By
The Associated Press
PRAGUE, Czech Republic - Protesters carrying white crosses staged a mock funeral yesterday, saying thousands of children die every day because of IMF and World Bank policies.
"Fifty years of oppression was enough," said Sam Kobia, an activist from Kenya calling for abolition of the big international lending institutions. "Global economy is a global apartheid."
The funeral march, launched by the anti-poverty group Jubilee 2000, was to draw attention to claims that 19,000 children die each day as a result of policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Poor nations are so burdened by debt that they cannot afford necessary health care, the group says.
IMF spokesman David Hawley rejected the charge.
"The claim that the fund kills babies is nonsense," Hawley said. "I speak for the fund, but the fund and the bank are both dedicated to reducing poverty."
A group of 520 protesters, mostly Italian, were stopped at the Austrian border when officials denied entry to four who refused to get off the chartered train.
That set off a protest rally in Prague, which had escalated by late afternoon to a group of about 1,000 people marching through the streets chanting "open the border."
Interior Minister Stanislav Gross told local television the four would not be permitted to enter the Czech Republic because they had participated in riots that marred a World Trade Organization meeting last year in Seattle.
The so-called Battle in Seattle has been seen as a rallying cry for anticapitalist protesters trying to halt economic globalization.
But some veterans of the Seattle battle are finding themselves apparently locked out of the Czech Republic this week.
An American who said he was a journalist, Lee Suster, was denied entry yesterday because he was on a list of "undesirable people," a Czech police spokeswoman, Iva Knolova, said.
Suster, a journalist for the Chicago-based paper Socialist Worker, told The Associated Press he was prevented from going through passport control after landing in Prague on a flight from New York.
He said no reason was given, but he suspected it was because he had been arrested in Seattle while covering the protests there.
With the IMF and World Bank opening their meetings tomorrow, following Saturday's session of G-7 finance ministers and central bankers, activists have vowed to block the main highway in Prague.
