Protesters,
police clash near new European bank HQ in Frankfurt
Send a link to a friend
[March 18, 2015]
By John O'Donnell and Frank Siebelt
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Anti-capitalist
protesters clashed with riot police near the new headquarters of the
European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt on Wednesday and set fire to
barricades and cars, casting a pall over the ceremonial opening of the
billion-euro skyscraper.
|
Nearly 90 police were injured by stones and unidentified liquids
hurled by a violent minority from within the thousands-strong
protest, police said. Some protesters said they were injured when
police used pepper spray.
Seven police cars were set on fire, streets were blocked by burning
stacks of tyres and rubbish bins, and shops were damaged in the city
center. Dark smoke billowed in front of the ECB towers and across
central Frankfurt.
Police used water cannon to try to make a path through the mass of
black-clad protesters to the entrance of the building, blocked off
from the street by police barricades. Five people were detained and
others taken into custody for questioning.
ECB President Mario Draghi addressed the demonstrators in his speech
at the opening ceremony but said they were missing the point by
blaming the ECB.
"European unity is being strained," he said, according to an advance
text. "People are going through very difficult times. There are
some, like many of the protesters outside today, who believe the
problem is that Europe is doing too little.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2015/Mar/18/images/ads/current/LPL_small%201.gif)
"But the euro area is not a political union of the sort where some
countries permanently pay for others. It has always been understood
that countries have to be able to stand on their own two feet – that
each is responsible for its own policies. The fact that some had to
go through a difficult period of adjustment was therefore not a
choice that was imposed on them. It was a consequence of their past
decisions."
The protest organizers, a group called Blockupy - named after the
Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 - estimated that about 10,000
demonstrators were at the rally. Thousands came into the German
financial capital from other parts of Europe.
[to top of second column] |
![](../images/ads/current/demay_inv-lda081412.png)
"Our protest is against the ECB, as a member of the troika, that,
despite the fact that it is not democratically elected, hinders the
work of the Greek government. We want the austerity politics to
end," Ulrich Wilken, one of the organizers, said.
"We want a loud but peaceful protest," he told Reuters.
Blockupy says it represents grass-roots critics of supranational
financial institutions including the "troika": the ECB, the European
Commission and the International Monetary Fund, whose inspectors
monitor countries such as Greece and Cyprus that have received
international bailouts.
The ECB is also influential as a provider of finance to the banks of
struggling countries and has in recent weeks sanctioned a drip feed
of extra emergency finance to Greece's lenders.
Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis last week criticized ECB
policy towards Athens as "asphyxiating", a criticism also made by
the protest organizers.
(Additional reporting by Paul Carrel; Editing by Erik Kirschbaum and
Louise Ireland)
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2015/Mar/18/images/ads/current/edward_jones_sda_pollice.png) |