By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Oct 5 2000 (IPS)

Swiss activists occupied International Monetary Fund (IMF) headquarters here Thursday to protest the abuses committed against the demonstrators who were arrested in Prague during last week’s meeting of international financiers.

The protesters in Geneva affirm that the Czech police brutally beat the detainees last week, which include 20 foreigners, half from Eastern Europe. An undetermined number of Czech citizens were also arrested, but estimates put the total at more than 500.

Thursday’s protest began outside the Czech Republic’s international mission offices in Geneva, and continued on to the IMF offices, which the demonstrators took over.

Olivier de Marcellus, spokesman for the approximately 100 protesters, called for international solidarity with those Czech nationality being held in Prague because “they will surely have to endure a lengthy stay in prison.”

Meanwhile, trade unions and politicians from Switzerland’s socialist and green parties emitted a declaration demanding the immediate release of all Prague prisoners who were involved in the anti-globalisation protests.

De Marcellus said the text, with the backing also of Canadian unionists, calls for the creation of an international commission to investigate “the literally fascist violence exercised against the prisoners by the Czech police.”

The annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank boards of governors, held last week in the Czech capital, were overrun by demonstrators who protested the measures the financial institutions impose on developing countries as conditions for aid.

This new wave of street protests against economic globalisation and its emblematic institutions, which include the World Trade Organisation (WTO), originated in 1998, when that organisation held its second ministerial conference in Geneva.

Then, last December, the demonstrations heated up in the US city of Seattle, to the point that they were blamed in part for the failure of the WTO’s third ministerial conference. The massive protests were repeated in April in Washington DC during the joint sessions of the IMF and the World Bank.

Black and Israeli demonstrators suffered the worst brutality at the hands of the police Prague, “a clear demonstration of the fascist nature of the repression,” said De Marcellus. The four Israeli protesters who were arrested suffered broken limbs, he affirmed.

The Swiss protest leader lamented that such incidents would occur under the government of Vaclav Havel, president of “the Velvet Revolution,” as the Czech transition process after the fall of communism is known.

Havel, a writer and philosopher widely respected in Western democratic circles, promised his government would actively promote human rights.

In recent years, Prague has replaced Washington in sponsoring resolutions against Cuba’s human rights record presented before the United Nations Commission.

“Sadly we are seeing that the Czech government is not reacting or taking measures against the police guilty” of the reported crimes against the detainees, De Marcellus said.

Numerous denunciations confirm the brutality committed by Czech police and prison guards, forces that are “heavily infiltrated by the extreme right,” he asserted.

Of the prisoners released to date, 38 percent said they had suffered ill treatment while in prison.

An Austrian woman, with fractures of the pelvis and leg, was reportedly tortured as police transported her to a hospital. The attending doctor later acknowledged that he had withheld sedatives from the patient so that the police could interrogate her.

Some of the arrested women were forced to remove their clothes and perform exercises in front of male police officers. Others were subjected to thorough body searches, also by male agents.

The Swiss protesters sharply criticised the IMF and the World Bank for remaining silent on the excesses committed against the anti-globalisation demonstrators in Prague.

But their lack of response is not surprising, said the activists, because the structural adjustment programmes originating in these institutions have been systematically imposed, with violence when necessary.

An hour into their occupation of the IMF headquarters, the demonstrators indicated that the events in Prague constituted a warning of “the violence of the globalisation to come.”

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