By DIRK BEVERIDGE, AP Business Writer
PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) - Their voices may have been hoarse from chanting "smash the IMF," but anticapitalist activists began screaming with joy as the world's top financiers closed their summit a day early.
"We wanted to shut them down and we made it," said Tedd Caine, a Chicago man arrested and fined for chaining himself to a bridge and unfurling a banner outside the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings that finished late Wednesday.
The two money groups said they had wrapped up their business, and that the riots that turned Prague into a smoke-filled battleground on Tuesday had not influenced them.
The lenders reported progress toward their goal of increasing Third World debt forgiveness, and said every summit delegate scheduled to make a speech got to make it.
"They moved more quickly than anticipated - they finished ahead of time," IMF spokesman David Hawley said. "It has nothing to do with the protests."
But protesters who call the big lending institutions menaces to humanity weren't buying it.
They staged a spontaneous victory party, singing in the night to the rhythm of spatulas beating on garbage can lids.
After seeing World Trade Organization (news - web sites) talks collapse last year in Seattle amid raging street fights and then mass protests outside IMF and World Bank meetings in Washington in the spring, the demonstrators said they had succeeded in Prague, too.
"Now I think they must know they are not welcome in any city in the world," enthused Spanish activist Antonio Banos.
IMF and World Bank officials say the protesters are wrong, and that their lending policies are intended to help the poor get richer through finance to the Third World.
But they've acknowledged their message doesn't always get out the way it should. In a closing speech to the annual meeting Wednesday, World Bank President James Wolfensohn said he felt the shared "feeling of stress" from the turmoil outside.
Titans of global capitalism attending the meeting - including U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers - had insisted this week that the trend toward economic globalization cannot be reversed, and that that wouldn't be in anyone's interest anyway.
Others said they appreciated the passion of the demonstrators and their goals of eliminating world poverty, they just didn't understand what the activists want to accomplish, aside from killing off the World Bank and IMF.
The banks hope to increase, from 10 to 20, the number of desperately poor nations obtaining debt relief.
Critics say the IMF and World Bank are too tightly controlled by rich nations such as the United States to adequately address the needs of the world's impoverished billions.
Czech authorities said Wednesday that 12,000 demonstrators had turned out Tuesday, throwing firebombs, stick and rocks at riot police who fought back with tear gas, clubs and concussion grenades.
For a brief period late Tuesday, demonstrators blocked delegates inside the communist-era convention center from leaving. Trapping the delegates had been a goal of the demonstrators, and they claimed success.
Finally, officials brought in a special subway train and used it as an emergency evacuation vehicle. A day later, the delegates left for good.:
