The
World Economic Forum
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international non-governmental and lobbying organisation based in Cologny, canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab. The foundation, ...
in
Davos,
Switzerland (January, 2003) triggered
anti-globalization protests across Switzerland. Access to the town of Davos was blocked by the police of
Grisons, with reinforcements from other cantons, and even
Austria
Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...
n police, which was unprecedented. On Saturday January 25, the day scheduled for a protest march in Davos, only selected protesters were allowed to pass.
In the afternoon, some of the protesters that were turned away outside Davos travelled to
Bern, where the demonstrations quickly degenerated into full-scale
riots, with thirty arrested and three policemen injured. The police prevented the protesters from entering the historical center of the city. The director of the Bernese police, Kurt Wasserfallen, referred to the events as "
terrorism
Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of criminal violence to provoke a state of terror or fear, mostly with the intention to achieve political or religious aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violen ...
".
Meanwhile, the protesters who were allowed to enter Davos demonstrated peacefully, securely cordoned off from the WEF participants. One group appeared in monkey costumes, wearing masks of various world leaders, 'adoring' a
golden calf that they carried around with them. Between bursts of adoration, they bashed an inflatable globe with plastic clubs.
Osama Bin Laden was portrayed as raping the planet in unison with
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. A member of the Republican Party, Bush family, and son of the 41st president George H. W. Bush, he ...
and
Donald Rumsfeld.
In a picture of the protests, a protester wearing a mask of Donald Rumsfeld and a yellow, six-pointed cardboard "
sheriff" badge is portrayed carrying the golden calf, and next to him, another protester impersonating
Ariel Sharon is wielding a plastic club. The Rumsfeld character's badge was misinterpreted as alluding to the
Star of David, or even to
Nazi concentration camp badges
Nazi concentration camp badges, primarily triangles, were part of the system of identification in German camps. They were used in the concentration camps in the German-occupied countries to identify the reason the prisoners had been placed ther ...
, an interpretation that arose because low-resolution versions of the image were circulated in news reports, where the "sheriff" text on the star was not legible.
External links
Slideshow of the Bern riots(20min.ch)
Collection of reports on the protests(indymedia.org)
Discussion of the supposed anti-semitic subtext in the Coffrini image(littlegreenfootballs.com)
Images of the "monkey" protest (remote.ch)
{{Anti-globalization
Anti-globalization protests
Protests in Switzerland
2003 in Switzerland
Davos
January 2003 events in Europe