German nuke activists to lose battle, may win war
Date: 28-Mar-01
Country: GERMANY
Author: Mark John
The demonstrators, many of them locals angry that their sparsely inhabited region on the river Elbe has been earmarked as a nuclear dumping ground, have their sights on the long term.
"We've no illusions that we can stop the waste reaching the store, but we want to make these transports so expensive that they are neither economically feasible nor politically justifiable," said pensioner Helmut Piethers, one of a band of activists huddled around a campfire by the road to the waste dump.
Few believe they will overcome the mass police presence to seriously delay the arrival of containers of reprocessed nuclear waste from France that are edging through Germany by rail and are due to be delivered on Wednesday.
The quiet roads within 15 km (10 miles) of Gorleben were lined with police vans on the lookout for protest actions like the blockade of a railway bridge.
The mood on both sides was still remarkably relaxed, but that may change as the waste nears its Gorleben dumping ground.
VIOLENCE EXPECTED
"When we start doing our sit-ins tomorrow (Wednesday), the police will be a metre deep here," said a local campaigner, pointing to a stretch of road being patrolled by five mounted policemen.
"Sure, they will use violence to get us off, but because of all the journalists it will be more limited than four years ago," he said of the last transport into Gorleben, when police were criticised for what some called needless brutality.
Many of the demonstrators were not yet sure how they would react when the inevitable clashes with police do come.
"In that situation, the differentiation the media makes between the 'peaceful' demonstrator and the violent is totally artificial," said one demonstrator.
Such a distinction has been sought by the Greens party, struggling to contain anger among their supporters over transports they permitted last year in an accord to phase out nuclear power by the mid-2020s.
The appeal made by the ecologist party earlier this month for its members to refrain from sit-ins or other blockades had little relevance for many of those here.
"Politicians just give you blah-blah," said Susanne Hampf, a local veteran of protest actions who rues her support for the coalition of the Greens with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats in the 1998 general election.
She said past demonstrations had actually changed government policy, discouraging one plan to build a waste reprocessing plant here. "This is the only way we can get results," she said.
