Marchers Rehearse for Money Summit

Protest groups, hoping to repeat their success in Seattle by shutting down the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, conducted two small, peaceful protests on Tuesday under the watchful eyes of police.

The activities were part of a weeklong Mobilization for Global Justice that has attracted many of the same groups opposed to global capitalism that successfully disrupted meetings in December of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. Their actions forced authorities to declare a state of emergency and call out the National Guard.

The protesters are hoping to use human chains and other tactics employed in Seattle to block intersections on Sunday and keep finance ministers from attending the opening IMF sessions, but District of Columbia police, backed up by federal authorities, have studied tapes of the Seattle demonstrations and hope to avoid the mistakes authorities made there.

Police kept a watchful eye as several dozen demonstrators marched from the U.S. Capitol to the World Bank in an “Economic Way of Cross” to demand debt relief for the world’s poorest countries.

Carrying chains and white crosses with the names of countries and the amounts of their foreign debts, the demonstrators handed out passages from the biblical texts Deuteronomy and Leviticus calling for the forgiveness of debts.

Both the IMF and World Bank, under pressure from the United States and other rich donor countries, have instituted programs to forgive a greater portion of the debt of the world’s 40 poorest nations, but the demonstrators contend that the effort has provided too little in debt relief.

A separate small band marched from the residence of the Colombian ambassador to a local office of the giant mutual fund company Fidelity Investments to protest international support for Colombia as the country’s president, Andres Pastrana, arrived in Washington for an official visit. He is seeking congressional approval of a $1.6 billion emergency assistance program for his country.

The protesters targeted Fidelity because it owns stock in Occidental Petroleum, which is locked in a standoff with a native Indian tribe in Colombia over oil drilling rights.

Vincent Loprochio, a spokesman for Fidelity, called the protest at the firm’s K Street office “fairly uneventful.”

Police said there were no arrests made at either protest.