Thinning Easter peace marches

German peace advocates took part in more than 60 events over the weekend, seeking to advocate non-violence in the annual "Ostermärsche" or "Easter Marches." The movement's main office in Frankfurt said people had braved wintery weather to express their objections to topics including Germany's military operating abroad, German arms exports and the federal government's plans to add armed drones to its fleet of observational unmanned aircraft - either before or after this year's federal election.

One of the largest marches took place in Frankfurt, where around 2,000 people expressed their displeasure with domestic military policy and the tough talk on the Korean peninsula.

One peace group based in Bonn said that the US, North and South Korea were falling "into a spiral of rhetorical and military escalation," adding that this could easily lead to a war that none of the major players wanted. Manfred Stenner from Netzwerk Freidenskooperative (Network of the German Peace Movement) said peace groups urgently wanted the US and South Korea to cancel military drills on the peninsula to calm the situation.

In western Germany, protesters marched from city to city on a three-day vigil incorporating Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Essen, Bochum and other cities before the Dortmund finale. Organizers put the total turnout over the weekend at 2,500 people. A scene from another march in the capital Berlin is pictured at the top of this story.

Dying tradition or slumbering custom?

Another key protest took place at the Büchel airbase in the Eifel national park in the west. The site is believed to house roughly 20 US nuclear warheads, some of which might soon be modernized. Around 200 protesters held a vigil under the motto "not modern, but rather illegal" at what's believed to be the last remaining site in Germany storing atomic bombs.

The Easter Marches in Germany can trace their roots back to the Alderston Marches in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s targeting the nuclear weapons research facility in the Berkshire town of Alderston. The German matches recorded their best turnout in 1968, as the Vietnam War escalated, and in 1983, when an estimated 700,000 protesters logged their disapproval at the nuclear arms race.

Turnout nowadays is tiny by comparison, though the Left Party's Willi van Ooyen, a spokesman for the Easter Marches movement, said the event "remains a political signal and a boost of the pacifist society," adding "there are a core of people close to the peace movement."

msh/jlw (AFP, epd, dpa)