PARIS (Reuters) - Anti-capitalist protesters plan a mass blockade of this weekend's G8 summit, fired up by the presence of President Bush (news - web sites) on a continent where millions demonstrated against the U.S.-led war in Iraq (news - web sites).
Tens of thousands of protesters aim to bottle up leaders of the world's seven biggest economies and Russia inside the French town of Evian, using to their advantage the narrow approaches to the Lake Geneva resort and the surrounding mountains.
Leaders from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States are due to arrive by helicopter for their summit aimed at kick-starting the world economy. But thousands of other officials face severe disruption.
"Our main target is George Bush, who is coming to (continental) Europe for the first time since the war in Iraq, so we have the slogan 'No to the G8 of War,"' said Petros Konstantinou, a leading Greek anti-globalization activist.
"Since the end of the war (in Iraq) the U.S. political elite has been crowing about the whole thing," added Guy Taylor, an activist with Britain's anti-capitalist Globalize Resistance movement. "That's really going to anger people."
Organizers, targeting a turnout of 150,000 to 200,000 for Sunday's opening day protest, want to prevent delegates housed in the Swiss city of Lausanne from reaching ferries meant to bring them south across Lake Geneva to the conference in Evian.
Protesters also plan to block the tight road approaches to Evian, wedged in between Lake Geneva and the French Alps further south. That could block other delegates commuting from hotels in the Swiss city of Geneva at the lake's western edge.
Disrupting the three-day meeting, the first G8 summit in Europe since an Italian police officer shot dead a demonstrator during riots in Genoa in 2001, aims to show G8 leaders that they have no popular mandate to act as "Masters of the Universe."
"The G8 is illegitimate and its policies are harmful to the people of the planet. We have to get rid of it," Jacques Nikonoff, president of the anti-globalization movement Attac, told the 20 Minutes newspaper on Monday.
An eclectic mix of groups -- from anarchist to Christian, gay rights to humanitarian, ecologist to Third World -- will flock to the region for a series of events including a "Summit For A Different World" in the nearby French town of Annemasse.
Still more radical alternatives will be on offer at up to four "anti-capitalist villages" that will sprout up, while a chain of bonfires around Lake Geneva on summit's eve are designed to evoke the peasant revolts of yore.
RISK OF VIOLENCE
The hostility toward G8 leaders and globalization is clear from the strident anti-G8 Web Sites lambasting what they see as a militaristic, neo-liberal capitalism that is despoiling the planet and trampling on workers' rights and the Third World.
Taylor said protesters aimed to make a peaceful nuisance of themselves while avoiding any repetition of the Genoa riots that threw the future of international summitry into doubt.
"I'm hoping that the Swiss and French police will actually learn the lessons of Genoa," he said. "This year in Europe we've had some of the biggest demonstrations (against the war in Iraq) the continent has seen and they were entirely peaceful."
"We've taken steps, and those involved in vandalism or violence will be condemned in advance. They are not part of the alternative world movement," added Nikonoff.
The police seem well prepared. Some 15,000 have been mobilized to ring Evian in a series of ever-tighter security zones. France will reimpose border checks during the summit.
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