The art of distraction

DENMARK. Last Thursday all hell broke loose when it was “discovered” that a primary school was going to have a women-only parent conference in order to reach more Muslim mothers. The principal of the school in question was quoted for saying that some immigrant men don’t allow their wives to come if there are going to be other men present.

This prompted a lot of politicians to express harsh criticism of the school. The far-right Dansk Folkeparti demanded that the principle be fired.

The leader of Socialistisk Folkeparti, who seems to think the way to power is to keep repeating “We want exactly what the government wants”, talked about Danish traditions, until someone reminded him that his own party had a rich tradition of women-only summer camps etc.

Søren Pind from one of the ruling parties, Venstre, wrote on his blog that Denmark was more or less doomed (if you’re picturing him yelling “the end is nigh”, you’re not very far off). Pind later back-pedalled and said he had “misunderstood” the issue.

The fact was that this wasn’t a regular parent-teacher conference from which fathers were banned. It was a women’s café evening which was an additional event to the regular meetings. It also soon turned out that several other schools had had this kind of meetings for years.

To top it off, it had been approved and payed for by the parliament and all parties except for Enhedslisten had voted in favour. The principal explained in the news that he in fact didn’t know for certain that some immigrant men didn’t allow their wives to attend meetings; it was just an assumption.

What’s really interesting though is what else happened last Thursday and Friday.

Due to a high number of bankruptcies in January (458), 1,700 full-time positions were lost.

Hospitals announced that they would fire all in all 1,000 employees because of budget cuts. That’s a high number for a small country like Denmark.

Negotiations between the Danish Regions (who are responsible for public hospitals) and the private hospitals trade organization BPK broke down. This means that the one month guarantee of treatment is suspended for certain conditions (for example gall bladder).

But who cares, right? What’s important for Dansk Folkeparti is to ban foreign languages in schools. And what’s important for Venstre is to study the extent of religious considerations and demands in day care institutions, schools, and public sector workplaces. These are much more important things than the job market and the health care system, anyone can see that.

Mr. Manky wrote about another thing that happened around the same time.

Now also available in Russian

This is an article of mine that was recently published in Russian on the web page of the NGO Youth Human Rights Movement. And this is my name in Russian: Амилы Ясаревич. Cool, innit ? Enjoy. And share the link above with your Russian speaking friends.

Denmark and COP15: Erosion of the right to assembly

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark and it’s not just the cheese. Civic rights have recently been quite seriously impaired in Denmark, suddenly making it a lot scarier to protest in public. Or even just to be outside at the wrong time.

On October 29th 2009, the Danish Justice Minister Brian Mikkelsen from the Conservative People’s Party proposed a new law on “civil disturbance”. Read on and you’ll se why I put this in quotation marks.

The law was rushed through and was adopted only a month later. All warnings, protests and suggestions from law and human rights experts, judges and the opposition were dismissed. Only ten days before the UN Climate Change Conference 2009 (COP15) was to begin in Copenhagen, the law was adopted, giving the police expanded powers to detain random citizens.

This law basically authorizes the police to detain people for up to 12 hours because they look like they might do something at some point. Or because someone else is doing something. All they need to do is be at a protest. Even if they’re actually just crossing the street during a protest and not actually taking part in it, they can be detained. And they can also end up in jail for 40 days for hindering the police’s work, which outlaws peaceful civil disobedience like sit-downs. It is completely at the police’s discretion how to use this law.

During the one month that the law was deliberated in parliament, the media was overflowing with political spin. The law was consequently called “the trouble makers law”, in order to pacify the citizens and make them believe that only bullies would be affected by it. But the law applies to everybody in Denmark, of course, like all other laws. The media was also full of stories about how full the prisons would be during COP15, how bad the conditions would be in the prisons and how uncomfortable it would be for all those many, many protesters that the police already knew they would arrest. We were shown pictures of cages that were going to be used as the “climate prison”. It was clearly scare tactics. The message was: stay at home. Nice people stay indoors, only trouble makers go out.

Whether it was because the people let themselves fall for that rhetoric or because most Danes live outside of Copenhagen and probably never go to protests, there was no real public outcry against what was happening. NGOs, human rights experts, law experts and indymedia were in an uproar, but their protests apparently fell on deaf ears. The citizens seemed too complacent to care. Or too naïve.

Once COP15 began, we started seeing the consequences of the law. There were a lot of protests and actions at the time and the police were quite eager to use their new powers. On one occasion, 67 people were detained for a total of one broken window. On another occasion, an entire protest was kettled and detained. But the biggest event was when the police detained 968 people all at once, cable tied their hands behind their backs and made them sit on the cold street for hours before taking them to the cages (the “climate prison”). Of all those people, less than a handful were actually charged. The police simply detained them not because they were doing something but because they were there.

This happened on December 12th during the biggest protest that counted about 100.000 people from all over the world. A small group called “Never trust a COP” was going to have a separate protest, but the police told them they had to join the big one. They tagged along at the back. Not long after that, the police kettled a big section at the back of the protest and detained those 968 people. The official explanation was that someone had thrown a rock at a policeman, some windows had been broken and there were some fireworks. Also, there were a lot of people wearing black in that part of the protest. It was the guys from “Never trust a COP”, the same ones that the police pushed into the protest.

I was close to the part of the protest that was kettled. I had been very anxious about the heavy police presence – I had honestly never seen more uniforms at a protest – so I kept in the back because I expected the trouble to happen in the front once we reached the conference centre. I could very easily have been among the detained. But I saw no disturbance. I heard two fireworks and that was it. Writer and activist Naomi Klein was also at the back and she later wrote “it barely interrupted my conversation”. But the police chose to detain the whole end section. Simply because they could.

Pictures of the detainees went around the world. People sitting in long rows on the cold and wet street. Many had urinated on themselves because they weren’t allowed to use a bathroom. Artist Camilla Brodersen updated the old tourist poster for Copenhagen and it too went around the world.

The police also tapped activists’ phones, stopped and searched entire city busses (because people “looked like they were up to something”) and even beat delegates from the conference centre, when they tried to meet protesters who were trying to enter the premises. Meanwhile, a couple of Greenpeace activists managed to crash the Queen’s galla with 100 heads of state, where they unfolded a banner saying “Politicians talk – leaders ACT”. Why? Because they were wearing nice clothes and didn’t look like they might do something. They had even had a Greenpeace sticker on their car, but the police failed to stop them before they made it all the way into the castle.

During COP15, nearly 2.000 people were detained. And in spite of all that happened, most politicians completely failed their task and actually praised the police in stead of criticizing them. Some even chose to downplay the situation by focusing on the 99.000 protesters that weren’t detained. It’s true we weren’t detained. But that’s our constitutional right, not an exception or a gesture generously bestowed upon us by the authorities!

There still hasn’t been any real debate about the impact this law has on the right to assembly. We can still all be detained for 12 hours with no charges – just for being present at a protest. Many have argued that this actually makes violent protests more likely, as there is no difference whether you’re peaceful or violent, you will be treated the same. So concerning its name – “trouble makers law” – this law might not be preventing riots and disturbance of the peace but actually encouraging people to become trouble makers. Because you might as well, if you’re going to be detained anyway.

Denmark and COP15: Erosion of the right to assembly

Muslims this, Muslims that

DENMARK. Last December President of The Free Press Society, Lars Hedegaard, gave a video interview to the Danish blog Snaphanen in which he among other things claimed that Muslim men rape their own children and nieces (“you hear it all the time”) and that Muslims have no conscience to stop them from lying (“which doesn’t mean they all lie, just that you can never know”).

When these accusations hit mainstream media, several prominent members of the Society’s advisory board stepped down and condemned Hedegaard’s claims. However, he recieved support from the MPs for the far right Danish People’s Party, Søren Krarup, Søren Espersen and Jesper Langballe. The leader of the DPP, Pia Kjærsgaard, remained silent for weeks until eventually saying she “wouldn’t have put it that way”.

When Jesper Langballe expressed his support in a comment in the daily Berlingske Tidende on January 22nd, he presented his own version of what happens in Muslim families: “Of course Lars Hedegaard shouldn’t have said that Muslim fathers rape their own daughters when in fact they seem to just kill them in stead (the so-called honour killings) and turn a blind eye when the uncles do the raping.”

This, of course, caused a new uproar. Everyone except for the DPP’s leader Pia Kjærsgaard condemned this new accusation (she was somewhat ambivalent and said that Langballe was hurting the party but also that “he wasn’t lying” and that his “timing was bad”).

There has been no comment from prime minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen whose government is dependent on the DPP. In the last parliamentary election, the DPP got 13,8 % of the vote which was just enough to keep the government in power.

Today a former member of the city council in Copenhagen, Hamid El Mousti, sent a text message to about 300 people as a reaction to Langballe’s comment in Berlingske Tidende. It said (in Danish): “Denmark is ruled by a party according to which Muslim men rape and kill their daughters and nieces.” It quickly made the news. I saw an anchor keep asking him why he had sent this text message, why he wants people in other countries to know what some MP from Denmark had written and whether he wasn’t concerned that his text might cause new riots like the ones we saw after the publication of the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.

But as writer and columnist at the daily Politiken, Rune Engelbreth Larsen, pointed out: this can’t be news to international media. They all have correspondents in Denmark and are well aware of what is going on here. The reason the anchor panicked may have been the fact that the international media is more likely to see the Danish People’s Party for what it actually is because it isn’t numbed by its daily bullsh!t.

The only mistake Hamid El Mousti made is to write that Denmark is ruled by the DPP. This isn’t true; the DPP isn’t in the government, but the government is dependent on it to stay in power. It isn’t hard to understand why he wrote that though – and he’s far from the first to do so. The government seems only too eager to comply with the DPP’s far right, anti-migrant agenda. This is something we’ve had to live with day in, day out, since 2001. What the DPP wants concerning foreigners, the DPP gets. And somehow all problems are traced back to Muslims. With that in mind, it’s perfectly understandable if you as a member of a minority start feeling like the DPP  is running the country.

But the sad truth might be that this government is just doing what it would have done anyway – this way it just gets to use the DPP as its windbreak.

Clothes (don’t) make the activist

Two days ago Chief Inspector of Copenhagen Police, Per Larsen, was a guest on the show “Deadline” to discuss the police’s methods during the COP15 summit. As I wrote earlier, the police decided to kettle a whole section of a huge march of 100.000 protesters last Saturday and detain people indiscriminately. People were forced to sit on the cold asphalt for hours with their hands cable tied behind their backs. Several people urinated on themselves because they weren’t allowed to use a bathroom. Of a total of 968 detainees that day, only 3 were charged.

The protests kept taking place though. And the police kept using their new powers. Two days ago, they stopped and searched entire city buses and detained people who looked like they might be activists. I’m not making this up. According to a newly adopted law, Danish police can detain people for up to 12 hours for looking like they might want to do something at some point.

So Chief Inspector Per Larsen came to “Deadline” to talk about this with defense attorney Thorkild Høyer. Høyer felt that the new law gives the police practically limitless powers which the police are using to the fullest. When the host asked Larsen how you can know who to single out when you go into a bus, he replied the key is to “have a nose for it”. And I’m not making that up either.

Same Larsen earlier said about the 968 detainees that “there were many foreigners among them which also indicates that [the police] got the right ones”. (Foreigner = baaaaad.)

Høyer argued that the police were wrong to judge people based solely on their appearance and that people in business suits never would have been subjected to this kind of treatment.

The very next day this was put to the test. Two Greenpeace activists showed up at a formal dinner at Christiansborg Castle, hosted by the royal family and attended by 100 heads of state. They wore formal evening wear – and marched right past the photographers and into the castle. Once inside, they pulled out their signs saying “Politicians talk. Leaders act.” You can see some photos here.

There was plenty of police around. I’m sure you can imagine the security detail for the royal family and 100 heads of state. But these were nice looking people. You know, establishment – people who don’t look like they might do something at some point.

Copenhagen before and after

(Courtesy of Camilla Brodersen.)