 The
mobilisation for S26 (September 26th) was the first event of this kind
that took place in a Central or Eastern European country. About 12,000
people from all over the world came to Prague to protest against the Summit
of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) in September
2000. It was a long and sometimes painful task to organise not only the
protest actions, but the whole campaign. But looking back on it, I think
it was the best thing that could have happened to the Czech anarchist
(or to be more general - anti-authoritarian) movement. We learned a lot.
First of all, however, I would like to point out that the views expressed
here are my own and don’t necessarily reflect the opinions of other
organisers or participants.
The
Beginnings of the Mobilisation
A kind of predecessor to the Prague 2000 mobilisation were the street
parties organised in Prague and Brno. The first one took place in Prague
in 1998, was a part of the worldwide Global Street Party and was organised
by people from Earth First!, the collective of the radical newspaper Konfrontace
(Confrontation) and others who later became the Czech Reclaim The Streets
group. This action was very important for our movement in terms of being
the first Czech reaction to a global mobilisation. It introduced the problem
of economic globalisation to the activists and the public, it connected
protest with a party, some international contacts were established and
also the Czech police showed how brutal they can be.
The idea of organising something against the IMF/WB Summit appeared for
the first time during an informal meeting in July 1999. It was attended
by people who were involved in organising the street parties. At that
time most of us hardly knew anything about these two financial institutions,
and we had only a vague feeling that there was something wrong with them.
We agreed to collecting information and meeting again in the autumn.
In September 1999 a couple of us went to Slovenia where we met a friend
who worked for A-Seed Netherlands at that time and had more experience
with international protests than we had. She offered us help, we talked
a lot and then decided that we really wanted to organise something. Regular
meetings started to be held in Prague but it wasn’t until January
2000 that concrete decisions started to be made.
The beginnings of INPEG (Iniciativa Proti Ekonomicke Globalizaci - Initiative
Against Economic Globalisation) were very chaotic. Nobody had a clear
idea of what to do, most of the people were only talking without starting
to do anything concrete and also the system of working groups was ‘discovered’
by us quite late. But everything got better with time. Also, the idea
of what INPEG should look like and what role in the whole mobilisation
it should play changed a lot over time from being a very loose platform
with nearly no organisational structures to a quite well organised and
big body, which had a lot of characteristics of a real organisation. An
important point was also the Seattle protests against the World Trade
Organisation (WTO) in 1999 when we got an idea of what the whole mobilisation
should look like.
One question we were discussing from the very beginning was who we should
and should not work with. In December 1999 we met with the NGOs (Non-Governmental
Organisations) - Czech Jubilee 2000, CEE Bankwatch, Friends of the Earth
etc. - and decided not to collaborate officially with each other. Our
opinions, goals, methods and strategies were of course totally different.
For example, some of them participated in discussions with the IMF and
World Bank and participated in the cultural programme at Prague Castle
organised by Vaclav Havel, the former Czech President, whereas we refused
to sit down and eat sandwiches with the financiers while people in other
parts of the world were starving. Furthermore, none of the NGOs besides
Jubilee 2000 wanted to organise any kind of demonstrations. Nevertheless,
the NGO people helped us a lot with gaining information about the IMF
and WB, which was very difficult, especially when focusing on Eastern
and Central European countries, and later a lot of them joined our protests
in a personal capacity. So there was some kind of unofficial symbiosis
working quite well.
However, it was more difficult to decide which groups should be involved
in INPEG itself. There was quite a clear agreement of not involving dogmatic
Bolshevik or Trotskyist groups or the youth organisation linked to the
Czech Communist Party. We only met a couple of times with them to agree
on concrete dates and places for our actions so that they didn’t
clash with one another. These groups organised their own platform called
Stop IMF! On the other hand, however, we agreed to Socialisticka Solidarita
joining INPEG. This is a sister organisation of the British Socialist
Workers Party (SWP) which didn’t have a good relationship with Czech
anarchists at all, but as we knew this mobilisation would be huge we decided
to put aside our differences for the moment and to collaborate.
The other groups that joined INPEG were the Czechoslovak Anarchist Federation,
the collectives which produce the radical newspaper Konfrontace and the
anarchist magazine A-kontra, Earth First! and individuals from Amnesty
International and environmental NGOs (Children of the Earth and NESEHNUTI
- Independent Social-Ecological Movement). There were also, of course,
individuals involved who weren’t organised in any kind of group.
So to summarise, the groups mobilising against the IMF and World Bank
Summit were as follows: the informative and lobbying campaign of the NGOs;
the informative and direct action mobilisation of the Stop IMF! platform,
small actions organised by the Federation of Social Anarchists (a small
section of the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers Association)
who didn’t want to join INPEG; small protests organised by other
individuals or small groups of various political orientations; and finally
INPEG who organised the biggest mobilisation.
The
Character of INPEG
In spring 2000 we agreed on the character of INPEG. Firstly we decided
not to register it at the Interior Ministry which is a thing that every
official organisation has to do. The base of the organisation were the
working groups which included Technical, Media, Health, Outreach, Street
Actions, Financial, Borders, and others. The activities of each group
were periodically presented to the other groups during general meetings.
The structure was non-hierarchical and we agreed to make decisions by
consensus which resulted in some very long discussions. All of the meetings
were held in Prague, meaning that people from other places wanting to
get involved either ended up travelling a lot or moving to Prague.
A thing that is not often mentioned but was very important, particularly
given the local Czech conditions, was the question of money. We decided
to apply for funding from some projects and small foundations (Dutch XminY
and Alert) and founded a fake NGO called Spolecnost 2000 (Society 2000)
for this purpose. For the rest we decided to ask for donations from the
international community as we did not want to get money from any big foundation
or organisation that could have been supported by multinational companies
or financial institutions. And the result was amazing! All in all, we
spent around 1.3 million Czech Crowns (CZK) on the mobilisation (a little
over 40,000 Euro) and the majority we got from small donations from all
over the world!
A very controversial thing from the beginning was the question of violence.
On one side there was the fact that we felt a very strong pressure from
the mass media and also knew the opinion of the majority of the Czech
public which is strongly against any kind of violence. On the other side,
not many of us had ethical problems with violence against property but
the position on violence against humans or the question of the level of
self-defence was not really clear. So we decided to write down a statement
which said that INPEG will not initiate any kind of violence (this was
later misunderstood - nobody was criticising active self-defence). We
also officially declared our plans for the non-violent blockade of the
Congress Centre where the Summit was to be held.
International
Participants and Volunteers
The Czech movement (despite receiving help from Slovak comrades) was,
and remains, comparatively small. After some time we realised that it
was simply too much work for the (approximately) 30 Czechs involved with
INPEG, so we asked internationals for help. Our first volunteers came
in spring 2000 and were from Britain and Norway. There were some initial
difficulties with translation from Czech to English, but this problem
was dealt with as time went on. The collaboration with internationals
was very instructive for us. It was also important to show the Czech public
that we were organising ourselves on an international level - there had
never been a protest joined by internationals before in our country.
The first very interesting thing was the comparison between Czech and
international female activists. I had had the feeling for a couple of
years that most of the Czech females weren’t very enterprising and
independent and a lot of Czech males didn’t mind this situation.
In INPEG there weren’t many Czech women or girls who had been involved
for very long - most of them had become active in the last few months
or weeks and they were in the Medical group. I think this was a very typical
kind of work they were doing at that time (cooking, health care) - whilst
very few (or more accurately, none) of them were involved in the Financial,
Technical, Street Actions, or Borders groups. The international females
were quite the opposite: very energetic, active, self-confident and independent.
 The
nearer S26 got, the more internationals came, and the communication between
them and the Czechs got worse - some of them didn’t meet any Czech
people in the first days they were here and wondered where we had disappeared
to. One problem encountered at the INPEG offices was that the internationals
couldn’t do any telephone calls and other stuff when Czechs weren’t
working there. The problem was that we were overloaded not only with INPEG
work but also had to go to school or university, had jobs or had to take
care of our families. So the internationals co-ordinated on their own,
took care of the newcomers and mostly lived their own lives. The situation
got a little bit better at the action camp in the beginning of September
when a lot of us got drunk together, fell in love with each other and
did a lot of crazy things - but it wasn’t the solution.
The question very often asked by internationals was whether the actions
they were planning were suitable for the Czech situation. I was very impressed
at the international meetings for example by the Italian White Overalls
(Tute Bianche), who told us a lot about how they organised actions in
their country, and we agreed upon actions in a way that was acceptable
for both sides. In general, it was nice to work with these international
groups who took part in the international meetings before S26 because
they respected the Czech point of view. However, there were a lot of internationals
(and some Czechs too) who didn’t participate in preparing the actions
but took part in rioting on the blue march and the window smashing in
the evening. These people didn’t take responsibility for anything
and hadn’t spent over a year working on the mobilisation. Later
they just went back home and left the INPEG people on their own with all
the problems that resulted from the violence: negative public perception,
police harassment (but this wasn’t too bad), attacks by media, death
threats, verbal and sometimes physical attacks on INPEG spokespeople on
the streets etc.
An interesting point was a man called Jan Urban (a former dissident and
politician) who somehow appeared in June and said he wanted to help us.
A lot of Czech people didn’t have a good feeling about him. Nobody
knew where he came from or what exactly he wanted. So the Czechs agreed
to stop communicating with him but he was very aggressive about being
in contact with INPEG or anybody who was involved in the September actions,
and started to develop international contacts. The internationals didn’t
know about him and some of them started to negotiate with him (he offered
some office space and things like that) and didn’t tell the Czechs.
Later we got some indications that he worked for the Interior Ministry
and we are sure that one of his aims was to push us into a position where
we only organised symbolic protests.
What Did the
Mobilisation Look Like?
The INPEG mobilisation did not only consist of S26, and the whole campaign
was much more than just one big mass protest. Our work was divided into
two parts: outreach and direct action on the streets. We planned to organise
an Art of Resistance Festival too, but this finally failed. Apart from
this, INPEG organised a solidarity demonstration with the protests against
the IMF in Washington in April 2000. There were also some accompanying
actions organised in the spring, not exclusively by INPEG but by some
of its members or sympathising groups (e.g. anarchist Mayday and street
parties).
The informative part of the campaign started in late spring. We published
the newspaper Kontrast (sporadically before, and daily during the protests),
created a website and printed thousands of fliers, stickers and posters.
Every group involved in INPEG could also print its own material about
the IMF and World Bank. A very important part of the campaign were the
discussions at cultural events (such as alternative music concerts) or
at universities and secondary schools. We tried to create a counterbalance
to the brainwashing campaign the Czech Interior Ministry started, but
of course our activities were limited by money, people and possible places
where we were allowed to speak. The finale of all of this was the alternative
counter-summit a couple of days before the financial summit. It took place
in cinemas and houses of culture in Prague and we invited a lot of speakers
from various continents. The counter-summit was attended by hundreds of
people.
From the beginning there was a very complicated relationship with the
media that was being fed information by the police, the Interior Ministry
and politicians. One of the main arguments used against us to convince
the public of our aggressiveness and violence was, of course, Seattle.
On the other hand some politicians and also the leader of the biggest
trade union officially spoke out for the right to protest (but only peacefully).
We also won a law suit when one of our demonstrations was banned, but
we wanted to show that we didn’t only demonstrate and so we organised
a series of small creative happenings which were accepted quite well.
After some months we found a couple of journalists that wrote in a positive
way about the protesters and sometimes also added information about why
we were protesting. In general, the articles became a little bit more
positive. But everything changed after S26, as the typical media hysteria
started and the reality of S26 got lost.
Two days before S26 we organised one smaller demonstration, and one day
previous to this, an anti-fascist demonstration organised by the Anti-Fascist
Action also took place. The international day of action was set for September
26th, the opening day of the Summit. I don’t want to go into too
much detail here about what exactly took place as I think there has already
been a lot written about it. However, just to summarise: in the morning
of S26 about 12,000 people came to the Namesti Miru square to gather for
a colourful carnival and to listen to some speeches. I guess that at least
two thirds of the protesters were international. After noon we split into
four marches: yellow led by the Italian White Overalls, pink made up of
socialists, a pink-silver carnival march and the blue one with the most
radical participants. The blue march was more or less anarchist, but I
think I don’t have to point out that this is not the reason why
it became the ‘violent march’.
The results of S26 in numbers were as follows: Doctors attended to 123
policemen and 142 protesters, INPEG medical volunteers gave basic help
to 350-400 people at the streets, 30 of them were seriously injured and
sent to hospital. During the protests there were 859 people arrested,
330 of them were internationals. The violence in the police stations was
the most massive and brutal since 1989. Interestingly, it was only internationals
who were attacked in custody - they were then kicked out of the country
immediately after release so that they couldn’t lodge complaints.
I don’t know of any Czech protesters being injured in police custody
during the Summit. Straight after the protests, 20 people were charged
with participating in riots, destroying property or attacking policemen,
18 of them internationals and two Czechs. In the days after S26, solidarity
demonstrations for the imprisoned people took place in Berlin, Dresden,
Stockholm, Paris, Madrid, Vienna, London, Rome, Milan, Barcelona, Oslo,
Bratislava and other international cities and, of course, in Prague too.
The Czech police had been allocated 89 million CZK (3 million Euro) for
the operation around the Summit. The former Interior Minister Stanislav
Gross later said he believed he had used the money efficiently and dismissed
complaints about police brutality as a conspiracy of mostly international
“extremists”.
The
Things Which Worked, And Those That Did Not…
In general, the mobilisation was a success. One obvious reason for this
is the fact that the Summit was ended a day earlier than planned, and
the protests were at least one of the reasons why. We also received a
lot of media attention, and even though it was mostly negative, we were
able to pass on basic information to the Czech public, i.e. that the IMF
and World Bank exist, and that there are a lot of people in the world
who don’t agree with what they are doing. Neither of these institutions
were well known in the Czech Republic before S26. The issue of economic
globalisation had been brought to peoples’ attention - of course,
the mass media were more of a problem than a useful tool, but that’s
another discussion. S26 was the biggest protest action of its type in
the Czech Republic, and 12,000 people on a demonstration is, for our conditions,
a really big turn out. The mobilisation really helped the progress of
the Czech and Slovak movements.
So what worked well? We organised a big and colourful protest action and
a very good informative campaign. We were able to invite a lot of interesting
people to the counter-summit. A lot of new connections and relations were
created both on the local and international level. But a lot of mistakes
were made too.
First, the people from Socialisticka Solidarita together with their international
comrades broke their promise and did not act according to the plan of
the four marches and instead of joining the pink march, they joined the
yellow march, which resulted in a very strong yellow march (maybe 6,000
people) and a weak pink one (maybe some hundreds of people). This led
to an incomplete blockade of the Congress Centre. They were also very
active in the INPEG outreach working group and used this to send their
own propaganda material to people who contacted INPEG.
We knew that the most radical people would join the blue march, but we
didn’t expect that level of violence. Some of the violence seemed
not to make sense from a strategic point of view and later became an excuse
for the police brutality which followed. Because of this INPEG distanced
itself from this violence which was later criticised by many internationals.
We also weren’t able to mobilise a large number of Czech participants
for several reasons. Firstly, it was difficult to illustrate the negative
impacts of the IMF/WB policies as there are barely any concrete projects
led by these two institutions in the Czech Republic. Secondly, the idea
that only two alternatives exist, Bolshevism or capitalism, is widespread
in the Czech Republic and capitalism is, of course, preferred. We weren’t
able to address these issues properly. One has also to keep in mind that
the culture of protest is quite new in our country and that people simply
aren’t used to going on to the streets to demonstrate their opinion.
Apart from some details, we learned three main lessons. First, to deal
with the violence question before the protests more carefully, and to
be more careful about what we tell the media. Some people have begun to
argue for a boycott of the media during protests - simply to refuse to
have any contact with them. Second, some people showed a quite strong
dislike for working with any Marxists/Trotskyists/Bolsheviks again, and
third, we should have thought more about a strategy for after the day
of action - all our plans and thoughts ended with S26 and we didn’t
think about how to deal with the consequences.
We also missed the chance to discuss deeply the issue of Bolshevism, Trotskyism
and Marxism. Some Czechs started to do this in the spring but as we had
a lot of other things to do and some internationals argued that they didn’t
want to split the movement, we didn’t continue with it. I regret
this a lot as we weren’t able, for example, (as it hadn’t
been agreed upon before) to officially ask the Turkish Bolsheviks to take
down their banners at the S26 demonstration. They were carrying ‘hammer
and sickle’ flags, which is totally unacceptable, not only for Czech
anti-authoritarians but also for the public who still remember 40 years
of Bolshevik totalitarianism.
The last few days before S26 were very chaotic - we weren’t able
to meet regularly and circulate information properly, leading to a lot
of mistakes and misunderstandings. I think this is a problem that we have
to think about and have to try to be prepared for when mobilising, but
it can’t be avoided altogether.
The Czech
Movement After Prague 2000
INPEG was originally meant to be a temporary platform serving only for
the organisation of the Prague 2000 mobilisation but later some voices
appeared that wanted to keep it working for other future activities. Some
weeks after S26, representatives of the Czechoslovak Anarchist Federation
came with the demand that Socialisticka Solidarita should leave INPEG
because of the above mentioned reasons. A very long discussion started,
without coming to any clear conclusions, and INPEG stopped any kind of
activity just a couple of weeks later.
After we did the accountancy of INPEG’s expenditures, we realised
that about 200,000 CZK (6,700 Euro) were left and decided to give it to
the Infocafe Krtkova Kolona which was being founded at that time in Prague
and needed money for repairs.
This Infocafe is still working and although it is not attended by the
public very much (for various reasons) it has become an important place
where meetings can be held and various workshops and preparations for
actions can be done. Another thing that is a direct result of the mobilisation
is Prague Indymedia which was started in summer 2000 and still continues
its work.
I think the public perception of the anarchist, anti-authoritarian or
so-called anti-globalisation movement got worse after S26. Although this
was the result of the media hysteria which totally changed the reality
of S26, to be honest I think it was just a little bit too much violence
for Czech conditions. But one has also to distinguish between Prague citizens
and the rest of the Czech people who weren’t directly affected and
were later much more tolerant. This is one of the reasons why we did the
NATO mobilisation in 2002 in quite a different way.
The violence became an excuse for introducing new laws to deal with public
meetings and protests. Since September 2000, there haven’t been
any riots involving the radical left. Some politicians wanted to allow
the police to use rubber bullets against protesters, but this was eventually
rejected. In November 2000, the Ladronka squat in Prague was evicted.
It was the oldest Czech squat and the municipal authorities mentioned
the participation of squatters in the violent protests against the IMF/WB
as one of the reasons for the eviction.
The Prague 2000 mobilisation had a big influence on the Czech and Slovak
anarchist and anti-authoritarian movements. We learned how to organise
a big and diverse campaign, practised direct democracy, got a lot of international
and local contacts, are travelling much more now and were inspired by
the creativity of the internationals (banners, puppets, music etc. at
demonstrations). The positive effect was more qualitative than quantitative
(the movement did not get significantly bigger).
One of the most important lasting impacts of the Summit mobilisation is,
in my opinion, the encouragement of Czech and Slovak girls and women to
participate more actively in the movement. The number of active women
has risen quite a lot in the last four years, and the issues of anarcha-feminism,
sexism and even machismo within the movement itself have started to be
discussed. We now have an anarcho-feminist group in Prague doing really
good activities. I think it was because of the high number of international
female activists we met during the IMF/WB actions who could have served
as some kind of role models for us.
In 2002 we had the NATO mobilisation and, as mentioned above, it was quite
different from the IMF/WB one. In the biggest demonstration we had about
2,000 people, but seeing as the majority of them were Czech, it was also
a success. Especially considering the huge police and media intimidation
campaign that lasted for about half a year. We also did not want to gather
as many people as possible (we asked internationals for solidarity actions
in their own countries instead of all of them coming to Prague) and rather
focused on the informative part of the campaign. We had several reasons
for all of this: the intimidation campaign was incredibly intense; we
knew that a lot of internationals were simply afraid of the Czech police
(which we could totally understand); we did not have the energy and money
for a second S26; we were a little bit sceptical about the trend of ‘action-hopping’
and wanted to decentralise it as much as possible; and finally we didn’t
want to do the thing that everybody was expecting us to do. We kept everything
100% peaceful and at the main demonstration we gave a present to the Czech
police. It was a big paper tank with a broken muzzle and after this we
just collectively laughed at the police and left. It was a really good
feeling.
Prague 2000 meant a lot for the development of our movement and I think
I have presented some examples of that. But I also have to be critical
and say that the Czech movement could have learned more lessons. It is
mostly the fact that we aren’t able to organise any kind of long-term
campaign when we are not pushed by a financial or military summit which
I find disappointing. This was the case before 2000 and remains the case
today. We are doing a lot of things, but there is no continuity.
So what to say at the end? Despite the amount of problems and disappointments,
the summer of 2000 was just amazing!
Resources
and Further Reading
Do or Die Issue 9 pp.1-21.
See: www.eco-action.org/dod/
Film: Crowd Bites Wolf by Guerrilla Vision (December 2000). Available
from: www.cultureshop.org
Film: Love, Peace and Petrol Bombs by AK Kraak (October 2000): http://akkraak.squat.net
A collection of reports from the Working Groups involved in the Prague
2000 mobilisation can be found under www.travatools.com/takdem/takdem.htm
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