Ahead of G-8 summit, protests in high gear
Gleneagles, a luxury hotel set amid fabled golf links deep in the Scottish countryside, is a good place to get away from it all.
The Group of Eight (G-8) leaders of the world's most industrialized countries, however, will not find the resort its normal secluded self when they meet there for their annual summit Wednesday.
Swarming with police and guarded by a five-mile chain-link fence, the hotel will be a magnet for tens of thousands of protesters who make G-8 meetings a perennial priority of their political activism.
More than 200,000 demonstrators thronged the streets of nearby Edinburgh Saturday, urging rich countries to offer better deals on aid, trade, and debt to the developing world.
As thousands more made their way to the Scottish capital following Saturday's Live8 rock concert watched by billions, the eclectic activists were united in a belief that mass demonstrations are a proven tool to promote global change.
"Politicians know they will be heavily scrutinized by people and the media and they don't court unpopularity," says Andy Atkins, advocacy director for Tearfund, an aid and relief group founded by evangelical churches, which is part of "Make Poverty History." "They want to be seen doing the right thing."
This weekend's protesters were a mixed bunch. There were churchgoing grandmothers, mobilized by the "Make Poverty History" alliance of charities, trade unions, and development groups that had already persuaded more than a million Britons to wear white wristbands as symbols of their sentiment.
There were families, encouraged by the mostly peaceful atmosphere: even Gordon Brown, the British finance minister, was on hand to rally the faithful.
And there were a few hundred anarchists, whose frothy outbursts against global capitalism accounted for most of the weekend's few scuffles with police.
Whatever their motives, however, they have been drawn to Scotland for one reason - to grab their share of the global attention that G-8 meetings attract nowadays, and thus amplify their voices.
Mass action does not always work, of course. The million-plus marchers who demonstrated against the Iraq war in London in February 2003 did not change Tony Blair's mind, and "if politicians do not want to do anything, no one will take any notice," says Stephen Rand, a leader of the Jubilee Debt Campaign, which advocates a reduction in developing countries' debt.
"When you have politicians who are responsive," however, "they can use the presence of sensitized people" on the streets to push for new policies, Mr. Rand adds. A big demonstration at the G-8 summit in Birmingham, England, in 1998, he argues, "changed the whole agenda on poverty for the G-8."
British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President Bill Clinton found it politically advisable to hold an unscheduled meeting with demonstration leaders, Rand recalls, and a year later the next G-8 summit in Cologne, Germany, agreed to wipe out $100 billion of developing country debt.
Anarchists, too, say that they gear their tactics to their desire for attention.
At the G-8 summit in Denver in 1997, remembers Jay Kaye, a member of the "Dissent" network of activists, "we went marching down the street peacefully and there was a complete press blackout."
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