MONDAY, JANUARY 12, 2004
Thousands pay tribute to Luxemburg
AFP
BERLIN : More than 25,000 people paid their respects on Sunday in Berlin to German communists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, murdered by far-right soldiers during an uprising 85 years ago, police said.
The annual ceremony in the Berlin suburb of Friedrichsfelde was organised by the former communist Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the successor to the force that led communist East Germany for 40 years, which said that 100,000 people participated.
East Germany 's last communist leader, Egon Krenz, also joined the event. Krenz was released last month after nearly four years in prison for the state's shoot-to-kill border regime.
Police said the turnout was the lowest on record for what had been a state-sponsored tradition in East Germany .
The mainly elderly participants laid red carnations and wreaths at a memorial to Liebknecht and Luxemburg, who in 1918 transformed the left-wing Spartacus League into the German Communist Party and then tried to proclaim a German Soviet Republic .
They were kidnapped, beaten and shot in January 1919 by soldiers belonging to a rightist fringe group. Luxemburg's body was dumped in a Berlin canal while Liebknecht's corpse was taken to a hospital by his assassins, who identified him as an "unknown dead Spartacist".
Among the participants at Sunday's events were some 7,000 people who took part in a protest march called by leftist and "anti-fascist" groups from east Berlin, ending at the memorial ceremony.
Their rally was called against US foreign policy and cutbacks in the German social welfare system. Eight people were detained for minor infractions.
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