US protests expose raw race relations worldwide
Images of a white police officer kneeling on the neck of African-American George Floyd, who then died, have sparked protests from Amsterdam to Nairobi, but they also expose deeper grievances among demonstrators over strained race relations in their own countries.
With violent clashes between protesters and authorities raging in the United States, anti-police-brutality activists gathered by the thousands in support of the Black Lives Matter movement in various European and African cities.
Peaceful protesters highlighted allegations of abuse of black prisoners by their jailers, social and economic inequality, and institutional racism lingering from the colonial pasts of the Netherlands, Britain and France.
"If you want to believe that we in the Netherlands do not have a problem with race, you should go ahead and go home," Jennifer Tosch, founder of Black Heritage Amsterdam Tours, told a crowd in Amsterdam, from where the Dutch West India Company operated ships estimated to have traded 500,000 slaves in the 1600s and 1700s.
In London, a protester held a placard reading "The UK isn't innocent," while in Berlin around 2,000 people protested outside the US embassy.
Police in northern Paris fired tear gas on Tuesday to disperse demonstrators protesting over the 2016 death of a young black Frenchman in police custody - an incident that has drawn parallels with Floyd's killing. Amid a coronavirus lockdown, French activists also say there have been a number of police brutality cases in low-income Black neighbourhoods.
But not all in Europe side with the protesters. Spain's far-right Vox party and the Netherlands' anti-Islam Freedom Party called those protesting Floyd's death "terrorists" and backed US President Donald Trump.
"Our support for Trump and the Americans who are seeing their Nation attacked by street terrorists backed by progressive millionaires," Vox wrote in a Tweet.
In the Netherlands, the Freedom Party's Geert Wilders tweeted: "White House under attack. This is no protest but anarchy by #AntifaTerrorists."
A study in US carried out in 2019 found that black men are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by the police than their white counterparts.
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