The battle which raged all day Saturday and into the early hours of yesterday morning in Quebec will long be remembered as the occasion when the old French-Canadian city was gassed.
For hour after hour police fired tear-gas canisters, about one every five seconds, into anti-globalisation demonstrators attacking the 3.8 km fence around the venue of the Summit of the Americas.
But the stinging chemical particles penetrated whole streets, blocks of apartments, and even the conference centre as police fired thousands of CS speed-heat grenades manufactured by Federal Laboratories in Saltsberg, Pennsylvania. They have a detonation time of 0.7 to 2 seconds after removing the lever, according to the label.
The coke-can-size grenades were lobbed by riot police over the 3 m fence onto activists a few paces away, or fired high in the air to fall twisting like dervishes among distant spectators.
Only protesters with gas masks could stand their ground against the acrid, stinging, white fumes. One of these, armed with an ice-hockey stick, raised huge cheers as he "pucked" smoking tear-gas canisters back towards the police.
The day began peacefully as some 30,000 people, many with painted faces and carrying placards with such slogans as "Democracy, the rich man's con", marched at midday behind the banner of the Quebec Federation of Labour to a protest site well away from the fence.
The first violent act came when, almost beside me, three burly men grabbed Morgan Stewart, the 22year-old former head of the students union at the University of Victoria as he chanted "So-so-so-solidaritee" into a megaphone. `Police, keep back", they shouted as they dragged the man on his back into a white van which drove off at speed. "He was not a militant", wailed his student friend, Mary Conquest.
As the march headed down empty streets, a large section broke away and climbed up narrow laneways to where the fence crossed the Rene-Levesque Boulevard. Militants from the so-called Black Bloc cell attached a grappling iron and almost pulled the fence down before a hail of CS grenades and jets from a water cannon - a new toy for the Surete du Quebec - forced them back, though one drenched protester continued to play his bagpipes undeterred.
Rocks, bottles and snowballs taken from old snowdrifts rained down on the riot police. On a nearby common, hundreds of young students and burly trade unionists, along with a few elderly professors and Quebec nationalists, applauded every time a gas canister was hurled back.
The fence to them was a symbol of exclusion and this was a way of getting the attention of those inside for their case that a free-trade zone across the Americas would hurt the poor and damage the environment.
Police were clearly aiming to avoid the street fighting which marred the 1999 Seattle WTO meeting, and to rely on gas, pepper spray, water and rubber bullets to hold the line. You knew rubber bullets were being fired when the bang of exploding CS canisters was replaced by a crackling sound.
Keith Lee, a poet from Sasketchwan, was hit by a bullet on the right leg. "I came here because for the first time in my life I feel strongly that people must unite against something that is evil," he said as he displayed his bloodied shin.
A second violent siege was mounted a kilometre away at Place D'Youville near the summit centre where President George W. Bush and 33 other American leaders were discussing free trade.
For hour after hour, militants fired rocks and bottles at riot police in front of the fence, cheered on by crowds on an overpass. At times a cloud of gas enveloped both demonstrators and police. Here I saw people retching yellow liquid, a girl with braided hair being carried unconscious to the nearby Quebec No 2 Hospital, and a journalist in gas mask interview a militant in a gas mask.
The only breach of the fence came in an alley conveniently located just below the third-storey windows of the press centre. Journalists inside got a splendid view of the steel mesh being pulled down, but were locked in for two hours as the doors were sealed against tear gas.
A gentle breeze wafted the gas over the security zone, and the air conditioning at the summit centre was switched off to prevent contamination. All the leaders got a whiff of CS as they emerged for a state dinner of LacBrome duck supreme and Jackson Triggs Chardonnay on Saturday evening.
Some petrol-bombs were thrown late at night at Rene-Levesque Boulevard, but the "measured response" of the police, as Sgt Michael Martin called it, was matched by the absence of the kind of serious attacks on property which occurred in Seattle.
Some windows were broken in the early hours of yesterday, but otherwise Quebec got off lightly. The worst damage was to the fence, which is coming down this evening in any event.
