Germany's May Day turns nasty

2004-05-02 18:08

Berlin, Germany - Almost 200 people were detained and as many police hurt when officers clashed with youths and demonstrators in Berlin over the May Day weekend, city authorities said on Sunday.

City-state interior minister Ehrhart Koerting said 186 people were detained during rioting, 57 more than last year, and that 192 officers were injured, up 17 from 2003, but that he was satisfied with the way police handled events.

"For the first time in several years the cycle of violence in Berlin on May 1 has been broken," Koerting told reporters.

Police also said that the violence, which has become an annual ritual with no apparent political or union links around the traditional May 1 workers' holiday, was more muted than in recent years.

"The way May 1 played out vindicated the plan put in place by Berlin police. Excesses of the scale of those that were seen last year were absent," the police said in a statement.

About 8 000 officers were deployed in the German capital over the weekend to deal with several May Day rallies, a demonstration by the extreme-right NPD party and a counter-protest by leftists.

It all came on the weekend of the European Union's biggest-ever enlargement, festivities for which extra police were also mobilised.

The first clashes

The first clashes happened shortly after midnight on Friday on the margins of the traditional pacifist May Day assembly in Mauerpark, in eastern Berlin, in which some 4 000 people participated.

About 60 officers were injured as bottles, stones and other objects were hurled at their ranks, which had been heavily bolstered in anticipation of riots. Police said they detained 111 youths.

Then on Saturday, 52 people were detained after scuffles between the security forces and extreme left demonstrators protesting the neo-Nazi NPD march through the capital, police said.

Six people, including two police officers, were injured.

The trouble began after part of a group of about one thousand left-wing protesters tried to confront the NPD marchers. They then clashed with a section of the 2 200-strong police contingent mobilised to protect the neo-Nazi march.

The neo-Nazis, whose numbers were put at about 2 300, were taking part in a rally ahead of European elections in mid-June.

Delegations from the United States, Austria and Spain were among those taking part in the NPD march.

Other May Day gatherings went off more peacefully, but some violence was reported in Berlin's alternative Kreuzberg district on Saturday evening, where around 500 youths, many of them masked clashed with police.

- AFP