LONDON — By the millions, peace marchers in cities around the world united Saturday behind a single demand: No war with Iraq.
In Rome, between 1 million and 3 million people turned out, according to police officials and protest organizers; in London, between a half-million and 1 million; in Berlin, a half-million.
On a global scale, the demonstrations were among the largest in decades. They began with the arrival of the day in New Zealand and spread time zone by time zone around the globe, culminating with 100,000 people flooding the streets near the United Nations in New York. More than a million marched in Barcelona, Spain, while more than half a million took to the streets of Madrid.
The larger than expected marches, coming a day after the U.N. Security Council debate on whether to give weapons inspectors more time in Iraq, will make it harder for the Bush administration to win support for any war effort in Iraq.
“Peace! Peace! Peace! Let America listen to the rest of the world — and the rest of the world is saying: ‘Give the inspectors time,’” Nobel Peace Prize winner Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa told an inter-religious throng at a church near the United Nations.
In many places, the marches equaled or surpassed the scope of the anti-globalization demonstrations in recent years. In other places, they rivaled or topped the anti-nuclear protests of the early 1980s or the Vietnam War protests of the ’60s and ’70s.
“People are getting organized to a degree I have never seen in my lifetime,” said Henry Schwarz, director of the Program on Peace and Justice, located at Georgetown University. “It does seem to have far-reaching impact.”
In London, a seemingly endless throng of flag-waving marchers flowed down the wide avenues of Piccadilly. The march took five hours before the end of it finally caught up with the front at the speaker’s stage on the muddy grounds of Hyde Park.
Shaggy-haired left-wing protest veterans teamed up with families who had never marched before. Demonstrators wore diamond rings and nose rings, fur coats and jean jackets. Babies and children were plentiful.
“It’s not Americans, it’s your government,” Santino Russomanna, 46, told an American reporter in Rome. “George Bush, he’s a rich man who is worried about his own interests.”
In Rome, as in London, demonstrators also attacked their own leaders for siding with Bush on the war.
Berlin’s large protest was aimed at the Bush administration, not the German government, since Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has been firmly against an Iraq war.
Berlin had not seen a rally so large since Nov. 4, 1989, when a half-million East Germans demonstrated against their government five days before the fall of The Wall.
Theodor Seidel, a retired Berlin judge, found himself marching in the first demonstration of his 71 years. He carried a sign that read “Bush to Nuremberg,” the site of the Nazi war crimes trials.
In New York, protestors’ efforts to march directly in front of the United Nations were thwarted by city officials, who denied them a permit for security reasons. But their rally became a de facto march when the sheer numbers overwhelmed police on many streets leading to the rally site, at 51st Street and First Avenue.