SWITZERLAND: Protesters aside, Geneva is currently a ghost town, reports Lara Marlowe, on the Franco-Swiss border.
Camouflage-green fighter jets, anti-aircraft artillery and armoured vehicles are parked on the Tarmac at Geneva Airport. Attack helicopters circle overhead and German riot police block major intersections. They were invited by their Swiss neighbours, in the knowledge that the most violent anti-globalisation protesters are young Germans wearing ski-masks who call themselves the Black Block.
Down the highway in Lausanne, a wall of freight containers has been built around the marina, topped by two rows of concertina barbed wire. In Évian itself, the inner sanctum of four controlled zones, hemmed in between the lake and sheer granite mountains, the swimming pool at the Hôtel Royal is adapted to decontaminate presidents and prime ministers in the event of a radiation or chemical attack.
The world's eight most powerful men are meeting in the French spa town of Évian, and on the day of the main protest march against the G8 Summit, the entire region felt besieged by the twin menace of bin Laden's al-Qaeda and the anti-globalisation movement.
"I don't see why Geneva should have to put up with all this," said my Swiss taxi-driver, a naturalised Tunisian. No other driver at the airport was brave enough to take me to the anti-globalisation march. "Over there at Évian," he continued, "the French have no problem - they're protected. This was a rotten thing for Chirac to do to us."
On Saturday night, the boys from the Black Block attacked dozens of shop and car windows in the Swiss capital. Yesterday they looted and vandalised two BP petrol stations in villages on the border, during a 70,000- strong protest march.
A young man was severely injured when he fell while abseiling from a bridge in Lausanne. Demonstrators claimed security forces cut his rope, but this could not be confirmed.
Downtown Geneva was a ghost town, its famous banks and fashionable shops boarded up until Tuesday. Switzerland's unwelcome guests decorated the plywood in a riot of colours and slogans: "Change the World; dÉVIANt Summit; Stop Mad Cowboys; George, Tony: Where are Iraq's Chemical Weapons? No to the Petroltariat." It was a glorious summer day, but the good burghers of Geneva were quaking behind closed shutters.
I arranged to meet Garrett Mullan of Globalise Resistance Ireland in front of a green van covered by a "McDollar'$" sign, along the main demonstration route. The march that had so frightened Geneva was more like a good-natured street party, with thousands of cheerful French, German, Italian, Spanish and British people walking by, many of them waving rainbow-coloured peace flags. A band played samba music in the shade of a bridge.
Mr Mullan pointed out a handful of Black Block activists and we approached them. The most sinister-looking wore a khaki ski mask and carried a sack full of stones. He just scowled when I spoke to him. I was surprised to see two or three young women among them. The least fierce-looking of the group had orange-dyed punk hair. "Black Block isn't really a group," he said in a heavy German accent. Why were they trying to disrupt the G8? "They're eight people who kill. There's Berlusconi the fascist, Bush the murderer..." Fire engines barrelled down the road towards the BP station that was under attack by their comrades. The Black Block activists cheered and ran after the red trucks.
"There aren't very many of them," Mr Mullan said. I heard that argument several times yesterday from anti-globalisation protesters seeking to distance themselves from the violence.
"We would not defend or advocate what Black Block do," said Matthew Waine, the youth organiser for the Irish socialist party. He was at Genoa when Carlo Giuliani (21) was shot dead by Italian riot police.
"In Genoa, I saw Black Block members talking and smoking cigarettes with security forces," Mr Waine said. "There are a lot of agents provocateurs, to discredit the movement and give them a reason for rushing in with the tear gas."
Mr Mullan (27) works with the Simon Community in Ireland. He and Mr Waine (22) are living proof that the left did not die out with the end of the Soviet Union or the more recent loss of elections across Europe. They are part of a growing protest movement that increasingly proposes alternatives to world leaders - hence the newly coined French term "alter-globalisation" in lieu of "anti-globalisation".
By turning out in force at G8 and other major summits, the anti-globalisation movement has transformed the agenda of such fora, forcing them to address Third World poverty and disease. Partly to placate them, the current (stalled) round of trade negotiations was named the Development Round.
President Jacques Chirac has astutely tapped into the widespread dissatisfaction with the way the free movement of goods and capital are affecting the lives of Europeans and the developing world. The US delegation at the summit snidely speculated that he is promoting aid to Africa as a pay-back for African support during the Iraq crisis, but Africa was one of Mr Chirac's priorities long before President Bush began talking of invading Iraq.
Anti-globalisation activists now stress that the influence they've had on world leaders, forcing them to donate money to combat AIDS, for example, must be extended to social policy in their home countries.
Mr Mullan and Mr Waine attended an anti-war counter-summit at the University of Geneva this weekend, where the keynote speaker was the British MP George Galloway.
But their biggest concern is bringing the spirit of protest back to Ireland.
On October 20th, the World Economic Forum, the meeting of the top 1,000 multinational companies (which usually meets in Davos) will convene in Dublin. "We're calling for an international demonstration with this kind of character - like Prague, Genoa, Geneva," Mr Mullan said.
Mr Waine had even broader ambitions for the Irish left. "There's a wider question which we have to ask ourselves," he said.
"Where is this going? We can consign our anger to a couple of days a year, but the key is relating it to local issues - for example, to the trade unions, to the looming crisis between communities and the government over rubbish collection."