Thousands in Europe March Against War

Thousands of protesters marched in European cities Saturday, voicing their opposition to the looming military conflict in the Persian Gulf region.

Police estimated that 40,000 anti-war demonstrators assembled in the French capital in one of the largest of the European protest marches. Organizers estimated the French crowd at over 100,000.

The demonstrators included Communist Party members, environmentalists, classes of schoolchildren and dancing, chanting Kurdish nationalists, who fear that a gulf war would annihilate their people living in Iraq.

In Germany, demonstrations in more than 70 cities constituted the first significant stirring of a once-powerful peace movement that traumatized West Germany in the early 1980s with its opposition to deployment of medium-range nuclear missiles.

Organizers said more than 200,000 turned out for rallies under the motto, “Five minutes to 12”--the slogan used by the movement in earlier years to depict the image of impending Armageddon.

In Hamburg, Munich, Hanover, Dresden, Frankfurt and Berlin, demonstrators marched through central city areas chanting slogans and carrying banners urging negotiations instead of war in the gulf.

In Berlin, where police said more than 30,000 took part, protesters marched peacefully through the downtown areas, but small groups of hooligans, known as “autonoms,” broke way from the main group and stoned three police cars and broke windows at four banks.

Police spokesman Rainer Hasdorf said 10 people were arrested.

As in the early 1980s, the protests were organized mainly by a coalition of Germany’s political left--Greens, Social Democrats, parts of the Protestant church and trade unions.

The demonstrations occurred on the day that the country’s leading news weekly, Der Spiegel, published a report that about 100 German companies are suspected of having violated the U.N.-imposed embargo against Iraq.

According to the magazine, only Jordan has a greater number of companies on a list that Secretary of State James A. Baker III is reported to have handed over to German authorities during his visit to Bonn last week.

In France, 100 anti-war activists delayed a French national railroad train carrying U.S. military supplies for 1 1/2 hours Saturday by lying on the tracks at Chambery in the French Alps north of Grenoble.

The French train, carrying jeeps and other equipment from U.S. bases in Germany, was bound for Italy, where the equipment was expected to be sent to the gulf.

In Italy, a crowd estimated by organizers at 100,000 turned out in Rome to express opposition to using military force in the gulf.

The largest anti-war protest in Britain was in London, where police said 15,000 demonstrators gathered at Trafalgar Square.

The main Paris demonstration was largely organized by the French Communist Party and its affiliated labor union.

Most demonstrators wore yellow badges quoting a line from French poet Jacques Prevert-- quelle connerie la guerre (“what damned stupidity is war”). Many of the anti-war chants were directed at President Francois Mitterrand.

However, the loudest and most active participants were the estimated 2,000 Kurdish refugees who paraded waving bright red banners and flags of Kurdistan, their dreamed-of homeland in the Middle East.

“If there is a war, the Kurds will be the first to be sacrificed,” said Sadet Turgut, 23, a Kurdish bookkeeper in France. “We will be caught in a cross-fire between the Turks and the Iraqis. Obviously, the object of this war is the oil that is in the Kurdish region.”

Times staff writer Tyler Marshall, in Berlin, contributed to this story.