GERMANY: The battle began yesterday with the toot of a horn. Within seconds, half a watermelon was whistling through the air. Berlin's annual Food Fight was in full flight, writes Derek Scally in Berlin.
It's 15 years since the fall of East Germany, but the ideological struggle was revived yesterday at the longest surviving stretch of the Berlin Wall in the former No Man's Land.
The first Berlin Food Fight took place three years ago when, to cut administration costs, city fathers fused all of Berlin's neighbourhoods. The move created strange bedfellows, particularly when the former West Berlin neighbourhood of Kreuzberg was merged with its eastern rival, Friedrichshain. Kreuzberg was the hotbed of squatting punks and artists in the 1970s and 1980s, but lost its crown to the funkier Friedrichshain after 1989. Now the rivals settle their differences with an annual face-off with not-so-fresh produce.
The Kreuzbergers arrived early yesterday at the bridge linking west with east to stockpile their crates full of rotting fruit and vegetables. Their apparent leader, with a fox skin dangling from his head, commandeered a shopping trolley which he had turned into a mobile catapult with the help of a rubber bicycle tube around the handles.
Two overweight punks arrived pushing an even bigger catapult while a third carried a crate of elderly kippers and a sign reading: "Whoever attacks us will be annihilated." Soon hundreds of people bearing shields and home-made foam coshes gathered behind fruit-crate barriers, looking at each other across the former Cold War divide.
At 3 p.m. exactly, a roar went up and the first charge began. Soon the sky was filled with projectiles: tomatoes, peppers, water balloons, orange skins. The Kreuzbergers threw plastic carrier bags filled with flour and water and soon the melee was covered in white flour dust.
The Kreuzbergers almost made it to the East when, quite literally, the Friedrichshainers got out their big gun: a monster truck bearing two water cannon. The Kreuzbergers destroyed the cannon but the Friedrichshainers had fresh supplies and began a slow push across the River Spree.
"East! East! East Berlin!" they chanted as they marched into West Berlin in just over half an hour, conquering the city the Soviet Union couldn't starve into submission during the 15 months of the Berlin Airlift.
The Friedrichshainers flung burst pillows, coating the Kreuzbergers with feathers and the battle was over. As all around were coated with foul-smelling gunk, a small poodle, still immaculately snow white, picked his way through the debris.
"It looks like they threw everything they could find," said Else Kloppenburg, a Danish doctoral student living in Berlin, as she inspected the pavement.
"There's some parsley. No, wait, it's dill." The Food Fight was over and the easterners from Friedrichshain won for the third year in a row. "I knew we'd lose as usual," said Timo, a doleful Kreuzberg punk. "But there's honour in defeat. And it was close. Maybe next year."