Heiligendamm G8 Summit: A chronology of protest and repression
01 July 2007
From 6 to 8 June this year, the annual G8 summit took place in Heiligendamm, a seaside resort near the northern German city of Rostock. Since the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999, meetings of representatives of industrialised states and businesses promoting and coordinating capitalist globalisation have met with mass resistance, which in turn has been met with heavy-handed policing, some argue, at an unprecedented scale for liberal democratic states. Protests shook Washington and Prague in 2000, Gothenburg and Genoa in 2001, Quito in 2002, Thessalonica, Evian and Cancún in 2003, Gleneagles, Mar del Plata and Hong Kong in 2005 and now Heiligendamm in 2007.
This latest summit also brought with it an unprecedented arsenal and scale of police violence, criminalisation of protest and many infringements of fundamental civil liberties. The scenes unfolding over the week were impressive: roughly 80,000 people demonstrated on 2 June in Rostock against G8’s neo-liberal policies, 10,000 demonstrated on 4 June for the rights of migrants and refugees, and around 20,000 people remained for a whole week in three self-organised camps around Heiligendamm in order to block the summit at its main entry and exit roads. 10,000 people took part in peaceful blockades between 6 and 8 June. The protests were policed by a total of 17,800 officers from all over Germany and, according to some reports, 2,000 military personnel. The deployment of the latter, which is now being debated in parliament, was in violation of Germany’s constitution. After two years of alter-globalisation activists in Germany and abroad preparing the protests, and the authorities' parallel attempt to criminalise them, protesters and civil liberties groups are drawing preliminary conclusions and preparing for lengthy court cases. Below is an incomplete chronology of the protests and their repression.
Stage 1: preliminary criminalisation
The first public attempt by the German authorities and police to de-legitimise the protests by way of criminalisation took place on 9 May this year in form of large-scale police raids. On the order of the Federal Public Prosecution (
Bundesanwaltschaft), 1,000 police officers searched around 40 private homes and two social centres in Hamburg, Berlin and other cities in northern Germany. The target: politically active people between the age of 25 and 50, some of whom were involved in organising the protests against the summit. The reason given for the raids and confiscation of personal computers and address books, in some cases even cigarette butts and so-called "scent samples", was the accusation of the "formation of a terrorist organisation" under Article 129a of the German Criminal Code. "Scent sampling" was a technique that many believed had vanished with the Berlin wall, used by the East German Stasi secret police to track down dissidents with dogs. Article 129a is a well-known provision amongst activists as it is regularly applied by police and the public prosecution to legitimise this severe infringement of privacy without the police having any hard evidence that any of the victims took, or were planning to take, part in any criminal act. In this case also, the purpose of its application appeared to be a general information-gathering exercise targeting the political movement: police copied the hard disk of the left-wing server SO36.net, which hosts many mailing lists and websites as well as personal computers of third parties not accused at all. Press releases from the Republican Lawyers Association (
Republikanischer Anwältinnen- und Anwälteverein - RAV) and groups affected pointed out that the intent of the operation was to disturb the communication structures of G8 critics, which were in the final stages of preparing the logistics for the camps and demonstrations, all of who had, at that time, the relevant permissions of the authorities.
The suspicion that evidence to justify the police raids was lacking was