Friday, November 12, 2010

Germany Near Civil War

This is the way you get it done -
Like the Roman legions vanquished in the Teutoburger Wald in Lower Saxony in 9 AD, the 17,000 police officers that marched into the woods around the nuclear storage facility in Gorleben in northern Germany on Sunday morning looked invincible. Police personnel from France, Croatia and Poland had joined in the biggest security operation ever mounted against protestors against the a train carrying nuclear waste to an depot in an isolated part of Lower Saxony’s countryside. Helicopters, water canons and police vehicles, including an armoured surveillance truck, accompanied an endless column of anti-riot police mounted on horses and also marching down the railway tracks into the dense woods. Tens of thousands of anti riot police clattered along the tracks, their helmets and visors gleaming in the morning sun, and wearing body armour, leg guards and carrying batons.

But by Sunday night, those same police officers were begging the protestors for a respite.

Trapped in black, icy woods without supplies or reinforcements able to reach them because of blockades by a mobile fleet of farmer’s tractors, the exhausted and hungry police officers requested negotiations with the protestors. A water cannon truck was blocked by tractors, and yet the police still had to clear 5000 people lying on the railway track at Harlingen in pitch darkness. The largest ever police operation had descended into chaos and confusion in the autumn woods of Lower Saxony, defeated by the courage and determination of peaceful protestors who marched for miles through woods to find places to lie down on the tracks and to scoop out gravel to delay the progress of the “the train from hell.”
Over what you might ask?
As in the Stuttgart 21 railway protests, it was people from all walks of life, a genuine grass roots movement, that arrived in Wendland to protest the decision by the CDU/CSU/FDP government to ignore a legally binding deadline to phase out nuclear power. Against the wishes of the majority, Bilderberg Chancellor Angela Merkel announced this autumn that 17 reactors would continzue for another 12 years at gigantic cost to the tax payer in subsisides.

The tax payers of Lower Saxony even have to foot the bill of 50 million euro for the police operation to protect the nuclear waste – and not the electricity companies making a fortune from the extravagant energy source while the government keeps investments in ground-breaking new renewable energy technologies such as the third generation solar cells at a neglible amount.
As in Stutggart, the police used savage force against peaceful demonstrators reinforcing the impression of a government out of control and refusing to respect the basic demoractic right of people to hold protests without being beaten to a pulp. Videos of the Castor transport on Sunday show police beating people with their trudgeons, punching them and throwing them to the ground. Police also used tear gas, pepper spray and water canon.

One clip shows a police officer using his fist to punch a man lying on the railway track in the head.

About a 1000 people were injured, it is reported. 950 people are reported to have suffered eye injuries due to pepper spray and tear gas, according to a spokesperson of “Castor schottern”. Another sixtreen protestors suffered broken bones. There were 29 severe head wounds. Two people had to be taken to hospital.

One person had to be taken by helicopter after suffering multiple bone fractures after being trampled by a police horse.

But as in Stuttgart, the people did not give up in spite of the risk of savage beatings at the hands of the police. They insisted on their civic right enshrined in the constitution to hold peaceful political protests.

More than 50,000 people from all parts of the country and all walks of life attended a rally on a field close to Dannenberg. Thousands then marched through the autumn woods, splitting into small groups to descend into the valley, break through police lines to chain themselves to the rails or remove gravel from the tracks to delay the train.

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