Police were called to the Gare de Lyon in Paris and to stations in half a dozen other cities

Police were called to the Gare de Lyon in Paris and to stations in half a dozen other cities when the demonstrators tried to block ticket offices and tracks. One group, which boarded a Nice-bound train, was violently ejected by police at Valence.About 50,000 mainstream trade unionists from the 15 EU countries marched through Nice yesterday to demand protections for workers’ rights, but the “counter-summit” proper will begin today, with demonstrations and conferences that will allege that the EU is an ultra-liberal Trojan horse for globalisation.Several of the anti-globalist leaders prominent in Seattle will attend, including the French small farmers’ leader, José Bové.Unlike Prague and Geneva, sites of the last two anti-globalist jamborees, Nice has declared it intends to continue business as usual. The Gaullist, but former National Front, mayor of the city, Jacques Peyrat, dismissed the counter-summit as an “extravagant hotch-potch of protest”.The decision to hold the summit in Nice was taken by the French President, Jacques Chirac, against the wishes of Lionel Jospin, the Prime Minister, who feared that the city’s far-right tradition and the far-left demonstrations might prove an explosive mix.French national authorities will police the event, not Mr Peyrat. A no-go zone has been drawn around the summit itself, and there are efforts to prevent some demonstrators from reaching Nice; a train booked by Italian anarchists was cancelled on Tuesday and the EU’s Schengen open-borders agreement is being suspended at the Italian-French frontier for four days to allow police to refuse entry to anyone seen as a likely trouble-maker.”Nice is not, and will not be, under a state of siege,” declared Jean-Rene Garnier, the Prefect (senior national government official) of the Alpes-Maritimes département, who will be leading the security operation in Nice..

The Nice summit looks set to be a test of French negotiating skill and is France’s last chance to excise the charge that hangs over its six-month presidency of the EU: supreme arrogance. The Nice summit looks set to be a test of French negotiating skill and is France’s last chance to excise the charge that hangs over its six-month presidency of the EU: supreme arrogance.
Twice in the past three days the French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, has had to defend his country’s conduct in the talks running up to the Inter-governmental Conference. The criticism has even crept into the French media.At an evening press conference last Sunday, Mr Vedrine was on the end of an aggressive question from a member of the Brussels-based French press corps, but yesterday it was the turn of another newspaper, Le Figaro, to put the question of “l’arrogance”, provoking the minister into another defence of his record.France now sees this summit as an opportunity to set the record straight. One French diplomat said: “Nice is a chance to overcome this wave [of criticism]. If we get an agreement here there will be a totally different impression.”But it is Mr Vedrine’s Europe minister, Pierre Moscovici, who has been the main target of criticism; smooth and clever, he has not endeared himself to some colleagues. One diplomat described his conduct in negotiations as “disgusting”, adding: “He works with the assumption that the French line is best for Europe. He does not want to understand the arguments of other countries.”His scapegoat status has now been confirmed by press stories about a recent appearance in the European parliament in which he studied his papers rather than listening to the debate; officials said he was checking the identity of the speaker from his directory.It was the French president, Jacques Chirac, who precipitated the bad blood over a dinner at the last EU summit in Biarritz.

To their fury he rounded on some smaller countries that insisted on a right to carry on sending a commissioner to Brussels, thus blocking French proposals for a smaller and leaner Commission. The exchange cleared the air, but the prime ministers of Portugal, Luxembourg and Finland still left fuming.More recently the lead-up to a key meeting on social policy – one of France’s priorities – produced a similar reaction and familiar accusations of a lack of consultation; the French draft paper outlining a five-year agenda was denounced as “old-fashioned” by the European Commission and after a rebellion by several countries, a redraft was swiftly ordered.Part of the problem has been that as a big country with a distinct European agenda, France has found it hard to play the role of the honest broker, which is normally expected of the presidency. Germany and Britain, in their respective tenures in the chair, faced similar, if less widespread, accusations of partisanship.France has also been grappling with the “co-habitation” between the centre-right President and his leftish Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, which has made co-ordination between the French delegation in Brussels, its foreign ministry, the Elysée, and the Matignon highly complex.One council meeting was described by an EU diplomat as a “catastrophe”: the documents, he said, came just before the meeting and the council secretariat had no time to translate them; some saw this as evidence of an obsession with the primacy of the French language and a lack of attention to others’ problems.The French are right to see the summit as a chance to purge their past failings. Ultimately, their presidency will be remembered for whether they achieved the now much-hankered-after Treaty of Nice.As one diplomat noted yesterday: “To judge that, we have to wait until the end.”. French riot police clashed with hundreds of rock-throwing protesters today outside the site where European leaders opened a three-day summit, creating scenes of chaos in this normally tony French resort city. French riot police clashed with hundreds of rock-throwing protesters today outside the site where European leaders opened a three-day summit, creating scenes of chaos in this normally tony French resort city.
Tear gas inadvertently wafted over to the Acropolis convention center as leaders were entering the hall, causing French President Jacques Chirac to sneeze and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin to step away from photographers so he could blow his nose.At least two officers were injured as the rioters tried to pierce a police defenses in a street that leads up to the hall’s main entrance.One injured officer stumbled out of the police front line clutching his arm and another helmeted officer appeared to have suffered a head wound under a volley of stones hurled by protesters.Demonstrators fought their way to within a 100 yards of the convention center’s entrance, where the EU leaders arrived one by one along with leaders of 13 East European nations due to join the EU in the years ahead.Police pushed the demonstrators back one block A bank building was set on fire.

Efforts by the fire crews to put out the blaze were met with more rock throwing and mayhem The fire was eventually extinguished. The streets around the center were littered with broken glass and rocks.A crowd converged on the car of a motorist who had knocked over several protesters. The crowd beat on the car with sticks and pipes, smashing the windows and forcing the driver to flee in reverse. Undeterred, he floored it again scattering the demonstrators like dominoes.About 1,000 protesters – including radical trade unionists, Basque separatists and anti-global activists – were demanding the EU do more to combat social exclusion and poverty across the 15-nation union.The protests began about an hour before the summit began with demonstrators marching noisily through streets near the summit venue, shouting “Europe is not for sale” and “No, No, No to a federal Europe. Yes, Yes, Yes to a social Europe”.The summit agenda focused on reorganizing the way the EU runs its affairs – an issue of controversy that touches on the influence governments will wield in EU policy-making for years to come.