As the WEF's European Economic Summit begins in Warsaw, Poland, activists in the city report that, as in Seattle, Quebec, and elsewhere, the usual methods of repression are being used to quell dissent in the name of 'security'. Thousands of police officers have been dispatched to the capital, and reports indicate that peaceful activists from other parts of Europe are being turned back at the border on bogus pretenses.

What follows is a report from pl.indymedia.org:

The alterglobalists slowly become numerous in Warsaw. There are also more and more of police buses coming, which results in more and more controls. The Indymedia volunteers also reach Warsaw from the other cities in Poland and abroad. We hope that the Indymedia editing room will soon be ready for writers, photographers and filmmakers. We hope, that neither our internet, nor our faith will fail ...

The alterglobalists slowly become numerous in Warsaw. There are also more and more of police buses coming, which results in more and more controls. The Indymedia volunteers also reach Warsaw from the other cities in Poland and abroad. We hope that the Indymedia editing room will soon be ready for writers, photographers and filmmakers. We hope, that neither our internet, nor our faith will fail .....

We still don't know whether to announce our current address - since the officially announced conferences of anti-authoritarian and lefty groups have been rejected by the owners of the conference spaces; we are still not sure what to do. One of the conferences was supposed to host the Rabbi of Warsaw and Lódz, and the main representative of the Club for Catholic Intelligentsia. Since 2 days we've been discussing what to do with our address, and we also think of letting the most people possible publish and use the office for media work. We try to not to get paranoid over all this.

On every corner of the central districts you can see the flashing green of the police's new outfits. Proud of their numbers, cops are ready to offer their professional services to any person who does not resemble the style of clothes used by New Kids on the Block.

It's the 27th now and we can now only imagine what the "season of bigger police activity" will look like in practice.

The shop keepers in the centre provide wooden covers for their windows. Also those shops that are in "Areas" "1" and "0" cover the windows, although noone will be allowed to enter there.

The division of the city into zones with different levels of accession is being justified by the laws for .... the time of natural disasters. The "journalists" of main Polish newspapers continue to call the alterglobalists "terrorists" etc., but we see, that the summit is much worst than protesters.

[PHOTO from pl.indymedia.org: Heavy police vehicles in locked-down Warsaw, Poland. The local media hyped up the "threat of violence" so much that most storefronts in the city centre have been boarded up by the owners even though there have been no threats nor reports of violence. Police in the tens of thousands have descended on the city; some activists report seeing younger cops posing as 'fashionable youth' in civilian clothes.]