Agents Provocateurs

dublin | summit mobilisations | opinion/analysis Tuesday May 04, 2004 17:40 by Brian

We all met them on Mayday, we might not have noticed but we did. So lets reveal them.

On May 1st we all met Agents Provocateurs. At the bring the noise demo i saw two and spoke to one.

What did they want? The two i saw appeared to be provoking infighting between protesters, running into people, pushing people and what not.

The one i spoke to wanted to know if i was "involved with the riot", apparently he had "just seen it on his television". This wasnt during the clashes, this was halfway into town after the police had fallen back. He asked other strange questions like, "What did i plan to do once i got into town", go to bed was my answer. How did i know he was a cop, he came out of nowhere as three to four strange cars followed us up the road towards mountjoy. They had lights off or dimmed with four-five passengers, a garda helicopter appeared above. We were in a crowd but if we were alone who knows what could have happened.

This guy was strange though. He spoke in a wicklow accent (hardly a crime, but he certainly didnt travel up from wicklow after seeing the 'riots' on TV). He had an ear piece in his ear which he actively tried to hide, he wasnt interested in what our opinion was regarding the outbreak of the clashes nor what we thought of the cops, in fact he seemed to side with the cops when pushed on this. He was only interested in finding out what we had done, were planning to do and where we were going.

He didnt seem happy with our answers and he made a phone call and excused himself. He walked over to other protesters at the back with us but then seemed to fade into the line of cars coming up the rear of the protesters.

This i am sure is not a unique case. Im sure people on this site came across this guy as well as others on the march.

What is important now is proving to the media and people that these agents provocateurs were in the crowd. Which got me and a good friend of mine thinking, remember a while back RTE played some footage of Riot Police training in templemore or wherever they were training. In this footage was about 20-25 riot cops and 30 or so rioters. The footage was used on the joke publicity/propaganda video that was posted to Indymedia before Mayday and which made the examiner frontpage.

If the makers of that video or for that matter anyone with footage of that RTE report could post images of the 'rioters' in that RTE report to indymedia again then perhaps we could start comparing photo's of supposed agents provocateurs with this footage. Im fairly sure we may find that some of the 'rioters' in that footage were the agents provocateurs we all met on May 1st.

Makes sense, if the state were training Riot Cops then would it not make sense to train their agents provocateurs at the same time?