MOROCCO: Around 50,000 mainly Islamist demonstrators marched through the Moroccan city of Casablanca yesterday, protesting against a possible US-led attack on Iraq and branding President Bush a "war criminal".
The peaceful protest was largely good-humoured and showed no support for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The crowd shouted slogans in favour of the Iraqi and Palestinian peoples and against US and Israeli policies.
The demonstration was also a show of strength by Islamist groups ahead of local elections in June. Islamists of the Justice and Development Party, the third largest force in parliament, marched beside militants of the more radical al-Adl wal Ihsane (Justice and Charity) group, which is banned from politics but allowed to engage in charity and other work.
Police said the march drew up to 50,000 people, more than a similar protest a week earlier in the capital, Rabat.
"In Morocco and other Arab countries, people don't have the freedom to express themselves, on unemployment for example. For some, today was a context to come out and do that," said Hassan (36), a bearded secondary school English teacher.
While many slogans had a religious tone, demonstrators chanted "Iraqis are in our veins" and denounced Washington's drive to attack Iraq, saying "Bush, butcher in Iraq".
Placards written in English said: "Bush war criminal", "Bush and Hitler are the same" and "Life of children is more expensive than oil".
Meanwhile, some 6,000 people rallied in the Japanese city of Hiroshima yesterday to protest against any US plans to attack Iraq and warned against the use of depleted uranium (DU) bombs.
The demonstrators formed human letters in a Hiroshima park, spelling out the message "No War" and "No Du" in English.
Organisers plan to have an aerial photograph of the message formed by thousands of people published as part of an anti-war advertisement in the Washington Post newspaper.
They noted the United States used depleted uranium in shells during the 1991 Gulf War.
The shells are suspected of causing high levels of radioactive contamination and a sharp rise in various forms of cancer and malformations in Iraqi babies.
"There are Iraqi people who were exposed to radiation through depleted uranium shells used by the United States during the Gulf War," Kobe University professor Nobuo Kazashi, a member of the rally's organising committee, said.
Hiroshima, along with the Japanese city of Nagasaki, has rebuilt itself from the ruins of a US atomic-bombing in the closing days of the second World War. The city suffered the first nuclear attack on mankind.
A group of human shield volunteers from Britain, who were among the first to stand in defiance of war in Baghdad, were today heading home amid safety fears, a spokesman said.
Up to a dozen of the anti-war campaigners who drove to Iraq in two red double-decker buses last month have now begun the long return trip in the same vehicles. - (Reuters, AFP, PA)
