A masked protester launches fireworks in the direction of riot police during a protest on July 7, 2017 in Hamburg, northern Germany, where leaders of the world`s top economies gather for a G20 summit.Protesters clashed with police and torched patrol cars in fresh violence ahead of the G20 summit, police said. German police and protestors had clashed already the day before at an anti-G20 march, with police using water cannon and tear gas to clear a hardcore of masked anti-capitalist demonstrators, AFP reporters said. / AFP PHOTO / Odd ANDERSEN (Photo credit should read ODD ANDERSEN/AFP/Getty Images)
Thousands of Group of 20 protesters marched through Hamburg on the final day of the summit, the largest demonstration yet at an event marred this week by looting, rioting and running street battles between black-clad anarchists and armored police with water cannon.
The Saturday gathering, which began near Hamburg’s main train station, had a carnivalesque atmosphere, with music and speakers on several stages. Protesters waved colorful banners with insignia for Germany’s anti-capitalist Left party, Turkish and Kurdish dissident groups, and labor and environmental organizations.
Police estimated about 20,000 turned out for the “Solidarity Without Borders” demonstration, which denounces G-20 leaders as being responsible for a “humanitarian and social disaster.” Organizers said they expected as many as 100,000 to turn out.
Hamburg Interior Minister Andy Grote said Saturday that the “immense brutality" of some activists over the last two days had led to more than 200 police officers being injured and about 260 protesters being detained. Grote estimated that 1,500 activists participated in rioting and looting on Friday night in the Schanzenviertel neighborhood. With many of these individuals still in Hamburg, the German port city of 1.7 million remained in lockdown mode.
As German Chancellor Angela Merkel hosts leaders including U. President Donald Trump, who had his first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Hamburg, the protests have proved at times overwhelming for city authorities and the almost 20,000 police on hand to maintain security.
"The G-20 is an anachronism and this summit especially is a fiasco for democracy," Katja Kipping -- co-chairwoman of the Left party, the largest opposition faction in German parliament -- told the crowd on Saturday. "Compared with Trump, Putin and Erdogan, Merkel doesn’t look very different."
Authorities for a second night on Friday grappled with protesters who rampaged through the Schanzenviertel, throwing bottles and Molotov cocktails, trashing store fronts and torching cars. The action took place near the Rote Flora, a theater that’s been occupied by left-wing activists since the 1980s. Police said some 500 assailants ransacked a supermarket in the area and torched it.
“The brutality, with the extremely violent chaos in Hamburg yesterday and the day before, is incomprehensible and outrageous,” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said, calling for the prosecution of those who committed such acts. “They are not protesters, they are criminals.”
Andreas Blechschmidt, a Rote Flora activist who helped organize an anti-capitalist demonstration broken up on Thursday with water cannon, condemned the violence by some radical elements as “politically and in substance wrong.”
“We had the impression that there was something self-reinforcing about these events -- and that the kind of militancy that poured onto the street was somehow intoxicated with itself,” Blechschmidt told broadcaster NDR.
Police deployed water cannon Friday to break up violent rallies, including one with thousands of demonstrators near the Elbphilharmonie concert hall, where G-20 leaders heard a classical music performance. Protesters had pelted armored police with stones.
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