( dpa ) - Peace campaigners held a fresh day of Easter marches in Germany Sunday, with organizers saying the turnout was better than last year, with the focus on conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But the events this year, mostly with a few hundred protesters at each, were modest compared to the great German anti-war anti-nuclear rallies of the early 1980s. Pacifist groups despise US foreign policy and oppose German military deployments abroad.
Organizers in Frankfurt, from where the weekend of peace marches is organized each year, said the marches Sunday in the Ruhr metropolitan zone in the west of the country included a mass bicycle procession from the city of Essen to Bochum.
The marchers demanded a pullout of German peacekeepers from Afghanistan and a non-nuclear Germany. Germany has no nuclear weapons and is phasing out its use of nuclear electricity generation.
West of Berlin, protesters were marching Sunday afternoon to a military training zone earmarked for use as an air force bombing range. The weather in the north was better than on Saturday, when marchers braved cold and sleet.
Peace activist Matthias Dembinski of the Foundation for Peace and Conflict Research in Frankfurt, acknowledged that numbers were down from the high point of previous decades.
"War and peace are still an urgent issue," Dembinski told national public radio Deutschlandfunk, saying the main aim was to maintain consciousness among peace activists.
But he admitted there was no key issue to motivate the wider populace.
The movement is marking its 50th anniversary this year, dating the birth of the peace movement to the 1958 march in Britain from central London to the nuclear armaments facility at Aldermaston.