July 22, 2001

Allies Tell Bush They'll Act Alone on Climate Accord

By DAVID E. SANGER and ALESSANDRA STANLEY

GENOA, Italy, July 21 — As tens of thousands of demonstrators marched toward the center of this ancient city and occasionally clashed with the police, the United States' leading allies told President Bush today that they intended to move ahead and ratify the Kyoto Protocol on global warming by next year, even without American participation.

At the summit meeting of top industrial nations, protesters and riot police clashed anew, one day after a protester was killed. Today as many as 50,000 demonstrators flowed through the streets of Genoa, but outside the center of the city, where the leaders were sequestered.

The crowds were far larger than on Friday. The police made efforts to keep their distance, after images raced around the world on Friday of an Italian policeman shooting a demonstrator dead, and then running over his body with a jeep.

In the day's meeting agenda, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien of Canada said that his nation had the same position on the global warming treaty "as Japan, as Europe, as Russia: we are ready to ratify."

Other officials suggested that a round of telephone calls among the leaders of Japan, France and Germany this week had left Mr. Bush isolated on the issue.

Mr. Chrétien said negotiators would work overnight to come up with some common language about global warming for a communiqué to be issued Sunday.

But he added that negotiators in Bonn, where a meeting on the subject is under way, would work on details of how the Kyoto accord would be implemented. [Those negotiators moved a step closer to agreement on the final details. Page 14.] Without American participation, though, the treaty would be largely ineffective.

Mr. Chrétien said the Americans had agreed to come up with an alternative proposal to Kyoto, but the Americans said they had not promised a date for delivering that plan.

In the debate on global warming, Mr. Chrétien said Mr. Bush had promised to present an alternative to the specific restrictions of the Kyoto agreement by early fall, a proposal that would presumably sidestep the Kyoto accord's specific targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to levels Mr. Bush said would cripple the American economy.

Mr. Chrétien said he was still open to hearing the American proposal, but he was not waiting for it. "They claim they will be ready," he told reporters this afternoon. "I will see."

As the leaders politely dealt with their disagreements, the global warming issue did not come up in meetings Mr. Bush held today with President Chirac and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany.

Twenty-four hours after the death of the protester, Mr. Bush spoke about it briefly today, saying, "It's a tragic loss of life." But he insisted that protesters who "claim to represent the voices of the poor aren't doing so. Those protesters who try to shut down our talks on trade and aid don't represent the poor, as far as I'm concerned."

But while Mr. Bush insisted that the leaders should be undeterred by escalating protests at these summit meetings, President Jacques Chirac of France, sitting next to him, offered a different view. "Obviously, we have all been traumatized by the events," he said.

Mr. Chirac, referring to the protests, said: "The elected leaders of our countries have to consider the problems that have brought tens of thousands of our compatriots, mainly from European countries, to demonstrate their concern, to demonstrate their wish to change."

As sporadic scuffles with the police continued into the evening, Mr. Bush and his fellow leaders dined by the port of this ancient city, in an ornate, early 19th-century boat terminal that has been restored, along with much of this city. Even that imagery worried some leaders, who knew that the television images of their toasts would be intermingled with the scenes of rock throwing and tear gassing a mile away.

"We have to find another way," a senior Japanese diplomat said late today. "This is no way to hold a real discussion."

The police, bedecked in an array of riot dress and armed with tear gas and more lethal weaponry, tried to take a lower profile on the streets today as they struggled to contain the largest crowds yet. They were absent entirely from the site of the shooting of the protester, even when a group of young anarchists attacked a Japanese television journalist.

The protesters who turned out on the broad boulevards here were composed of young veterans of the Friday clashes, some with bandaged wounds, union members, smartly dressed groups of citizens from towns all over Europe bearing banners with anti-capitalist slogans in different languages, and black-clad anarchists. Many of the self-described "Black Bloc" wore motorcycle helmets and waved lengths of lumber as truncheons.

The tension ran high between moderate groups who saw the gathering here of leaders from the leading industrial nations as a chance to protest against disparities between the rich and poor, and the anarchists who wanted to act out their rage after the shooting death of one of their supporters.

The plaza where that shooting took place, in front of a large Baroque church, was converted into an informal shrine today, with mounds of flowers and candles, and messages scribbled on paper and T-shirts. "May you have not departed for nothing," said one.

A little more than a mile away, President Bush and the other leaders of the Group of 8 nations held an all- morning review of security challenges in Europe and Asia, before signing a guest book of notables who have come to the home port of Christopher Columbus.

On Sunday, after the formal meetings have concluded, President Bush is to meet with Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, in a session that will conclude with a joint news conference here. The meeting will be their second face-to-face session and they are expected to discuss the Bush administration's plan to pursue a broad missile defense program that will violate the Antiballistic Missile Treaty that the Russians want to preserve.

But for today, the leaders focused on their anti-poverty agenda, mindful of the rocky situation outside. "It is vitally important that democratically elected leaders legitimately representing millions of people can meet to discuss areas of common concern," the group said in a statement. The leaders said they would focus on issues "that matter most to our people," including economy, trade, job creation and, this year more than others, methods for sparking greater productivity in the poorest nations.

But in private, several of Mr. Bush's aides conceded that the imagery of the leaders meeting in the splendor of a 13th century medieval palace, while smoke and tear gas wafted over the hills nearby, seemed only to highlight the gulf between the leaders and the protesters.

The security cordon was so tight that a 15-foot fence around the central city, which demonstrators threatened without success on Friday to breach, was later reinforced. Military units at the airport kept antimissile batteries, which had been installed earlier, at the ready because of fears of a terrorist attack.

The causes represented on the street today included environmental groups like the World Wildlife Fund, Roman Catholic social workers pushing an anti-poverty agenda, pacifists and myriad national groups calling for the liberation of Iran, the liberation of the Kurds in Iraq and greater democracy in Turkey. Labor unionists were in abundance, and signs read "People before profit" and "Stop the capitalist-profit circus."

But the mix of moderate protesters and determined troublemakers served to dilute many of the messages. Some of the moderates clearly held back today, afraid for their physical safety and wary of an association with violent demonstrators whose tactics they say they abhor.

Among them was Luciano Battagli, a 60-year-old retired schoolteacher and regional union leader from Italy. "I myself am not against globalization," Mr. Battagli said. "But I don't like the bosses dictating to the world. The money they spent to do this summit, the ostentatious display of wealth and power, is a shame. They are spending more to do the summit than they are ever going to do for Africa."

Nearby, members of the Black Bloc, helmeted and bearing gardening tools and clearly itching for a fight, carried a banner declaring "Stop G-8" and shouted "bastard" and "assassino" at the police.

A young Welsh protester named Robert, 50, wearing plaid shorts and a yellow T-shirt that said "Drop the Debt," identifying himself as a member of a group calling for more aggressive debt relief for the poorest nations, walked in the march today along the sea coast until clouds of tear gas ahead drove him back. He explained that Drop the Debt organizers had warned members who had been planning to participate in the march about safety concerns after the killing on Friday night. Many chose to hold an ecumenical prayer vigil on a church near the march route instead.

"There is a lot of anguish about the death of that young boy," he said.

Robin Fishwick from Leeds, England, who traveled here on a bus with his wife Sarah, said the chaos of the crowds and the violence has made it "very difficult" to relay their message. "We act peacefully, we get many people together, but they don't make news" because their members do not create trouble.

"Trouble makes the news, but then they don't talk about what we came here for," he said. Rather than marching today, he and other Drop the Debt participants held a vigil and teach-in about the debt problem along the route of the march.

Mr. Bush has countered the protesters by insisting that ever freer trade is the answer to the problems facing developing nations, though never once here has he explored the side effects on countries unable to compete with the richest nations.

"Our discussions here in Europe are centered on some great goals," Mr. Bush said in a radio address broadcast this morning. "We want to spread the benefits of free trade as far and as wide as possible. Free trade is the only proven path out of poverty for developing nations. And when nations are shut off from the world, their people pay a steep price.

"The developing countries have no need for protectionist policies that would condemn them to permanent poverty," Mr. Bush said.