24 January 2004. A large number of punks and skinheads were mingling with the ski crowd on the concourse of Zurich’s main railway station. For the moment, the riot police were nowhere to be seen. The only security presence came in the form of a group of uniformed platform guards. A train pulled in on one of the far platforms, disgorging yet more black-clad activists. The crowd made its way to another train on platform 12. Half a dozen demonstrators tried to force their way into the first-class car, but a burly businessman stood in their path. Some light-hearted pushing and shoving ensued, but still the man refused to budge. Finally, a huge punk clambered up the steps to the next carriage before booting the businessman out onto the platform, where he landed in an undignified heap. And so began our journey south to Davos, home to the annual World Economic Forum conference.

After a thousand assorted protest types had made themselves at home in ‘Black Bloc class’, I found that the only space available was on the floor. Second class was crammed with ski tourists and old ladies day-tripping into the mountains. I entertained myself by thumbing through the pages of the Rough Guide to Switzerland. ‘It’s very rare you’ll even see a police officer in Switzerland, although you may come across one or two directing traffic,’ said the guidebook. The author clearly wasn’t familiar with the WEF protest routine.

Needless to say, no one expected to get anywhere near Davos. The furthest we got in 2003 was Landquart, a minor railway junction on the main line between Zurich and Chur. The best we could hope for was to get near enough to cause some disruption to the conference, and then make it back to Zurich to do whatever we could get away with.

The train zipped down the line and in ninety minutes, we had reached the site of the previous year’s confrontation. This time the platform was deserted except for a small contingent of riot cops. The anarchists started kitting up with goggles, gas masks and in one or two cases, full body armour. In Britain, confrontations between anti-capitalists and the police tend to be quite spontaneous and disorganised. In the German-speaking parts of Europe, on the other hand, actions are frequently prepared for months in advance. This means that fighting is more or less a certainty, especially as groups of neo-Nazis are always on the lookout to pick a fight with left-wingers wherever they appear.

Ten minutes later, we arrived at Chur, a small town high up in the mountains. Two dozen riot cops lurked on the square adjacent to the railway station as the anarchists streamed out onto the platform. I decided to check out the neighbourhood while the demo got its act together. I spotted a group of local Nazis congregating in a side street, replete with flags and banners. I had no doubt that we would be seeing more of them later on in the day. Within an hour, about two thousand protestors had packed the central square, half of which were blacked up and masked. Two Japanese tourists pushed a faux leopard-skin suitcase through the mob to reach their hotel. The square teemed with journos, undercover filth and Maoist teenagers wearing absurd flat caps.

Finally, at half past one, we were off. The Black Bloc led the way off the square, escorted by three uniformed local cops. The cameramen were pelted with blocks of hardened snow. This stuff was so heavy that it was practically the equivalent of throwing a rock. We passed a roundabout, where a group of riot cops lurked discreetly at the end of the street. More snowballs whizzed through the air. I chucked a block of ice at a particularly annoying cameraman and scored a direct hit on his camera lens. He backed off and melted into the crowd. The demonstration stopped for a full five minutes. Everyone seemed to be crowding around something and throwing yet more snowballs in one particular direction. I pushed my way to the front of the crowd. It was the cameraman, nursing a head injury from a hit at point-blank range. The anarchists left him alone after that and proceeded to chase off three riot cops guarding the entrance to a post office.

The rest of the demo followed a predictable pattern. Two banks were paint-bombed and the first had its windows booted in. There was a fair amount of low-level vandalism and some sporadic bottle throwing whenever the riot cops came within range. In the main, however, the Black Bloc was content to stand back and let the minority indulge in some harmless recreational trashing of corporate property.

Back at the station, we were treated to half an hour of boring speeches. ‘The only way to change the world is through Maoism,’ declared one woman, before embarking on a ten-minute rant about US imperialism. ‘Long live Marxism-Leninism-Maoism’ she finished to muted applause from the crowd. The anarchists were starting to get impatient. ‘Demo Now, Demo Now,’ went up the chant. A masked anarchist with a megaphone declared that now was the time to get back on the trains for Zurich. His group led the way into the underpass and out onto the platform where a train was conveniently waiting. Most of the Black Bloc got on the train while the ‘softer’ elements in the demonstration opted to stay behind. After ten minutes of aggro as hundreds of masked anarchists pushed their way onto the train, we were off again. I had visions of the mob storming into Zurich and attacking the city centre with gusto, as all the riot cops would surely be behind us in Chur. If only we could get our act together in Britain and stage something similar on Mayday, I thought.

As it turned out, it was the police and not the anarchists who had got their act together. The train came juddering to a halt in Landquart. A handful of demonstrators trickled onto the platform to see why. At the front of the train stood a hastily erected fence, behind which lay a force of riot cops backed with water cannon. The cops were about thirty metres away on the other side of a railway bridge. The Black Bloc quickly moved out onto the bridge and began chucking rocks across the water. The cops responded by blasting us with the water cannon. A quick look around the station confirmed my worst fears. We were surrounded on all sides by a two metre-high security fence. The fence was anchored in place with steel weights and heavily defended by riot police. There were at least five water cannon in firing range, and we had nowhere to run. It was only a matter of time before the cops moved into the station and surrounded us in a ‘Mayday Monopoly’ style operation.

In the meantime, a group of about one hundred neo-Nazis provided a welcome distraction. Like the police, the Nazis also seemed better prepared than the previous year, with increased numbers and a variety of flags and banners. The anarchists began throwing rocks over the heads of the police. ‘Swiss Police Protect the Nazis,’ they chanted (this rhymes in Swiss-German). The cops drove off the neo-Nazis with a baton-charge. A lone anarchist duelled at close range with the water cannon. He would throw a rock in its general direction, then the freezing jet of liquid would zap him from a considerable distance, before he picked up another rock and started the sequence all over again. Many people were collecting ballast from the railway lines in plastic bags. Some of the rioters were so pissed that they could barely hold a rock, let alone aim it in any particular direction.

A group of terrified elderly tourists took advantage of a lull in the fighting to make their escape through the police lines. They would be the last ones to escape before the real action began.

I made my way back to the bridge, where the missile throwing continued. The vast majority of the rocks either fell short or bounced harmlessly into the water. Suddenly, a force of riot cops appeared directly in front of our position. There was a loud bang. A tear-gas canister exploded to my right, igniting a small fire on the trackside. The gas dissipated in the direction of the police line. Some black objects fell harmlessly into the snow. These were the famous Swiss rubber bullets. Normally baton rounds would cause unpleasant injuries at this kind of range, but owing to the fence and hence the trajectory of fire, most were simply falling at low speeds to the ground. Nonetheless, even the hardest of the hard core seemed perturbed by the briskness of the assault and everyone gave the fence a wide berth from this point onwards.

It was now getting dark. The cops were closing in on the right flank and our position had become untenable. The Black Bloc urged everyone to get back on the train, but then just as suddenly, urged us to get back out again. Some didn’t wait for the queue to leave by the doors and simply flung themselves out of the windows. White smoke billowed from one of the rear carriages. This may have been tear-gas, but then again, it may also have been due to someone setting fire to the train.

I, along with half a dozen others, decided to surrender. We advanced past a group of riot police with our hands in the air. The police ignored us. We moved to the front of the station, where we found our path blocked by yet more police. No one was leaving anytime soon. Not long after, the cops cleared the railway line with a massive barrage of tear-gas. The Black Bloc came running out onto the station forecourt, desperately trying to escape the gas. Many people were visibly distressed with the effects of the chemicals. Bottles of mineral water did the rounds in an attempt to ameliorate the damage.

The water cannon opened up to the front, driving the crowd away from the fence. That was that. Our morale was broken. No one wanted to fight on. As an exercise in riot control, this was supremely effective. The Swiss police finally seemed to have learned the lessons from 2003, when groups of rioters had been allowed to roam virtually unopposed through the streets of major cities. They had grasped that the only way to stop the riots is to contain the demonstrators in a small area, preferably far from tempting commercial targets. Landquart station was a trap and we had walked right into it.

We waited for two hours in sub-zero temperatures while the police decided what to do with us. Caged in and numb with cold, I felt like an animal in a particularly oppressive zoo. Eventually, they announced that we would be allowed to leave in groups of five. All masks, hats and hoods had to be removed as we were paraded in front of a police cameraman. When my turn came, a riot cop grabbed my arm and frog-marched me to a waiting van. Two officers sat in the back of the van, notebooks poised on top of a plastic riot shield.
‘Passport?’ demanded the first cop. I dug out my passport and presented it to him. He flicked through the pages with a puzzled expression on his face. ‘Address?’ he asked.
‘I live in Buckinghamshire,’ I said truthfully, knowing that I wouldn’t be living there much longer so it didn’t matter if the cops knew where I lived.
‘Buckingham?’ said the perplexed officer.
‘Yep,’ I replied, too knackered to correct him. He dutifully wrote ‘Buckingham’ next to my passport number in his notebook.

We were herded in small groups onto the platform and forced onto a train bound for Zurich. Needless to say, I enjoyed the ambience of first class, courtesy of the Swiss taxpayer. The ‘reception committee’ at Zurich station consisted of hundreds more riot cops and assorted plain-clothes officers positioned at strategic intervals. Still greater numbers of police lurked outside McDonald’s and at the entrance to the main commercial street. Water cannon and armoured cars lay poised across the bridges. As if we didn’t know it already, the Swiss authorities had finally cracked the art of managing major anti-capitalist events. Our days of running riot in Bern and Geneva were over. With hindsight, it was a mistake to hold the demo in Chur and then expect everyone to get safely back to Zurich. In the future, we have to assume that the cops are capable of planning sophisticated operations to prevent us travelling around at will, especially as they had months to plan this one.

Maybe next year we will be better off holding the demo in Zurich, since we have no chance of getting close to Davos in any case. It will be interesting to see what will happen in Munich at the NATO Security Conference on 6 February, since the German cops will also be looking to contain the expected trouble before anything can kick off.