"Not against, but different": Impressions of Saturday's Demo

At 1pm, faces were smiling, painted and singing. The colors of peace were everywhere, in balloons, posters and towering puppets. We walked through the old town, towards the demonstration, with two sisters. Both in their '70s, they talked of surviving WWII, of the fall of the Wall. The air is full of the same need for change, they said, just as it was in 1989. They told of how difficult it had been to express their idealism, how even their church group has been scorned by the ever-watching eye of the GDR.

Their message had a nostalgic ring. As we walked together, they frequently mentioned how times had been good when the option was none other than to live together, and to live off one’s own land. “There is no reason for having strawberries in winter’, said one, ‘we did just fine with potatoes.” They wore stickers declaring, “Strike out illegitimate debts.” We need to forgive Africa of their debts, they told us, and stop stealing their wealth. We need to close this broadening gap between people: young and old, poor and rich, from here and from there.

As we stood on the street corner, the beginning of the parade began moving towards us, I tried to read their emotions in their eyes. “We are a bit scared,” they said, and hoped it would be a peaceful day. Before us young boys with spiked hair, dressed in black, beer bottles in hand, began chanting through a loudspeaker: boys who may not have even been born when the Wall came down.  Looking out silently towards the approaching crowd, the youngest sister turned to me and proudly said: “My car runs on canola oil.” Though perhaps puzzled by the intentions and the messages of these young people, she has nothing but their future in mind. What they have in mind, however, had yet to be seen.

We spoke with people from Denmark, Angola, Belgium, France: lawyers, Christians, students, parents, artists. Today they all intend to unite their different expressiona of hope into a clear voice, one peacefully denouncing the imbalance of G8 power. “Nicht dagegen, aber anders," read a bright pink slogan: “ Not against, but different”.

15:00

The air pulses with G8-themed French rap — "Where is the morality, the morality you talk of?" — and with the anticipation of the said 40,000 people (I'm certain there are more) who have come to the streets of Rostock today, shirts, costumes and banners unabashedly displaying their idealism and frustration with the status quo. People have come from everywhere it seems, with hope that their struggles to promote fair trade, freedom of movement, debt relief, and access to medicine will be validated by the powerful eight. The harbor is now hosting the reunion of this afternoon’s two marches. A stage is ready to entertain, the kiosks set up to feed.

Within minutes, though, the tension crescendos above the omnipresent hum of helicopters, which have now become beacons of where not to be. Underneath them, things are happening. The taut and ugly line between police and resistors is being drawn. Policemen stream the side-streets towards these locations, putting on their helmets, turning on their cameras. Their faces are young and, aside from their eyes, expressionless. They have come from all over Germany, and have been rehearsing this exact scene for months.

16:00

I am sitting in the front entrance to the dropping knowledge headquarters. The door has opened to reveal a stream of people rushing by. A loudspeaker’s plea booms around us, the words indecipherable. The door is now locked, and over the footfalls of the runners, the sound of helicopters nears. Just moments ago, here on our doorstep, a man with a peace-coloured scarf fought with a boy in black, whose blue eyes burned through the small hole of his cagoule. The peace-scarved man wanted him to throw out the stones that filled his pockets. He insisted he was using them for juggling. I asked the boy in black why he was here. "To fuck shit up" he said, looking me straight in the eye. He was shaking. "What would be your question to the G8 leaders?" He thought briefly: "Why don’t you die?" Did he have anything more eloquent to say, I asked, hopeful. He didn’t. A crowd of similarly dressed people were running our way and he left with them, his pockets still full of stones.

16:30

Esther has returned; her hair seems curlier than before, her eyes alive. "It's insane out there," she says. She tells me of what she caught on camera after I had left – “although the audio is unusable’, she says: ‘All you will hear is me saying: ‘I can’t believe this is happening, oh my god, oh my god.’” She filmed a protester being beat up by the police. ‘There was even, um – ” she says, pointing to her forehead – “Blood?” I ask; “Yes, there was even blood.”

17:15

A car down the street is burning furiously. Through the bushes, the black-booted feet of dozens of policemen pound by, heading elsewhere, no doubt somewhere more severe than the flaming carcass of some poor Rostock resident’s car. The helicopters make it hard to be heard, but then again no one seems inclined to speak. We all stand around in awe, peace flags drooping, faces tired.

***

The problem with the G8 Summit, so many people have been telling us today, is that eight people are in a position to represent the interests of the entire world. The injustice of the status quo is clear in the thousands of slogans assembled today. I can’t help but feel something similar is being played out here, today, though with different intentions and consequences. As the parade moved through the old town of Rostock, the colors and lively beats were suddenly eclipsed by a black-coated mass — The Black Block — their faces, for the most part, covered by scarves, cagoules, and sunglasses. The feeling around us had changed drastically and within minutes, fireworks and firecrackers were going off from within the mass, aimed at the wall of policeman anxiously watching, at the tall glass buildings, aimed, in fact, anywhere but at themselves. When rocks later were thrown, they were thrown into the crowd of demonstrators, thrown at the rainbow peace flags, at the puppets. I worry that these will once again become the images of G8 resistance, and that the black-masked boy’s crude words will resonate as today’s loudest voice of protest.