Berlin - Berlin's central Kreuzberg district cleaned up
Saturday after the worst May Day rioting by leftist and minority
youths in years had injured 273 police and left streets strewn with
debris.
Police detained 289 offenders during Friday evening's violence,
well up from the 139 caught one year ago for overstepping the bounds
in an annual May Day ritual that dates back to 1987.
Ehrhart Koerting, interior minister of the city-state of Berlin,
said it had been much more violent than in previous years.
The rioting, which was expected in advance by police and leftists,
began when 400 masked militants in a crowd of 5,000 anti-capitalist
demonstrators began hurling stones and bottles soon after a parade
began. Police dispersed the crowd and tried to catch the offenders.
Police deployed tear gas and pepper spray during hours of running
battles with an estimated 2,500 rioters, some of them minority
youths, who beat up lone policemen, set fire to trash and vehicles
and smashed windows.
An inflammable liquid was poured over two police officers and set
on fire, but the officers were uninjured thanks to colleagues who
doused the flames. Medical aid was also hampered when stones were
thrown at ambulance crews.
A sociologist, Dieter Rucht, rejected suggestions that the
fighting represented an upwelling of discontent among the poor amid
world recession, saying it was a 22-year-long tradition observed by a
militant leftist counterculture numbering about 5,800 Germans.
Berlin professor Rucht accused the media of egging on the violence
by predicting that the recession could lead to bloodshed.
'If no confrontation had developed, the public could have
concluded the militants were weak. From their point of view, they had
to act,' he said.
Some 6,000 riot police were deployed during Berlin's second night
of violence after clashes had begun Thursday evening, to be followed
by brawls with demonstrating neo-Nazis during the daytime Friday.
May Day is Europe's labour day, with trade unions and
left-of-centre parties holding orderly parades. In recent years,
neo-Nazis and the extreme left have used the workers' holiday for
their own shows of strength.
In the western city of Dortmund, police opened an inquiry against
280 neo-Nazis who attacked a parade of trade unionists with stones
and clubs Friday. A police union said neo-Nazis assaulted people and
police in five other cities on May Day.
On Saturday morning, Berlin sanitation crews cleared up debris and
road engineers drew up plans to restore cobbled street surfaces and
sidewalk paving ripped up by the rioters as ready ammunition.
In another German city, Hamburg, similar street fighting through
the night left a car gutted by fire and led to 20 arrests.
The leftists at the heart of the violence are linked to anarchist
movements in several other European cities and are hostile to the
police, who they regard as stooges of capitalism.
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