EUROPEAN leaders gathering in Amsterdam for next week's EU summit might have their delicate sensibilities offended by sights of civil disobedience such as a "mass vomit" in the City Hall.
Apparently anarchist protesters have been plastering the city with posters and flooding Internet sites with calls to action as the leaders of Europe finalise their new treaty.
The unattributed posters depict the heads of the 15 EU leaders with the words in English "search and destroy", suggesting the use of fists, stones, paint, smoke-bombs and Molotov cocktails.
The authors of the posters will be prosecuted, police say, insisting that they have 5,000 police on alert. Dutch sources point to the fringes of the Dutch squatter movement as being the likely culprits, but do not expect them to carry out their threats.
Other disruptive and potentially violent protests at the summit are also being planned, or at least advertised. On the Internet the anonymous organisers of a "punkfest" of "chaos days" are suggesting protesters bring anchors to throw over the cable lines of the city's trams. There will be an attempt to paint the inside of Dam Palace pink, and it is suggested the evening might be capped with "the burning down of a subway station".
That's only today. Tomorrow there is to be a "sex riot" in the Nieuwmarkt, a series of performances "for people who successfully explore their sexual development and sexual boundaries". "The Eurosummit Is Just going to be about jobs, and after all sex is far more important," the organisers say.
More traditionally, the organisers of Euromarches are expecting some 20,000 demonstrators from across the Union to protest against unemployment in the city today.
. There were red faces in the Dutch presidency yesterday after the Prime Minister gave a new twist (or perhaps spelling) to the expression "cock-up". In his traditional pre-summit letter to heads of government, Mr Wim Kok calls on fellow leaders to send a clear signal that the euro will start on time, "on December 1st, 1999".
The date the euro is actually due to be launched is January 1st, 1999, and to suggest otherwise is the last possible message the summit will want to send. "This was a mistake and is being corrected," an embarrassed Dutch official confessed. "The letter was written in haste."
As one diplomat here said, however, "Sure we know what he means."
