Up to 2,000 anti-war demonstrators marching through central London yesterday to condemn NATO's military action were jeered by a smaller group of demonstrators calling on the allied forces to step up the air strikes.
The anti-war march, organised by the Committee for Peace in the Balkans, encountered an estimated 400 counter-demonstrators as they arrived at Trafalgar Square after walking from Victoria Embankment and along Whitehall. Carrying banners with the slogan "Bombs weren't the cause, cleansing was planned" written across them, one of the counter-demonstrators, Mr Meriton Krasniqi, said: "We are pleading with NATO to step up its air campaign, consider sending ground troops or at least arm the KLA."
Addressing the anti-war demonstrators, the Labour MP Mr Tony Benn denounced NATO's military campaign in the Balkans as "dangerous" and "absolutely illegal". He said any decision to go ahead with military action should have been agreed through the United Nations and not NATO. "What America and Britain are trying to do is take over Europe in the name of NATO," he said. Mr Benn was joined on the march by fellow Labour MPs, Ms Alice Mahon and Mr Tam Dalyell, the former Tory armed forces minister, Mr Nicholas Soames, who insisted air strikes alone would not defeat President Milosevic, and the journalist John Pilger.
Thirty protesters against NATO strikes on Yugoslavia were arrested following scuffles with German police yesterday as they tried to disrupt a speech by the Defence Minister, Mr Rudolf Scharping.
The demonstrators tried to drown out the Social Democrat minister, who in the early 1990s opposed intervention in the Bosnian war, with cries of "hypocrite" and "warmonger" as he addressed a local election rally in a Munich suburb.
Demonstrations both for and against the NATO action went ahead at the weekend across Germany, for whom the operation is its first combat since the second World War.