Daylight cleared a curtain of grey mist from Prague's cobblestone streets on Tuesday, showering bright sunshine on thousands of protesters who were silently converging on Namesti Miru park.
Czechs stared down from balconies or idled in doorways, waiting for something to happen. The last time such an air of expectancy hung over the city was in 1989 when mass protests toppled the Soviet-backed regime, beginning an era of democratic rule.
The latest invasion marked the beginning of the annual International Monetary Fund/World Bank (IMF/WB) summit as the picturesque city was occupied by a ragtag army of global dissidents, Indian farmers rubbing shoulders with church activists, Irish campaigners, and Italian workers, the latter arriving 1,000 strong on a train chartered in Rome.
At the Czech-German border, police turned away 600 people, half of them travelling in vehicles declared "unfit for use on Czech roads". This pretext for denying freedom of travel was compared to the old regime's imprisonment of members of the Jazz Musicians' Union for distributing copies of the Live Aid album in the 1980s.
The Czech Education Ministry ordered Prague's 1,073 schools to shut down, leaving 200,000 students with an unexpected week of holidays. The Interior Ministry joined the hysterical chorus, sending a letter to city residents, advising them to buy in a week's provisions, bolt their doors and windows and stay indoors.
One elderly woman removed her paintings from the walls and hid them in her attic, recalling her experiences during the second World War.
Shop owners boarded up windows in advance of the menacing hordes and even the city's sex workers stayed off the streets. Meanwhile, in Namesti Miru park, the converging demonstrators were greeted by a Dutch cooking collective brewing strong coffee and a powerful sound system pumping out reggae, watched from a distance by Czech police.
The Italians had improvised armour, stuffing foam padding around their bodies and fashioning shields from thick cardboard. "We are an army of dreamers" they announced, as nearby a group of "Black Block" anarchists carrying flags and banners "hooded up", concealing their faces with balaclavas.
The "pink fairies" from Britain wore fluffy skirts and played their samba instruments, entertaining the early risers. The crowd was made up largely of middle-class activists in their twenties and early thirties with a solid grasp of the issues at hand. The so-called Battle of Seattle last year marked the coming-out of a new, global protest movement, which focuses on the dangers of GM foods, Third World debt, corporate unaccountability, the arms trade, resource wars, "fortress Europe", the long arm of NATO, sweatshop labour and indigenous rights. In general, the protesters despise political parties, left and right, acknowledge no leaders and plan activities at informal assemblies and via the Internet. They see themselves as part of an emerging movement, represented by activist groups such as Reclaim the Streets, People's Global Action and Earth First.
In Prague, campaigners reminisced about Seattle, Berlin, Chiapas and other recent flashpoints, and improved their activist network, snowballing this disperse movement into ever larger mobilisations.
The mood became more militant as the music switched from reggae to pounding techno, reflecting the adrenalin rush prior to street action. The assembled group, numbering close to 10,000, split into three colourcoded sections, each one planning to break through one of three strategic access points to the heavily-guarded IMF/WB summit conference centre.
Once the activists stepped outside the park that morning they also stepped outside the law - as Czech authorities had banned all demonstrations that day.
A group of volunteer legal observers handed out disheartening information leaflets, explaining that under Czech law anyone deemed "a threat to the safety of the state" can be detained for 24 to 48 hours, or, if necessary, for up to 180 days.
The vast majority of protesters came with peaceful intentions, planning to stretch non-violent resistance as far as it could go, blockading the summit but stopping short of violence. A handful of masked activists tossed molotov cocktails, which almost killed a Czech policeman. Many members of the Czech police force, poorly paid and nervous before the protests, took out life insurance at their own expense and generally showed restraint during the day of action. Dozens of police officers and protesters were injured and on Wednesday, outside the Hilton Hotel, Czech police attacked Irish protesters without provocation.
Ultimately, the conference finished a day early; the protesters saw this as a victory for their campaign and celebrated all night, in a fiesta of drumming, dancing and whistleblowing. The director of the IMF, Horst Kohler, said their early finish was "not at all" connected with the violence - that they had simply finished their agenda ahead of time. WB vice president, Mats Carlsson, meanwhile, admitted the finish had been encouraged by the demonstrations.
The question of violence distracted attention from the issues which brought bankers and protesters to the city, specifically the role of IMF/WB policy in global development as poor nations grapple with economic disaster.
The Czech Initiative Against Economic Globalisation (INPEG) hosted a countersummit before the day of action, criticising IMF/WB policy while outlining an alternative vision for a sustainable global economy.
According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), a 4 per cent tax on the assets of the world's wealthiest 225 people would bring in $40 billion. Ten years of such a modest transfer of wealth would ensure universal access to clean water (for 1.3 billion people), basic education (for one billion people), health care (17 million children die annually of curable diseases), nutrition (two billion people suffer from anaemia), sanitation and, for women, universal gynaecological care.
"It's democracy," said Eric Touissant, a Belgian academic, explaining at the countersummit how most of the external debt owed by poor nations was "odious" - that is, accrued under illegitimate governments.
The debt solution was relatively easy. According to Toussaint, the first step would be a 0.5 per cent tax on speculative investment, which would net $1,800 million a year. In addition deposed tyrants, such as Mobutu in former Zaire, would have their billion-dollar assets confiscated and returned home to fund a social development plan administered by competent local authorities.
"We want to raise issues of poverty and inequality in the media and put pressure on the IMF and World Bank to reform their agenda," said Jean Somers, spokeswoman for the Irish Jubilee 2000 delegation.
The Jubilee 2000 group organised a separate round of talks, inviting influential speakers from all over the world. Colombia's first elected indigenous senator, Lorenzo Muelas, emphasised the importance of "food security" in his country where "people value money above food but when prices fall the people go hungry".
An Indian speaker held a two-minute "laugh-in" where hundreds of people howled at the very thought that nations colonised by Western powers could owe them money after being stripped of their sovereign assets for several centuries.
Niamh Gaynor, an Irish delegate, spoke of her experience as an APSO volunteer in Benin, west Africa, one of 41 Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) targeted for World Bank debt relief.