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Some 20 Police Hurt As EU Summit Protests Turn Violent
by Robert MacPherson
NICE, France (AFP) - Violent protests rattled the start Thursday of a major EU summit in Nice, with rampaging demonstrators defying both drizzle and tear gas to confront riot police.
Some 20 policemen were reported injured in running skirmishes mainly with Basque nationalists and opponents of globalization who tried to break the tight security cordon around the summit venue in this city on the French Riviera.
Riot police fired volleys of tear gas at youths who threw bottles and paving stones, smashed shop windows, looted office equipment and set fire to a bank in a street leading to the Acropolis conference center.
Vehicles belonging to the City of Nice were also wrecked.
Police said about 20 officers were injured, one of them seriously, while Patrice Spadoni, an organizer for the French protest group AC!, said that "25 to 30 people" had been arrested.
Spadoni confirmed that protesters had smashed the windows of the BNP bank that caught fire, but blamed a tear-gas grenade fired by police for igniting the blaze.
The prefecture of Alpes-Maritimes, the French department that includes Nice, said the protesters were "very determined, armed with baseball bats, iron bars and cans of gasoline."
So much tear gas was fired that some fumes got into the Acropolis ventilation system, causing French President Jacques Chirac to sneeze as he opened a pre-summit meeting with the leaders of EU candidate countries.
Speaking later to reporters, Chirac said the street violence had been "contrary to democratic principles," while French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin said "acts of violence distort the very causes that we are claiming to defend."
East of Nice, at the Italian border town of Ventimiglia, police battled about 1,200 communists attempting to get to the summit. They left at day's end in a train they dubbed the Global Action Express.
Some protestors in Nice meanwhile made tracks for Monaco, the glittering playground of the rich and famous just a half-hour away, to carry on their struggle against global capitalism.
In contrast to the violence, about 4,000 people joined an afternoon demonstration for a federal Europe that passed off without incident. Among them was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a veteran of the May 1968 student movement in France who today is a respected French Greens member of the European Parliament.
Thursday's violence broke out after several thousand people marched at dawn towards the center of Nice, chanting slogans such as "the world is not a commodity," and "police everywhere, justice nowhere."
Nice Mayor Jacques Peyrat, a member of Chirac's Rally for the Republic (RPR) party, regretted the incidents, as he walked down a shopping street littered with spent tear-gas shells, posters and graffiti.
"I'm not the boss today. I'm the mayor of a city who lent out his city, so to speak, and hoped that during the European summit that shops could stay open," said Peyrat, trailed by hecklers yelling "Peyrat! Fascist!"
On Wednesday around 50,000 trade unionists and other protesters from across Europe gathered in Nice to press demands for EU leaders to improve working and social standards in the 15-nation union.
Late on Wednesday, two policemen were slightly injured by stones after clashes with demonstrators near the Nice train station.
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