Awwal 19, 1432 H/April 23, 2011, SPA -- Several thousand people across Germany participated in left-wing protest marches Saturday targeted at a variety of political issues, including nuclear energy, according to dpa. The Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan was the theme of a protest against nuclear energy in Berlin that saw around 4,000 participants, according to organizers, though police spoke of only around 1,500. In western Germany's Ruhr area, 200 people demonstrated against war and atomic energy with a march from the town of Duisburg to Dusseldorf. Around 750 protesters gathered in Hamburg demanding the removal of German troops from Afghanistan, the banning of nuclear weapons and the decommissioning of nuclear power plants. Similar marches took place 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. Interest subsided with the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Eastern Bloc.
