Eight world leaders, 16,000 police, 100,000 protesters - the battle lines are drawn for the G8 summit next week, writes Derek Scallyin Berlin
The resort of Heiligendamm on Germany's Baltic coast has always been the place where money and power meet. Gleaming white like an expensive smile, the 19th century villa and spa complex has attracted kaisers and kings, tsars and industry barons for rest and relaxation in the clear water and on the immaculate beach. The inscription on the facade of the spa house greets visitors with the promise: "Joy awaits you after curative baths."
None of the modern-day kaisers and tsars, the leaders of the Group of Eight (G8) industrial nations, will have time for curative baths when they arrive here on Wednesday. Instead, the leaders of the US, Canada, Britain, Japan, France, Italy and Russia will be locked up with their host, Chancellor Angela Merkel, the current G8 president, to talk trade, African aid and climate change.
Behind the scenes of the cocktail receptions, meetings and dinners, the greatest security operation in modern German history will be humming in high gear, with more than 16,000 police officers stationed to secure the event.
At least 100,000 people are expected to arrive on the eastern German coast to demonstrate against the summit. They call the G8 an unelected, illegitimate group which represents 14 per cent of the world's population and makes trade deals that unfairly affect the rest of the world.
"For those who protest peacefully, their concerns are not just legitimate; they will be heard," said Dr Merkel last week. To be heard, though, the protesters will have to shout extra loud.
Last Wednesday, police sealed off the Heiligendamm resort with a 12km long perimeter fence. With a price tag of €12.5 million, the fence is a 2.5-metre high structure of reinforced steel mesh, with a concrete base and topped with Nato- standard razor wire.
For critics, the metal fence cutting through the lush landscape to keep VIPs in and protesters out makes a mockery of Dr Merkel's hope that the G8 can "give globalisation a human face".
After meeting and greeting her foreign guests on Wednesday evening, work begins on Thursday morning with a long agenda.
The first G8 session addresses controls of hedge funds, product piracy and other issues of trade - the reason the G8 meetings were created in 1975, then as the G6, to discuss the oil and currency crises. Chancellor Merkel was hoping to return to the informal, "fireside chat" format of those early meetings, but outside pressures and media expectations have seen the original agenda swell beyond recognition.
A new "Heiligendamm Process" will create a forum to discuss trade issues and quell the impatience of the so-called "O5" countries - Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa - who are all pushing to be let into the G8 club. The leaders will also discuss a new sponsorship programme with selected African countries and hope to issue a "joint declaration" on climate change. (Joint declarations are masterpieces of woolly language and committee thinking that have been haggled out by top diplomats during weeks of heated horse trading.)
The G8 summit is a world of contrasts. The leaders - each with a delegation of 23 - will be fed by a team of 38 chefs. When they retire, they can study their "pillow menu" - offering nine choices of filling from cherry stone to merino wool.
SEVERAL KILOMETRES AWAY, thousands of protesters will eat barbecued bratwurst and bed down in makeshift tent cities. The protesters fall into two groups: the non-violent globalisation critics, and the extreme-left "autonomes", determined to pick violent battles with police. Floating between the two groups is the "Block G8" movement: protesters who hope to bring the organisational infrastructure to a standstill by blocking roads leading into the resort.
More than 40 organisations, including globalisation critics Attac, have organised talks and workshops in an "anti-Summit" aboard a boat in nearby Rostock harbour from June 5th to 7th.
"We don't want some kind of 19th- century idyll. We don't want to stop the summit either, that's not possible. We want a different kind of globalisation," said Peter Wahl of Attac Germany. "We aren't just saying 'no', we have concrete suggestions about how alternative reforms can be implemented. The alternative summit is to make clear the strength of our alternative."
The loudest protesters at the G8 summit will be Irish: rocker-campaigners Bono and Bob Geldof will be in Heiligendamm to remind the world leaders of their promise, at the Gleneagles summit in 2005, to double their aid contributions to Africa by $25 billion (€18.6 billion) by 2010.
In the last weeks, the two Irish campaigners have met Chancellor Merkel to ask why the world's richest countries are falling behind in their aid instalment promises. On average, they have given only half of the funds so far needed to reach the 2010 target.
At countless media events, the two have made an effective good-cop-bad-cop team. Bad cop Geldof's simple refrain is "show me the money"; he commandeered yesterday's edition of Bild newspaper to get that message across to eight million readers.
Good cop Bono, who will sing at a concert in Rostock on Thursday, has appealed to the "moral compass" of Germany and its leader.
"We think Germans keep their promises, and when Germany breaks its agreement, everyone else abandons ship," he said, warning of a crisis of credibility of the G8 if the world sees the leaders renege on their aid promises. That argument hit a nerve with Dr Merkel, who has since told the Bundestag: "A great deal of political credibility at stake. We will live up to our promises, that's something I say quite clearly."
Hovering over the G8 build-up and the extraordinary security measures is the ghost of Genoa, 23-year-old Carlo Giuliani, shot dead during riots between police and protesters at the 2001 demo.
As well as the €12m fence, German police have set up airport-style security centres to screen all summit attendees as well as unfortunate residents who live near the Heiligendamm complex and have to wear special IDs for a week.
Passport controls have been reintroduced on all German borders and secret service staff have been monitoring websites of left-wing groups for months.
Three military ships will patrol the coastline, military planes will guard a no-fly zone, bodyguards will monitor the preparation of food in the kitchen, and even the online database Google Earth has replaced current photos of Heiligendamm with satellite images from 2002.
Some of the more far-out security measures included gathering scent samples of known left-wing activists and searching the post in Hamburg for two days to find the perpetrators of arson attacks on luxury cars in Hamburg and Berlin believed to have a G8 connection.
Authorities say they have no indications of any violent attacks by any groups, but nevertheless raided the premises and homes of left-wing group members in Hamburg and Berlin, confiscating computers and arresting five people.
Civil rights groups criticised the preventative raids, while left- wing groups say the police searches have boosted solidarity and interest in the upcoming summit. But a march in Hamburg last weekend that turned into a riot with 52 people arrested has police worried that violent extremist groups will make their presence felt next week.
WHETHER THE ATMOSPHERE outside the G8 is good-natured or tense could be decided at a protest march today through Rostock, organised by Greenpeace to highlight its climate demands for the G8 summit.
"We want that the G8 industrial states, who are mainly responsible for climate problem, meaningfully reduce their greenhouse gas and that EU plays a leading role of a 30 per cent reduction by 2020," said Karsten Smid of Greenpeace Germany, an organiser of this morning's march. "With the blocking position of the US, the whole process could collapse like a chain of dominos. We want that [ Chancellor] Merkel, with no ifs and buts, plays a leading role on climate change, and doesn't hide behind President Bush."
The omens were not good last week for reaching any meaningful climate change agreement in Heiligendamm. German diplomats have been pushing other G8 states to agree to a multilateral agreement on carbon emission reductions that paves the way to the period beyond the Kyoto Agreement in 2012.
White House officials have said that crosses a policy "red line". To break the deadlock, President Bush has agreed to meet before the summit with the German leader, a woman he famously described as "having a lot of wisdom".
But as the summit looms, the only point on which Dr Merkel's advisers and G8 critics agree is that any breakthroughs in Heiligendamm will be modest.
"George Bush is a lame duck, as is Vladimir Putin, Tony Blair is a dead duck and Nicolas Sarkozy is just a chick," said Peter Wahl of Attac. "Seven of the G8 members will admit behind closed doors that they are simply waiting for the moment when George Bush leaves, with whom many sensible deals simply are not possible."