We organised a riot and no-one turned up
It was dubbed the event of the decade. Forty-six heads of state descending on Prague for one of the most important summits of the last ten years. For months beforehand we were force-fed details of the NATO summit, the first to be held in the former Communist bloc. With a war against Iraq looming, many people believed the Prague summit would produce a huge demonstration of anger against the United States and her allies. With this in mind, the Czech authorities were taking no chances: 12,000 police were to be deployed on the streets to deal with an estimated 12,000 protestors.
And so it pains to me say it, the 2002 NATO summit has been a huge anti-climax.
Quite what I expected I'm not sure, but something along the lines of chaos in the streets, protestors running amok, police in riot gear struggling to maintain order would have fit the bill. But no such luck. I write this Letter from Prague not from a hospital bed, recovering from a broken arm and tear-gas poisoning, but from my desk at the radio station, on a grey and chilly Friday morning.
For a start, far, far less than the 12,000 protestors turned up in Prague. The biggest demonstration was on Thursday, when around 1,000 anarchists - who can usually be relied upon for a bit of agro - marched through the streets. I went with them, and frankly, they weren't even trying. Apart from a brief moment when they contemplated, and then reconsidered, turning over a police car, they behaved almost as model citizens. They threw no cobblestones. They broke no windows. Even when they had the chance to break through the police cordon and try and reach the Congress Centre, they carried on walking. And when they returned to the city centre, they dispersed. Peacefully.
Even the police were a model of co-operation and self-control. Not once did they try and provoke the demonstrators, letting them go virtually where they pleased. A police spokesman said later that there was not one arrest on Thursday's march - I'll repeat that - not one. Even the civic observers monitoring the demo said the police had acted sensibly and fairly throughout.
So the predictions of Prague being brought to a standstill by thousands of violent demonstrators failed to materialise. Interior Minister Stanislav Gross - who said he'd resign if the demonstrators succeeded in disrupting the summit - will probably get a medal, or possibly a knighthood. The delegates can leave Prague safe in the knowledge that nothing even came close to ruining their big day.
But for us journalists - eagerly awaiting a bit of trouble and a real story to get our teeth into (and let's face it, no-one - not me, not you, not even some of the people inside the Congress Centre, is really interested in the changing role of NATO) - the Summit has been a damp squib. One commentator summed it up perfectly on Monday - "what if we make all these preparations" he wrote, "and no-one turns up?".
