Europe protests Iraq invasion on second anniversary
Pakistan Times Foreign Desk Report

LONDON (UK): Tens of thousands of people marched through European cities on Saturday, banging drums, waving banners and posters denouncing the "war on terror" on the second anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq.

In London, 45,000 protesters marched with pictures of US President George W Bush under the title "World’s Number One Terrorist", according to police, while the organisers put the figure at up to 150,000.

There were also banners saying "No War in Iran" mingled with others warning British Prime Minister Tony Blair that people would not vote for him in a general election expected in May due to his support for the invasion.

"Hey! Ho! Bush and Blair have got to go!" the protesters chanted as they moved from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square, where the main roads were cordoned off to traffic and hundreds of policemen stood guard.

"This shows that the British people are still very angry about the occupation of Iraq and determined that there should be no more wars in the Middle East with British support," Andrew Murray, who heads the Stop The War Coalition — the action group that organised the event, said.

Rome

In Rome, several thousand people took to the streets, some of them demanding the immediate return of the 3,000 Italian troops in Iraq.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi this week said the troops would start heading home in September, only to backtrack following a phone call from the US president. Around 1,000 demonstrators also marched from downtown Stockholm to the US embassy, after listening to speeches by anti-war lawmakers.

Sweden

"Sweden, with its need to export arms, keeps quiet and collaborates," charged Green Party deputy Lotta Hedstroem. Police in Athens said 2,000 demonstrators had marched in the city centre, where they attended a rock concert and heard an address by Sue Niederer, the mother of an American soldier killed in Iraq.

Poland

In Poland, where three out of four people oppose the deployment of Polish troops in Iraq, only 500 protesters marched in Warsaw past the US embassy and the offices of President Aleksander Kwasniewski.

Turkey

In Turkey protests took place in Ankara, Istanbul and Adana, attracting crowds of several hundred. Turkey, a mainly Muslim country, refused the US access to the country to attack bordering Iraq ahead of the war. London’s peaceful protest was the biggest since an unprecedented anti-war rally in the British capital in November 2003, Murray said, speaking at Nelson’s Column where a long line of prominent campaigners were delivering speeches.

Protesters of all ages and backgrounds said they wanted to send a message to Blair to pull British troops out of Iraq and warn against any more "Bush wars".

"A war on poverty, a war on AIDS that would be worthwhile, we would give more taxes for that," said one of the speakers, Paul MacKney, the general secretary of the National Association of Teachers in Further Education (NAFTE).

"But instead we see 100,000 dead in Iraq. The war has cost five billion (pounds), military spending is 10 per cent of taxes," he told the crowd assembled at the square.

"It think the war in Iraq is illegal, I think it is wrong and I will have no part of it," said Ray Hewitt, 34, a veteran of the first Gulf War and an army reservist who helped to carry the coffin through London.

People poured into London from across the country, including 58-year-old theatre worker Eileen Murphy who travelled on a coach for five hours from Lancashire, northern England.

Police officers Killed in Iraq

And a report from Baghdad says that attackers gunned down a police officer heading to work Saturday in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, then bombed a funeral procession carrying his corpse, killing three other policemen and injuring two, officials said.

The attacks came on the second anniversary of the U.S. invasion on March 19, 2003 and are typical of the violence that has become commonplace in Iraq.

The attackers sprayed automatic-weapon fire from a vehicle, killing the policeman as he made his way to the station house early Saturday, police Capt. Ahmed Shinrani said. Hours later, a roadside bomb hit mourners and security forces transporting the corpse for burial.

“This is a criminal act. The mourners were doing a religious duty. I don’t understand how someone could blast a funeral,” wailed Allaa Talaban, wife of one of the officers killed in the blast in Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad.

The Kirkuk Scenario

The Kirkuk attacks came as unidentified assailants in Baghdad killed police Commissioner Ahmed Ali Kadim as he traveled to his office in the Doura neighborhood of the capital, said Falah Al-Mohammadawi, an investigator in the precinct.

Also Saturday, a suicide attacker detonated a Car bomb, targeting a U.S. military patrol on a highway three miles northwest of Ramadi, a city 70 miles west of Baghdad in the restive region known as the “Sunni Triangle,” Sgt. Laith Ismael of the Iraqi police said. The U.S. military said in a statement the car bomb “detonated pre-maturely, before it could reach the patrol.”

The statement made no mention of casualties. U.S. and Iraqi forces also clashed Friday with gunmen in Ramadi after militants attacked a government building. No casualties were reported.

The insurgency routinely attacks U.S. and other international troops while also targeting local security forces and officials they consider to be the Americans’ coll-aborators.●