Massive demo in Barcelona

national | miscellaneous | news report Saturday March 16, 2002 20:25 by ISR Belgium - International Socialist Resistance geertcool at hotmail dot com 0032 485 40 07 80

First short report, live from the demo!

A first short live report from Barcelona! We just spoke to one of the participants in the demo which is taking place now.

Massive anti-capitalist demo in Barcelona!

At this very moment (16 March, 19h30), there's thousands of people demonstrating in Barcelona against the EU-summit. At the EU-summit the main discussion was on the privatisation of the public services, including the electricity supply. Those public services should work for profit instead of offering services for everyone.

We just spoke to Bart Vandersteene from International Socialist Resistance (ISR) who is at the demonstration. He said that the demo is huge, probably bigger than the union demo of last thursday! According to his first impressions there's more than 100.000 people, amongst which a lot of local people from Barcelona. This shows the enormous potential of the opposition movement against the rightwing policies and against capitalism. There's very few political delegations and people don't shout much slogans. Most people don't demonstrate in organised contingents, it's all very spontanuous. The few political groups intervening keep themselves limited to interventions from the sidelines without really giving a way forward for the movement. A lot of small groups of unorganised youth and workers are making up their own contingents.

From this potential a lot could be done against the rightwing government of Aznar, but we'll need a political instrument for that. An organised movement would be much stronger to take up the task of building such a political instrument.

The police is present in big numbers: 8.500 policemen. For the moment everything remains quiet. But after the problems which occured yesterday is the police presence causing tension amongst those present. The demonstrators are not going into the provocative presence of the police and keep a very good mood in the demo.