I have been following with alarm the reports coming out of Germany concerning the preparation for the G-8 Summit in Heiligendamm. On Thursday 900 police fanned out across six states in Germany to raid 40 sites of suspected protesters. The raids were widely seen as an attempt to intimidate dissenters, and the "evidence" used to justify the raids was questionable, or even non-existent. Leading the charge against the anti-globalization movement is German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, who has promised to take key protest leaders into "preventive custody" in order to disrupt planned demonstrations.
Heligendamm itself has been transformed into a fortress:
A patch of land around the resort village of Heiligendamm, in Germany’s far north, has been surrounded with 12 kilometers of heavy, razorwire-topped fence that reaches at both ends into the sea. Heads of state from Germany, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, the United States and Russia will meet inside on June 6-8. German police expect 50,000 to 100,000 protesters, most of them peaceful; but police also estimate unofficially that some 3 to 5 percent of the protesters might not just sit and listen to protest songs at a planned concert, but try to invade the summit.
Schäuble is also having mini-prison camps built on the site, where he intends to detain thousands of protesters. Good coverage of this in Die Linkszeitung. The Frankfurter Rundschau warns that these tactics are bringing Germany closer to a police state. But Schäuble wants to go one step further, and use the German Army to combat this internal "terror threat", even though the German constitution prevents domestic deployment of the military. Schäuble’s answer is that the German Basic Law (Grundgesetz) needs to be changed.
Schäuble’s assault on basic civil liberties is nothing new; and he may just be taking a page from the 2004 Republican Convention in New York City, where the police rounded up thousands of people on the street – often non-protesters just on their way to work – and held them makeshift prisons to prevent any protests of the policies of the Bush administration. For one week, New York City was transformed into Guantanamo on the Hudson. I can only laugh when Washington or Berlin express outrage at how Vladimir Putin has stifled dissent in Moscow. Democracy proves to be an illusion as soon as the state perceives even the remotest threat to its power monopoly.
