TIME EUROPE
WEB EXCLUSIVE
A Clash of Civilizations
By JAMES GRAFF Davos
Luckily for him, the distinguished, portly gentleman ducking into a side alley was unknown to the rowdy band of protesters moving toward him up Davos' main street Saturday afternoon. Peter D. Sutherland, founding Director-General of the World Trade Organization and Chairman of Goldman Sachs International, was unimpressed by the protesters' attempt to disrupt the annual World Economic Forum meeting. But it would have been unwise to stick around and argue the point. "All this does is antagonize people to the very ngos they're trying to help," said Sutherland.
The several hundred demonstrators, ranging from peaceful French grandmothers to militant Austrian anarchists, weren't interested in dialogue. To cries of "international solidarity" and "no peaceful hinterland," they broke through one police barrier but were stopped some 500 meters from the Davos Congress Center. Along the way, a pack of masked demonstrators brutally stomped on a fallen policeman while others trashed the local MacDonald's, throwing wooden clubs and a heavy steel crowd barrier through the windows and spraying "Foodkiller" on the facade.
The melee seemed to have quickly escaped the control of the several hundred police on scene to protect the estimated 2,000 Forum participants. Police spokesman Alois Hafner said several police had been wounded, one with a serious head injury, and that at least two arrests had been made. "We had been told that if the police weren't violent, [the protesters] wouldn't be," he said. "That promise was broken." Demonstrators threw sharpened sticks, bottles and snowballs spiked with firecrackers. "It's like a state of siege out there," said one bewildered WEF participant.
For all the drama, though, no one's mind was changed as two visions of globalization clashed on the streets of this remote Swiss village. "Don't leave the little guys out," U.S. President Bill Clinton admonished world economic leaders at the Congress Center earlier on Saturday. "Develop a shared vision." But his more sensitive take on globalization is no more acceptable even to the few protesters in the streets outside who had heard it. "It's the same old Clinton rhetoric," said Brent Blackwelder, President of Friends of the Earth USA and a wef participant. "All forms of protest are beneficial, since rational discourse is insufficient in getting through to the transnationals."
Blackwelder doesn't condone violence, but a vocal minority of the protesters on the other side of the barricade did. "I'm happy with the way this is coming off," said a 23-year-old store clerk from Basel who wouldn't give her name. "This is where all the capitalists, imperialists and job-killers are, and they're hearing us." Collette Bonnal, a retired teacher from Aveyron and follower of French farm protester José Bovén, was only slightly less sanguine. "We'll have no effect on the Forum," she said. "But I hope we will on the sensibility of the public at large." As she stood at the main square in Davos in the early evening--as some protesters banged drums, danced and juggled while a few others were trying, and failing, to break the plexiglass windows of the Sheraton Hotel--one thing was certain: wherever government and business leaders gather to talk about globalization, protest is sure to follow.
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