DOLVI SLIVNO - The world has a new Protest Generation, and it has arrived in Prague.
As the city's five-star hotels fill up with the suited bankers of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, the people who have vowed to wreck this week's summit and wrest control of the world's economy from their grip gather on a disused farm in the village of Dolvi Slivno, 5km north of the city.
They have come from across the world: not only the dreadlocked veterans of anti-capitalist campaigns, but many who have abandoned highly paid, white-collar jobs to be here, sleeping in the shell of a wrecked bus, or in an old barn with holes in the roof, and washing from a communal bucket.
Protest is back, and it is uniting the young from across the social spectrum.
Unlike the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting that protesters ruined in Seattle, this summit is being held in a country directly affected by globalisation.
Nowhere in the postcommunist world has embraced the global economy as eagerly as the Czech Republic: Prague is stuffed with McDonald's restaurants and Tesco supermarkets, and thousands of Czech activists are expected to demonstrate alongside international campaigners from across Europe and North America.
Those at the training camp are a fraction of those expected to arrive in Prague this week, and, unlike many who are coming, they are all committed to non-violence.
Chelsea Mozen gave up a highly paid job in Washington DC local government to come to Prague.
Scott Codey talks to journalists about the history of non-violent protest. His conversation is lucid and educated, full of references to Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
Next week Codey and Mozen, clean-cut, well-read Americans, will probably be teargassed and beaten by police for the first time in their lives, as they form a human chain around the congress centre where the IMF and World Bank meetings are being held.
These are the young people the IMF and the World Bank should be afraid of. They are the proof that the anti-globalisation movement has spread far beyond the hardline fringe groups who want to tear down the entire economic order.
They will stand hand in hand with veteran campaigners like Martin Shaw, an London electrician.
But unlike Shaw, a committed anarchist who says he wants to tear down the consumer society and live without "interference" from any government, Codey and Mozen are not revolutionaries: they want to reform the system, not destroy it.
This time it is not all about the sort of street protests that wrecked the WTO summit in Seattle. The Initiative against Economic Globalisation is also holding its own counter-summit while the IMF and World Bank delegates are in town.
The protesters will not only condemn global economic policy: they will set out their alternative vision.
"We're trying to decentralise power so local communities have a say in their own lives," says Codey.
These young idealists have their ideas sorted out - but are they ready to face the police on the streets of Prague?
- INDEPENDENT
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