Muslims in Asia staged peaceful anti-war rallies yesterday, after thousands of anti-war protesters took to the streets in cities across America Friday sparking scores of arrests, even as US and British forces unleashed a massive aerial bombardment on Iraq.
About 2,000 protesters rallied outside the heavily fortified US embassy in Indonesia's capital Jakarta, shouting anti-US slogans before marching to the UN office a few blocks away.
Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country and generally a US ally, has long opposed any attack against Iraq. Political and religious leaders had warned a strike could spark a widespread, possibly violent reaction.
In neighboring Moslem-majority Malaysia, about 8,000 people shouted "destroy America" as they took part in a "peace run" in eastern Kelantan state.
Officials cancelled a similar event in the capital Kuala Lumpur, fearing it could stoke emotions, as the US-led war against Iraq entered a third day.
In South Korea, some 3,000 protesters, including students and religious leaders, gathered in Seoul to protest against the war and their government's decision to send up to 700 non-combat troops to assist the US-led war.
South Korea is a close US ally but many people chafe at the presence of 37,000 US troops there. Some protesters worried North Korea could become Washington's next target.
North Korea, in a nuclear stand-off with the US and which has technically been at war with South Korea since an armed truce ended the 1950 to 1953 Korean War, said on Friday the Iraq war would have "disastrous consequences."
"It's not just someone else's problem. A war can break out in our nation too," said Song Byung-jin, a 36-year-old shop owner.
"This war shows that the United States can strike North Korea anytime it wants, just like it hit Baghdad without a UN agreement," said 29-year-old designer Kim Soo-myung.
Meanwhile, Pope John Paul II said yesterday the Iraqi conflict "threatened the destiny of humanity," in his first public statement since the outbreak of war in Iraq.
"Violence and weapons can never resolve the problems of men," the 82-year-old head of the Roman Catholic Church said from an Italian Catholic television channel.
"When war, as at this time in Iraq, threatens the destiny of humanity, it is even more urgent to proclaim, with a strong and decisive voice, that peace alone is the way to construct a united and just society," John Paul II said.
Waving banners that demanded "international law, not the law of the fist," tens of thousands demonstrated in downtown Berlin yesterday after the US-led attack on Iraq gained in intensity with the start of a massive air campaign.
Protesters on the capital's central Alexanderplatz carried Iraqi, Palestinian and labor union flags. One placard declared "Dresden 1945, Baghdad 2003: The same crime" -- a reference to the firebombing of the eastern German city at the end of World War II.
"The whole region is unstable and this could just escalate," said Moritz Felcht, 23, a student from the southern city of Wuerzburg. "It's not a humanitarian war -- it's about oil and [US President George W.] Bush's personal aggression against Saddam Hussein."
Peace rallies erupted across Germany after the Iraq war began Thursday, including some 60,000 demonstrators who massed then on the Alexanderplatz.
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