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.