Millions join anti-Iraq war protest worldwide

9.15am

LONDON - More than four million protesters joined forces around the globe on Saturday to deliver a blunt message to President Bush - "Give peace a chance and do not rush into war against Iraq."

In hundreds of towns and cities across the world, from Bangkok to Brussels, from Canberra to Calcutta, they took to the streets to pillory Bush as a bloodthirsty warmonger.

In the biggest demonstration of 'people power' since the Vietnam War, they poured scorn on Bush's hawkish stance.

"This war is solely about oil. George Bush has never given a damn about human rights," London mayor Ken Livingstone told reporters at a giant rally in London.

Close to one million people marched through London in the biggest peace demonstration in British political history.

"Give peace a chance, give peace a chance," American peace activist Jesse Jackson chanted to the cheering throng.

Hollywood star Tim Robbins, reflecting on the global reach of the protests, said: "The peace movement is acting as one."

Rome boasted another giant turnout. Under a sea of rainbow peace banners, one million people marched through the streets. Graying pensioners and dreadlocked teenagers marched side-by-side in a carnival-like atmosphere.

In France, one of the staunchest opponents of war, one woman protester said: "The Americans were stressed by September 11 and now they are going completely overboard."

The French interior ministry estimated that at least 300,000 people turned out to protest across the country.

France's opposition for now to war against Iraq to rid it of alleged weapons of mass destruction is supported in Europe by Berlin, where some 500,000 people attended a rally in the biggest protest in Germany since the end of World War II.

They waved banners reading "No Blood for Oil," "Make Love Not War," and "War? No Thanks!"

The day began with a slew of demonstrations in Asia. In Japan, the only nation to have been attacked with nuclear weapons at the end of World War II, around 300 gathered in front of the U.S. embassy in Tokyo chanting anti-war slogans.

"What the United States is doing now is wrong. We are on the brink of World War Three," said Japanese housewife Mariko Ayama.

Australians turned out in their thousands for the biggest protest since the anti-Vietnam War marches of 30 years ago.

"The whole world is against this war. Only one person wants it," said Muslim teenager Bilqees Gamieldien in Cape Town.

Protesters were cheered on Friday when U.N chief weapons inspector Hans Blix told the U.N. Security Council that he held out hope arms inspections in Iraq would work.

In the Arab world, tens of thousands of Syrians and Palestinian residents of Damascus took to the streets to voice their opposition to a U.S. war against fellow Arab Iraqis.

About 10,000 people waving Iraqi, French and German flags and Saddam Hussein pictures marched peacefully but noisily through the Lebanese capital of Beirut.

In Turkey, demonstrators pleaded: "No to more blood and chaos in our region" and "No more American imperialism."

Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz held his own one-man protest in the Italian city of Assisi, praying silently before the tomb of St. Francis, the patron of peace.

"The people of Iraq want peace and millions of people around the world are demonstrating for peace, so let us all work for peace and resist the war," he said in front of one of the world's most famous religious shrines.

The same wave of anti-Americanism swept over Europe, already deeply divided over the need to attack Iraq.

"The biggest threat to peace is the United States, not Iraq," said one pensioner in Finland.

"The war...would only make the Iraq people weaker and would keep Saddam Hussein in power," said Belgian social worker Roselyne Laforge.

One Russian protester's banner showed a photograph of Bush with the words: "Butcher: Get out of other people's lands."

"More forest, less Bushes," read one banner in Stockholm. "Bush = cancer of the planet" read another in Barcelona.

In Croatia, several hundred masked protesters burned the American flag in front of the U.S. embassy in Zagreb.

The only major trouble flared in the Greek capital, Athens, where demonstrators burned a car and smashed several shop and bank windows in center of the city at the start of a protest march to the U.S. embassy by up to 50,000 people. (Additional reporting from Reuters bureaux in Paris, Rome, Sofia, Moscow, Berlin, Johannesburg, London, Cape Town, Zagreb, Sydney, Wellington, Tokyo, Islamabad, Stockholm, Helsinski, Barcelona and Damascus)

- REUTERS