Duisburg, April 24: Several thousand people have participated in the annual Easter peace rallies in Germany to protest against nuclear weapons and wars around the globe.
In western Germany’s Ruhr area, 200 people demonstrated against war and atomic energy with a march from the town of Duisburg to Dusseldorf on Saturday, DPA reported.
Around 750 protesters gathered in Hamburg to call for the withdrawal of German troops from Afghanistan, the abolition of nuclear weapons, and the decommissioning of nuclear power plants.
The Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan was the theme of a demonstration against nuclear energy in Berlin that saw around 4,000 participants according to organizers, although the police said only around 1,500 people turned out.
Similar marches were held in the German states of Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Baden-Wuerttemberg.
Such marches have been an Easter weekend tradition in Germany since 1960. At their highpoint in the early 1980s, participants numbered in the hundreds of thousands.
However, interest subsided after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, and the end of the Cold War.
——–Agencies