Like a Bond movie scene

IT was like a scene from a James Bond movie at times with protesters scaling cliff sides, racing motorboats across the choppy waters of Lake Garda and firing ear piercing flares into the blue sky.

But the group of 400 protesters that turned up at the meeting of EU Foreign Ministers turned the security aspects of the picturesque town of Riva del Garda to their advantage.

They blockaded the two roads leading into the two by strewing them with pieces of plastic and broken up computers, causing tail-backs for kilometres in the heavily tourist area.

The ministers, most of whom flew into a nearby airport, were ferried across the lake by boat or dropped into the town at the base of the Dolomite Mountains by helicopter.

But the thousands of Italian police brought into the area to provide some of the tightest security ever seen at an EU meeting were anxious not to be provoked. Many police had been demoted or moved sideways after the pitched battles of the G7 summit in Genoa two years ago when they killed one protester and injured hundreds of others.

At one stage the protesters, most belonging to the Europe-wide organisation Movement of Disobedience, pushed the police in full riot gear back a few metres towards the cordoned off area where the meeting was about to start.

They stood stony-faced while speaker after speaker addressed the small crowd many of them tourists against the evils of globalisation and non-democratic EU governments. Most were in favour of the EU, but do not like much of what is happening in the Union.

One of the movement's leaders, Andrea Olivieri, told them: "We want a union of people, not a union of stock markets. When the new member states join next year we will still have borders between the people, but there will be no border for bankers and stockbrokers."

Other protesters demanded the ministers stop meeting in heavily fortified surroundings.

"This is not democracy. What are they afraid of? They should meet in public," another speaker said.

The Movement of Disobedience said it will have members at next week's World Trade Organisation talks in Cancun, Mexico.