Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar joined tens of thousands of people in a march through the Spanish capital to protest against the continuing war in Iraq and to demand the closure of the United States prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Chanting ”No to war” and ”The people of Madrid with the people of Iraq”, the protesters marched along a near-4km route from central Cibeles Plaza to Atocha square.
Organisers of Saturday’s event estimated the crowd numbered 400 000, but several witnesses put the attendance at less than a quarter of that figure. City police did not provide a crowd estimate.
Other rallies were held around Spain, with about 2 000 gathering in Barcelona and 500 taking part in Seville, according to news reports.
Political party representatives, union leaders and people from the acting and literary world took part in the Madrid protest.
Almodóvar told the private Europa Press news agency he was on the demonstration to protest ”the barbarities they have been committing in Iraq for the past four years”.
”We’re here for peace and for the closure of Guantánamo because it is a disgrace for civilisation,” he added.
The protests were called by about 50 organisations, among them Spain’s two main unions and the country’s main political parties, but not the right-wing leading opposition Popular Party.
”I’m against all wars, but especially this one. This is terrorism on a world scale,” said Gaudencio Garcia, 74, who travelled 45km from the small farming town of Azuqueca de Henares for the Madrid protest.
Spain was the scene of major anti-war protests in the run-up to and during the first months of the war, with demonstrations in Barcelona and Madrid attracting between one million and two million people each.
Former Popular Party prime minister Jose Maria Aznar was one of the strongest supporters of the US’s decision to invade Iraq. The party was voted out of office in elections in March 2004, days after 191 people were killed in bomb attacks claimed by Islamic radicals to avenge the presence of the country’s troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On winning the election, Socialist party leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero immediately set about fulfilling an electoral pledge to bring Spanish troops in Iraq home, claiming it was an illegal war.
In the Turkish city of Istanbul, more than 3 000 people protested the war in Iraq in two separate demonstrations.
More than 2 000 anti-war activists marched on the Asian side of the city that is bisected by the Bosporus strait, carrying signs that read: ”Bush go home” and ”We are all Iraqis”. Close to 1 000 other demonstrators, most of them members of far-left parties or groups, held a separate protest in a main square on the European side of Istanbul.
In the Greek capital, Athens, about 1 000 people marched peacefully from central Syntagma Square to the US embassy to call for the withdrawal of coalition troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. — Sapa-AP