GBG 2001

The story of my trip to Gothenburg to attend the protests during the EU summit meeting, June 14-17 2001

Wendnesday-Thursday

The voyage there

I travelled to Gothenburg on a bus organized by a local organization called Sosialistiliitto (Socialist union), a member of the Internationa1 Socialists (IS). I didn't know any of the members before and had only vague idea about their agenda, based on what I had read from their zines. There were other groups organizing transportation as well, but only this one would arrive there early enough to make it to the anti-shrub demo. My travelling companions turned out to be a great bunch, however. Their ideology seems to be something like old school (Trotzkyist) socialism, not my cuppa tea exactly, but close enough for me to get along with them just fine.

The first leg of the journey consisted of two hour bus drive to another town where we boarded the ferry to Sweden. On the ferry we had an unpleasant experience, which was a sinister ehco of the things to come. There was this dipshit security officer who harassed us with his nagging and complaints. He was completely immune to our attempts to discuss and negotiate the problems he had with us. There's nothing special about this, many security officers act like they own the place they're working for and seem to get their jollies out of being a pain in the butt. But for this guy the antagonism was clearly politically motivated. He consistently referred to us as people like you and said that we have been warned about you. When one of us asked who he thought that we were and what he actually knew about us and our ideals he said the guy's name and town where he lived, just like that. It was pretty scary and when we thought about it, the guy remembered that he was carded at the port, but by completely different people. When asked why he was checked, he was told we have to know who we are dealing with. So, we were 600km from Gothenburg, still in another country, and we were already under surveillance!

The hostile attitude remained for the rest of the ferry trip. We needed to have a meeting where we would discuss about lot of stuff, but the ship security told us not to have groups of more than ten in the hallways although there was enough room in there to have a meeting of all 50 of us without disturbing the other passengers (and some of them might even have found it interesting). A conference room would have cost us a shitload of money so we were forced to have a meeting on the deck, even though it was freezing out there (well, at least it wasn't rainin). Our high spirit was able to drive the cold away though, and after the meeting we divided into affinity groups.

Many different civil disobedience actions were scheduled for friday morning, and the affinity groups were formed so that people who wanted to attend the same action were together. I was most interested in the White Overalls block, to photograph them in action. I don't completely agree with all their ideology (or lack thereof), but I'm most interested in the idea of nonviolent active response to the riot cop tactics. I envision a special cop control units, which could be used in demonstrations to prevent the interference of the riot cops. Other blocks included the anti-capitalist block, which planned to approach the conference center as a traditional demo, with no protective equipment or special tactics, and proceed nonviolently as far as possible, the samba block, which planned to dress up colourfully and make much music and noise. One block, which turned out to be the most successful, was the Absurdistan delegation. Their idea was to dress up in suits and ties and try to get in as a delegation of an imaginary Eastern European country, which was for some reason not invited to the meeting. A combination of street performance and civil disobedience, that is.

We knew that one bus from Finland had been stopped and searched in Stockholm, not by the custom officials, but after the customs, by the police. We got through without hassle, however, and arrived in Gothenburg after uneventful but tiresome bus drive at 5am. We went to the Convergence Center, the Hvitfeldska Gymnasiet (HG), a big school which the city had rented to the organizers for accomodation. We went to sleep in the gym hall for couple of hours and were planning to get organized and get together with the other groups of our blocks later in the morning.

Thursday morning and afternoon

Under siege

After waking up in about 9am the events took unexpected turn when the school was suddenly surrounded by a police line in full riot gear. The street leading to the school yard was blocked by two trucks with cargo containers. The only thing the cops told was that they wanted to search and check the IDs of all the people (and arrest whoever they wanted) and search the premises. No reasons for this was given and the cops refused to negotiate. No press was allowed to enter and we soon discovered that they were using mobile cranes and big forklifts to build a wall of cargo containers around the school. Most of the people in the school were either members of the White Overalls or Black Bloc anarchists, and it was obvious that the cops were after them. They were pretty pissed off about the situation (not that we were exactly happy either) and there was lot of discussion on the schoolyard. Some suggested that we should try to break out before the wall would be complete, but it was finally decided that we wait, try to negotiate with the cops and try to organize the people outside to help us. The anarchists used the waiting time to prepare for a break in by building barricades on the entrances, stripping the school of stuff which could be used as weapons and chipping pieces out of pavement to be thrown. One time the cops did try to sneak in through the back windows, but they backed off when they were spotted.

Since our group had no intention to join any fighting nor to get caught up in the middle of it, we moved our stuff to the schoolyard and made our stand on the side of it, beside a wall with no doors or windows nearby. Our plan was, should the cops storm in, to just sit still and let them search our stuff if they wanted. After some time the cops drew back the line which separated the different school buildings (but not the one surrounding the premises). We found out that there was one building, which was completely empty and was actually our appointed accomodation place anyway, so we moved our stuff there. It seemed the safest place for the moment. After that there was a couple of hours of waiting with no new information. I went to eat to the canteen on the schoolyard run by the Rampenplan. There's no moral booster in a tense and awkward situation like a good chow, and that was the best damn field kitchen meal I've ever had anyway.

Around 4pm we heard that the cops were letting people out through one checkpoint, checking IDs and searching bags. We held a meeting and decided that since we had come for the peaceful demos anyway we might as well try to get out. None of us had criminal records or close association with the Black Bloc or White Overalls so we figured that we had a fair chance to get through. We called outside with cell phone to find out if the people who had already left had gotten outside. They were, so it didn't seem to be a trap. We decided to take all our personal luggage with us, because it was uncertain if we would be able to come back to the school for the night or even to collect them later. We also had signs for the demos, pamphlets and flyers to be handed out and pins and t-shirts to be sold. Some of us had gone outside shopping for food before the siege started so we had to carry their bags too and out of the other stuff we were only able to carry the shirts (which were the most expensive item). We got out pretty easily without anyone of us being arrested. Most of us were searched only quickly and superficially, some, like me, weren't even carded.

Most of the blacks and White Overalls stayed inside. They had decided to try to get out all at once and without IDs being checked. Some of them had arrest records and most were blacklisted so only few of them would have gotten through the checkpoint and the White Overalls would have had to leave their equipment behind. Before leaving I entertained the thought of staying with them to photograph what ever would happen. I was torn between the exiting opportunity to document the dramatic events on the other hand and reluctance to get separated from my group on the other. There was also the anti-shrub demo later that evening which I would definitely miss if I would stay. What settled the matter was that, with no prior experience of copfighting/riots I had no idea of what to expect, and I was quite afraid. With the experience I have now I might have decided otherwise (though it's very easy to say so in the safety and comfort of my home). In retrospect though, knowing how the things turned out, I probably made the right decision. If I would have stayed, I would have got arrested, possibly beaten and got all my films confiscated.

Thursday evening

The anti-shrub demo and the solidarity action for the imprisoned

The anti-shrub demonstration gathered some 15,000 people and the atmosphere was energic and cheerful. The police kept very low profile, I saw less than ten of them, in dress uniforms among the crowd, looking very relaxed. The demo proceeded with no incidence to Götaplatsen, a square which was the official legal demonstration place. When we arrived there we heard that HG had been stormed during the demo by the cops using dogs and horses. Some people had been arrested but many were still inside. About 500 people separeted from the crowd and proceeded to the school, which was only two blocks away. The crowd was stopped by a chain of riot cops outside the container wall. There was chanting demanding the release of the prisoners and the crowd tried to push the police chain back couple of times but was pushed back. After a short stand-off about 15 mounted riot cops appeared 50 meters behind the police line and about 10 cops with dogs came right behind it.

I don't remember exactly in what order the following things took place, because the situation was full of chaos and confusion. Some people from the inside appeared on top of the wall and tried to reach the safety of the crowd. The crowd rushed forward several times and was first repelled by the dogs and then by the horses. The cops brought the dogs close to people and then suddenly charged 2-3m forward, forcing the people to back off. Sometimes the people couldn't do this fast enough because of other people behind them or they tripped over. Those people got bitten by the dogs. The attack of the horses took place when some of the fugitives had jumped down from the wall and ended up in the hands of the cops. The crowd managed to push it's way all the way to the wall so that the cops were stuck between the wall and the crowd. The mounted cops charged full gait into the crowd to separate it from the wall. I was standing about 20m away, and to me it look extremely dangerous. Luckily the people managed to withdraw quick enought, but if anyone would have fallen and been run over by the horses, he could have been buried in a shoe box.

Some of the fugitives managed to get into the crowd, but most were captured again by the cops. After the cops formed another chain at the top of the wall there were no more escape attempts. The situation calmed down and the dogs and horses were pulled further behind the police chain. There was a burning of the American flag, which probably was a left over from the anti-shrub demo rather than a direct response to the situation at hand (though with dubya in town the cops most likely got their orders from the Secret Service anyway). After that ther was an open stage in front of the cops and the program included a guy rapping with a bullhorn and another breakdancing, some other guys doing joggling and polemic speeches by couple of older activists. By the nightfall the crowd started to disperse, but some remained until the morning, huddling around a makeshift bonfire.

During the night rest of those still inside the school either surrended or were arrested. I later heard what had happened earlier in the evening. The White Overalls and the Blacks had decided to try a nonviolent solution. They wanted to leave the school all together. Their plan was to approach as one block, the White Overalls in front, the main gate of the school which was only blocked by cops and a riot fence and suggest the cops that they are body searched but not carded, remain together and leave their stuff in the scool for the cops to search. Should this fail, they were supposed to try to push without violence through the blockade. When they arrived at the gate, the police refused to negotiate, and the people tried to push through the police line several times (wihtout violence, though, White Overall style). When they decided to retreat back inside the school, the cops opened the fences and charged the people on horseback, followed by more cops on foot with shields and clubs. At this point some of the Blacks started to throw stones from the back and sides, forcing the cops to retreat so that the people were able to return inside the school. One of the White Overalls who failed to follow the others was beaten unconscious on the ground by the cops.

After we left the solidarity demo, we went to the info center and another school was appointed for our accomodation, but it was 15km from the town center. Luckily we had bumped into our bus driver in the town and he offered to take us there with our bus. It took us some time to find the place, only to find out that it was closed. Yet another school was appointed to us and in this one there were people around to let us in, but we had lost almost two hours of sleeping time driving around the town.

Friday

The civil disobedience action, Reclaim the City -party and a mysterious police operation

The Friday morning was scheduled for different civil disobedience actions. Only legal place for demonstrations was Götaplatsen, but there were plans to approach the conference center using different strategies, as I mentioned before. But the problem was that even though HG was empty of people now, the cops still had it locked up, as a crime scene, and both the White Overalls and Samba block had all their equipment there. Without them their plans were impossible to carry out. The blocks still operational were the anticapitalist block of the IS, the Absurdistan delegation (of which one member managed to get all the way to the lobby of the conference center!) and the Black Bloc, which originally was supposed to participate the White Overall action. Many of the captured Blacks were released in the morning, obviously a plan of the cops to get more violence prone people on the streets.

Some 1000-1500 people gathered on the Götaplatsen in the morning. There was a Black Bloc among the crowd. Someone told me that they were negotiated with and they had agreed to not initiate violence. As far as I can tell, they kept their word, as it was the cops who started the violence.

We started to march toward to the conference center but the street was blocked by police cars and a police line after about 300m. The demonstration stopped at the blockade and after about 10 minutes of chanting there was some distruption further behind. I was in the front and I saw that the crod behind started to disperse because the cops had breached the flanks of the block with dogs.

The cops used the dogs to force their way inside the crowd of demonstrators and to cut it in several parts. The dog handlers were followed by other cops including at least ten on horseback. The cops beated or attacked with dogs everyone who was unable to stay away from their reach and the horses were used to move the groups of people back and forth, to create panic. The only act of violence I saw coming from the demonstrators was one small stick thrown at the police, and even this was met with disapproval by the people who stood near the guy who did it.

When all this had been going on for several minutes, the Blacks, who had been at the back of the demonstration, charged forward throwing stones at the cops. Most of the other demonstrators still around were standing against the walls and the fronts of the cops and the Blacks moved back and forth couple of times and then cops pushed the Blacks back in the direction of the Götaplatsen where the demo had started. From there the riot moved down the Aveny, the main street of the town.

As the action calmed down around me, I returned to Götaplatsen to meet with my comrades. From there we could see all the way down the Aveny, which now resembled a battlefield. The riot had already proceeded several hudred meters down the sreet, and I could see a big fire further away (I later saw that it was a big bonfire the Blacks had made out of cafe furniture). It was interesting that the cops made no effort to isolate the riot to a smaller section of the street, but rather pushed the Blacks all the way along the street knowing quite well that they would smash down everything on their way. It's quite clear that maintainig order never was their intention, but rather to create a big riot and to present a burned down city to the media. It was also no secret that the demonstrator groups were heavily infiltrated by undercover police officers (there was even a story about it in a Swedish paper) and they had plenty of opportunities to provocate the groups from the inside.

Later that day we went to Fritt Forum, a place where there were tents for speeches and meetings and stands for the participating organizations. The IS people had a stand there too and held a meeting. There was an Anti-EU demo scheduled for the afternoon but none of us were interested to participate it. The demo attracted about 20,000 people, but lot less media coverage that few broken windows.

In the evening there was a Reclaim the City -party, but it was clear that it would be attacked by the cops. For most of us, one fight a day was quite enough and we stayed in a park couple of hundred meters a way. Soon we saw lot of meat wagons heading for the party place and little after that the music stopped. We heard cracks which sounded a lot like gunshots and soon people started to disperse away from the party. Most of them were heading in our direction and not wanting to get caught in the middle, we packed our stuff and started to move away from the place. Soon we heard rumors that there indeed had been a shoot-out, but nobody knew who had been shooting and who was hit or if anyone was dead.

We gathered on a steet corner to wait one of us who had stayed to interview someone. We were holding a meeting about what to do next, some of us wanted to hang around in town and some wanted to go to the school we were crashing in to sleep, when one of us noticed something going on in a parking lot next to us. She said that some men were beating somebody. When we went there we saw two men behind a parked car holding a third man down. The two men were wearing the Black Bloc uniform, combat boots, black field pants and black hooded college shirt. When we asked them what the hell they were doing they said they're cops and they are arresting the man. The man on the ground had his face against the pavement and didn't comment. The men refused to show their badges, they said that the law only required them to show it to the arrested, not to us. I'n not familiar with the Swedish police law, but I'm quite sure the true reason for not showing the badges was that we would have seen their names on them. Two motorbikes appeared to the parking lot too, civilian ones, driving the lot back and forth and running the engines really loud, macho style. There were some people outside the parking lot as well, talking to cell phones and some unmarked cars driving around the area. They didn't seem too happy about our arrival to the scene, especially since we had a camera team with us. A bit later an unmarked car drove to the lot and the men packed the arrested man in it and everybody drove away. Nobody ever showed any kind of ID to us, but we have some faces and the licence plates on the tape. Little after the incident a meat wagon drove by with the cops inside checking us out but it didn't stop. Obviously we had bumped into some major undercover operation and the behaviour of all the cops involved left a really paranoid taste in our mouths.

Saturday-Sunday

The main event, the anti-cop demo and the trip back

The main demonstration in which all the participating organizations were invited, was scheduled for Saturday morning. Even though the weather was chilly and rainy, some 25,000 people attented and the athmosphere was cheerful. The police kept even lower profile than in the anti-shrub demo: I didn't see a single uniform nor a marked police car during the whole march. It was really exhilarating to see such a diverse collection of organizations marching in a same demo: The Attac, socialists, anarcha-feminists, greens, Friends of the Earth, labour unions, syndicalists, White Overalls etc... There was also a Black Bloc, with at least a couple of hundreds participants. It's interesting that the people who, according to the media and politicians, were there only to cause trouble and wreck havoc, were behaving completely peacefully when there were no cops around to harass them.

After the demo the rain got more intense and the crowd dispersed. We were heading back to the center of the town when we heard rumors that one of the boys cops had shot Friday night, had died in the hospital (there were three Blacks shot at by the cops, all told). There was a demonstration against police brutality planned for the evening. We spent the day at the IS stand and waited for an official confirmation for the news. The athmosphere in the town was getting tense, the cops had the town center practically under a martial law, with roadblocks on every street corner, checking people up and making random arrests. Later there was an official announcement from the hospital that the boy was still alive. There was speculation among the IS people that the rumor about the death was started by the cops to create tension on the streets. Their behaviour indicated that they were after yet another riot, maybe to better justificate the previous night's shooting. We had a meeting about whether to attend the demo. While everyone agreed that a demo against the cops definitely was in place, nobody wanted to walk into another police trap. There was also a rumor circulating that the demo was called together by the IS, which was not the case. This made the whole case smell more and more of fowl play, since if we would attend the demo and it would turn into a fight, the IS could be held responsible. We decided to send couple of people to the place to check the situation out and report to the others with a cell phone. It turned out that there was only a handful of people there, no one organizing the event and a lot more riot cops than demonstrators around. It didn't seem worthwile to go there, especially since we heard that the Blacks had also decided to stay out. Later we saw lot of meat wagons heading for the area, followed by 30 mounted riot cops and station wagon police cars, which they used for dog transport. I was kind of interested what was going on there, but didn't want to go wandering there by myself, was out of film already and definitely didn't want risk getting arrested only few hours before departure.

Around 10pm we gathered by our bus to start the journey home. The bus was parked quite close to the place of the demo, and we saw that it was still sieged by the cops. We later heard that the cops allowed the people to leave through check-ups threatening to make arrests, but most of the people refused to leave in solidarity and the cops finally gave in around midnight. The reporters were not treated kindly by the cops during the demo, many were forcefully removed from the scene and held behind the police line and a Finnish IMC cameraman was beaten.

On our way home we heard that on bus which had left earlier was raider by the cops on the highway out of town. We chose another way and got through without incident. We drove through the night and arrived to Stockholm in the morning. On the ferry back to Finland the attitude of the staff was quite different than on the other way. Part of the reason might have been that there were seven busfulls of us instead of just one and they knew better than to mess with us. On the other hand, maybe not all security people are assholes. Nevertheless, there was no program scheduled for the discotheque for the voyage and they gave it to us to sleep and have our meetings in(which I didn't use, though -- the wall-to-wall carpeting on the hallways was more comfortable to sleep on than the wooden dance floor). After the ferry trip there was still two-hour bus drive to Helsinki. During that the passenger fell into two distinct categories: those who had decided to get rid of all the tax-free booze they had bought on the ferry and keep their travelling companions entertained and those, like me, who wanted nothing more that to be home and give their bed a good bear hug.

One more incident happened in Gothenburg after we left: The cops raided yet another school were demonstrators we accomodated, the Schillerska Skolan, this time by the anti-terrorist team, armed with sub-machine guns. All the people in the school were arrested, they were held lying on the wet ground face down for more than two hours and those who didn't understand the Swedish commands were beaten. Some of the foreigners were later deported. The cops justified this attack by a claim that they suspected an armed German terrorist residing in the school, but they didn't find any.

In retrospect, I don't regret a bit for attending the protests. In larger context, despite all the violence, it was still a major success for the anticapitalist movement in the Northern Europe and I feel good to have contributed my tiny part to it. On the personal level, it was a tremendeous boost for my political consciousness. It's quite different to read about this stuff to seeing it with my own eyes and actively participate in it. I also met other activists and formed contacts which affect my future activism back home as well.