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Home | Friday 2nd October 2009 | Issue 693

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ON YER DENMARKS....

The run up to December’s COP 15 climate summit in Copenhagen (7th - 18th), kicked off last Saturday (26th) with around 1,500 demonstrators taking part in a mass demo and attempted sabotage of a coal fired power plant on the eastern edge of the city. Protesters marched in two blocks designed to be adaptable to changing police manoeuvres, culminating in a huge rally in front of the Amager power station, whilst another group cut a hole in the boundary fence and got onto the site. According to safety regulations, this should have caused production to stop, but not wanting to break the habit of a lifetime, the power station carried on regardless of the potential risk to human health.

Seen as a trial run for the Reclaim Power! march on 16th December by law enforcement and activists alike, police used new anti-protest laws, arresting an estimated 100 people in mass ‘preventative’ arrests and injuring many with baton-happy tactics. Under this mass arrest technique, police kettle protesters and arrest them one by one. These unlucky comrades are then sat in long lines and forced to wait for the vans to arrive to cart them off to the local cop shop.

The Danish press sided with the work of the demonstrators, and the group who organised the action, Shut It Down, announced that although the plant didn’t grind to a halt as planned, they were happy with their achievements and saw it as an affirmative step towards the internationally planned action in December.

See http://shutitdown.dk



 

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