Copenhagen Mass action against Coal Plant today

26th Sep­tem­ber 2009
Today in Copen­hagen is a large mass action against a Coal Pow­er Sta­tion near to the city. Break­ing news is of one mass ‘pre­ven­ta­tive’ arrest of activists from one of the two blocks (green / pur­ple) and the cops attack­ing anoth­er group with trun­cheons. A hole has been cut in the fence of the plant at the rear. The action is con­tin­u­ing…

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As is now usu­al when the Dan­ish cops make a mass ‘pre­ven­ta­tive’ arrest of loads of pro­test­ers, they ket­tle them, take them indi­vid­u­al­ly, and hand­cuff them with their arms behind their back. Then they put each per­son one by one behind the oth­er with the legs along­side the one in front. Sit­ting in the fash­ion for a while becomes painful as you wait for the wag­ons to even­tu­al­ly arrive and cart you off from the protest site.

They’ve been using this mass arrest thing for a num­ber of years now. It does­n’t mat­ter who you are, if you’re in the place they want to arrest peo­ple then its tough!

It’s like the UK ket­tle with an added twist!

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Today about 1500 peo­ple took direct action to shut down one of Copen­hagen’s coal fire pow­er plants.

The action plan was open­ly announced sev­er­al months ago and Dan­ish police have been gear­ing up for mas­sive use of force and to tri­al new anti-protest laws. Around 100 of the pro­test­ers man­aged to get inside the pow­er plant which should have been shut down due to safe­ty reg­u­la­tions at that point — but was kept run­ning. How­ev­er, as this was the goal for the action pro­test­ers have declared the action a suc­cess. Around 100 peo­ple have been arrest­ed.

One per­son so far has been charged. The action was wide­ly and pos­i­tive­ly cov­ered in Dan­ish news and pro­test­ers regard it as a very pos­i­tive tri­al run for actions around the COP 15.

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Suc­cess crit­era for Shut It Down Sat­ur­day 26th Sep­tem­ber, Copen­hagen

1. enter a pow­er plant and to shut down the pro­duc­tion
2. con­front politi­cians and ener­gy com­pa­nies with direct action, chal­leng­ing the exist­ing sys­tem
3. to evoke inter­na­tion­al recog­ni­tion of the intent­ness of cli­mate move­ments
4. mobilise peo­ple for cli­mate activism by par­tic­i­pat­ing in an cre­ative, colour­ful and inte­grat­ing action
5. and final­ly to raise aware­ness about the con­flict between coal pow­er and cli­mate change

http://shutitdown.dk/