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Davos protesters to take to streets despite ban

The genteel debate over globalisation taking place at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting could move to the streets on Saturday when demonstrators plan to defy a ban and protest against the event.

Swiss police and army have turned the conference centre in the Swiss town of Davos hosting the gathering of the world's movers and shakers into a virtual fortress, ringing it with coils of barbed wire and police equipped with riot gear.

More than 100 people carrying pamphlets or other material suggesting they were anti-Davos demonstrators have been stopped from entering Switzerland this week, Swiss officials said.

Switzerland's biggest security crackdown in decades is aimed at avoiding the kind of violent anti-globalisation protests that have swept cities such as Seattle and Prague.

Despite a local ban on protests in the chocolate-box Alpine ski resort of Davos, critics of the meeting say demonstrators still plan to take to the streets there on Saturday afternoon.

The organisers, however, say stringent security measures taken by Swiss authorities could mean only a small number of protesters turns out.

"There will definitely be a few thousand people trying to come up. It's likely that the majority won't be able to get here," Simone Brunner, a member of one of the groups organising Saturday's protest, told Reuters.

She said that if people were prevented from coming to Davos, "they'll be angry and they might demonstrate somewhere else".

Police in Zurich and other cities were on the alert in case that happened.

Police have not ruled out the possibility of spraying liquid cow manure on demonstrators who refuse to disperse in Davos.

Brunner strongly criticised police tactics, saying police patrolling trains and roads had prevented people from going to Davos just because of their appearance.

"I heard from a young woman who had dreadlocks who was not allowed to come up to her job here," she said.

"It's absurd what's going on. They can't suspend basic human rights because of a meeting," she said.

Swiss authorities said they were turning back people identified as potentially disruptive but denied acting arbitrarily.

By Friday afternoon, 104 people had been turned back at the borders, police said, including 14 on the blacklist of 300 activists that federal authorities issued.

"A range of propaganda materials, various gas masks, megaphones and signs were confiscated," a police statement said.

Opponents of the World Economic Forum say it is undemocratic for hundreds of world leaders and company chief executives to gather behind closed doors to debate issues crucial to the world's future.

Forum organisers have tried to address the criticism by inviting 36 grassroots organisations, including the heads of Greenpeace and Amnesty International, to attend.

Debate over globalisation, typified by trade liberalisation and ever growing markets, has been a key theme of countless working groups and discussion groups inside the forum.

Mexican President Vicente Fox told the gathering on Friday that "attempts to sugar coat the present form of globalisation with compensatory policies are not enough".

"If the new world economic order is to be consistent with what humanity most wants and needs, it must make the tools needed to access the new international economy available to the many, and not just to the few," he said.

Some grassroots groups have organised alternative meetings to the World Economic Forum both across the street in Davos and across the world in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

On Friday, more than 1,000 poor Brazilian farmers, bolstered by foreign activists from the Brazilian "Anti-Davos" summit, stormed a biotech plant owned by US-based Monsanto in Brazil in a protest over genetically modified food.

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