First indymedia reports from Larzac on this site:  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2003/08/275401.html

On Saturday afternoon roads to the site were closed because it was FULL! There were still tail backs for around 20km radius.

If anyone else has time to translate some of the stuff from Saturday and Sunday PLEASE do,  http://paris.indymedia.org/ is a good spot to start.

Yes could anyone out there please translate the french sites and publish them as stories on the UK site then it would be easy for us to doa feature on it...

Copyright 2003 Guardian Newspapers Limited
The Guardian (London)


August 11, 2003

SECTION: Guardian Foreign Pages, Pg. 12

LENGTH: 482 words

HEADLINE: French plan a hot autumn: 200,000 gather at Larzac festival

BYLINE: Amelia Gentleman in Larzac

BODY:


Two hundred thousand protesters came together in the southern French countryside at the weekend to plot ways of making September a difficult month for the government.

Almost twice as many participants as expected pitched tents in the scorching heat of the Larzac plain.

A government spokesman tried to play down the significance of the event. "By stirring up the concerns felt by a number of professions, the minority extreme-left activists have only one real goal: to paralyse French society," he said. But many of those there insisted that they were not extremist activists, just moderates infuriated by the direction taken by the centre-right administration during its first year in power, and spurred to take action for the first time in their lives.

"Of course when you get such a large number of politically motivated people together, there's a powerful sense of solidarity," said Joel Collot, an actor from Montpellier. "But this isn't a gathering of radicals behaving in a hysterical manner. There are a lot of reasonable people here who are just very angry with the government.

"You can sense that trouble is brewing for the autumn."

Thousands of people squeezed into huge tents to listen to debates over new government reforms proposed for the education system, the perils of privatising France's public services and the menace posed by genetically modified crops.

The organisational forces behind the strikes and demon strations, which have united teachers, train drivers, postmen, students, health workers and actors since the spring, were present.

Unions and campaign groups were recruiting supporters and planning further action for the autumn in protest against the government's plans to extend its implementation of pension reforms to other areas of social security.

Rightwing commentators and organisers alike referred to the gathering as a "summer-school in anti-establishment activity".

"The month of September mustn't merely be hot, it should be scorching; everyone must be on the streets. If there are lots of us, we will be able to make a difference," said Jose Bove, the radical sheep farmer and leader of France's anti-globalisation movement, who was released from prison last week.

"If we do nothing, France's education, its farming community, its health service and culture will all definitively be forced into the commercial sector."

The tone of the occasion was serious; philosophers and union leaders were greeted on stage with the kind of ecstatic excitement reserved elsewhere for pop stars and footballers.

One seminar focused optimistically on the drive to unite the separate campaigns being fought by different professions this year into a grander action on the scale of a general strike. Others planned protests for next month's World Trade Organisation summit in Cancun, Mexico.

guardian.co.uk/france

Copyright 2003 The Financial Times Limited
Financial Times (London)

August 11, 2003, Monday London Edition 1

SECTION: INTERNATIONAL NEWS; Pg. 5

LENGTH: 748 words

HEADLINE: Freed French activist rallies crowd of 150,000 faithful to Larzac: A coalition of those opposed to state reforms and globalisation sent a strong message to Paris, reports Jo Johnson

BYLINE: By JO JOHNSON

BODY:
More than 150,000 people gathered on the plateau of Larzac, 80km north of Montpellier, have sent a strong message to Paris in a spectacular weekend-long demonstration against the French government's plans for public sector reform and liberalisation of the country's statist economy.

Speculation over whether the government will suffer from a rentree chaude -a politically charged return from the August holidays - is one of France's great summertime traditions. For the angry crowds at Larzac, there was no doubt at all that the 2003 rentree will be one of the hottest on record.

Many spent three hours in traffic in 40-degree heat to reach the exposed hilltop site. Organisers said this show of commitment sent a clear message to prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin that opposition to his reforms - which saw strikes paralyse France this spring - will resume after the long summer break.

"The month of September will not just be hot for the government," said Jose Bove, the media-savvy spokesman of the Confederation Paysanne, a small farmers' union that helped organ ise the rally. "It must be scorching. Everyone must be on the streets. If we are numerous, we will be able to change things."

Originally, just 50,000 people were expected to make the pilgrimage to Larzac, a site with a mythical place in French social history since 1973 when hippies joined small farmers, led by Mr Bove, in an epic campaign to reclaim land seized by a nearby army base.

But on Saturday after noon, as traffic backed up 20km to Millau - the town dubbed Seattle-upon-Tarn ever since Mr Bove destroyed its half-built McDonald's restaurant in 1999 - he reluctantly told tens of thousands of teachers, striking actors and energy sector workers still making their way to the three-day meeting to turn back.

The crowds testify to Mr Bove's pulling power. The anti-globalisation campaigner was freed from jail just over a week ago - to the relief of a government keen to avoid his imprisonment becoming a violent cause cele bre at the rally - after serving five weeks of a 10-month sentence for destroy ing genetically-modified plants.

He is serving out the rest of his term - reduced by 4 1/2 months by President Jacques Chirac in his Bastille Day amnesty - under a home detention regime that may prevent him travelling to the World Trade Organisation meeting in Cancun in September.

Mr Bove yesterday called on the government to launch a public debate over the role over WTO ahead of the meeting. The request has the support of the Socialist party, which under the uninspiring leadership of Francois Hollande has so far failed to put forward a strong programme to challenge the government's agenda.

But this year's gathering at Larzac has been less about griping at the WTO's role as an agent of "untrammeled ultra-liberalism" than about providing those with specific grievances in the French public sector with an opportunity to start discussing how to defend their corner against a reforming government.

For Giselle Vidallet, a national executive director of the Confederation Generale du Travail, the turnout demonstrates anger at plans to privatise Electricite de France and reform healthcare. "These are questions that are central to people's lives," she said. "We fought yesterday. We will fight tomorrow."

Gael Detrain, a history teacher wearing the colours of SUD, a fast-growing and hardline union, was one of many teachers moving between the three debating tents labelled Genoa, Seattle and Cancun, battlefields of the anti-globalisation movement past and future.

"Teachers are here in mass because we were the first to feel the government steamroller," she said.

"The government hoped that the summer would allow every one to cool off. But we are instead using it as an opportunity to prepare ourselves for the battles of the rentree in a spirit of inter-professional solidar ity."

Actors and technicians, whose strikes in protest at government reductions to their unemployment benefit disrupted so many festivals this summer, were also out in force.

Larzac, which offered free concerts from Manu Chao and the Asian Dub Foundation, is one of the few big events this summer not to have been cancelled.

Olivier Letellier, a story-teller from Paris, denied any hypocrisy. "It's not a festival," he answers hotly. "It's a movement that signifies the convergence of our different struggles. Come the rentree, we will all stand together that's why we are here."

LOAD-DATE: August 10, 2003

Not quite a translation, but for those who want to know more, i found this, it might go to the global site:

250.000 protest against WTO

The action and discussion weekend (fr, en, de, es) that the French farmers' organisation Confederation Paysanne organised in Larzac (France) broke all limits. Organizers who were tabling on a 100.000 people attending their Anti-WTO rally in response to WTO intergovernmental talks in Cancun from 10th to 14th of September had to cope with about 250,000 paticipants turning up.

The Larzac meeting has yet again proved that resistance and debate against globalization is just as large and real after the Iraqi war as before, and it proves the need for political meetings of the anti-globalization movement independent of actual summits.

The meeting was planned to take place where the nine farmers activists, among them Jose Bove, where put on trial because they help dismantling a Mc Donalds in ptotest against the WTO decission forcing the EU to accept US meat treated with growth hormones. Some 50,000 people showed up for the trial to shpw their solidarity. Bove was sentenced to 10 months prison, was arrested in June, and released on 2 August in a general amnesty.



IMC Paris:  http://paris.indymedia.org/article.php3?id_article=4631

Confederation Paysanne  http://www.confederationpaysanne.fr

IMC Mexico on Cancun  http://espora.org/cancun03/

Only the French could come together in such a way to oppose their government's watwardness
Let's hope this core of opposition can create a realistic alternative to shatter the shell created by the new world order
Way to go! Bove