resistance. Often, as the police pushed lines of demonstrators back from the road leading to the gate, the retreating protesters would raise their arms above their heads in order to show that they sought to avoid further violent escalation. 
Back at Camp Reddlich, Fithian echoed a common refrain during the blockades and a consistent rebuttal to police allegations of protester violence. "We don't need anything but our bodies," she said "because were putting our bodies on the line." 
Throughout the week, many other protesters sported canvas patches that were pinned to their shirts or pullovers that read, Stören wir?, Are we disturbing? It was a question posed about the demonstrations to non-participants. Are they bothersome? But it was also put to fellow demonstrators. Are we disturbing enough? 

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