Oil execs gather — we besiege ( + video link)

As oil exec­u­tives gath­ered at a Lon­don hotel for their annu­al strate­gis­ing con­fer­ence on Mon­day 21st June, up to 200 cli­mate activists crossed the riv­er from BP-spon­sored Tate Mod­ern to con­verge on the front entrance with a sam­ba band and a giant p

Drum it Out 1Drum it Out 2As oil exec­u­tives gath­ered at a Lon­don hotel for their annu­al strate­gis­ing con­fer­ence on Mon­day 21st June, up to 200 cli­mate activists crossed the riv­er from BP-spon­sored Tate Mod­ern to con­verge on the front entrance with a sam­ba band and a giant paper-mache oil-cov­ered seabird.

Titled “Drum It Out”, the protest also put the indus­try on tri­al before a Peo­ple’s Court which loud­ly found it guilty of crimes of pol­lu­tion, war crimes, cli­mate crime, and more.

The court heard live tes­ti­mo­ny by wit­ness­es not only from the Gulf, but from Nige­ria, Ghana, Colom­bia, Peru, from Iraq which has suf­fered the dev­as­ta­tion of a war for oil, from Cana­da where indige­nous peo­ple are resist­ing the Tar Sands oil project destroy­ing a land as large as Eng­land, and from Kenya and Chi­na which are suf­fer­ing droughts as a result of the chang­ing cli­mate. “The Gulf of Mex­i­co is not the only dis­as­ter,” the pro­test­ers said — “in fact it’s not even the largest, and in some places this destruc­tion of life has been going on for decades. The oil indus­try is not sus­tain­able. They think they rule the world, but they are fac­ing resis­tance every­where. They can­not come to this hotel and think they will car­ry on busi­ness as usu­al”.

A dead fish award was pre­sent­ed to Bloody Oil in its var­i­ous com­pa­ny guis­es, and a “fish” was deliv­ered to the hotel to be passed on to Con­gress del­e­gates.

Fol­low­ing the tri­al, the main and back entrance were besieged by the drum­ming crowd, with no injuries and no arrests. Two activists who had suc­ceed­ed in pen­e­trat­ing the build­ing were uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly eject­ed. The Drum Out will be fol­lowed this Sat­ur­day by a Teach In, at the School of Ori­en­tal and African Stud­ies, where cam­paign­ers will learn more about the ongo­ing resis­tance by work­ers and com­mu­ni­ties in oil regions, will link-up live with organ­is­ers in Ghana, and will dis­cuss how to work togeth­er to bring the indus­try down. One pro­test­er com­ment­ed, “If even half the mon­ey invest­ed in sub­si­dis­ing oil, clean­ing up its dis­as­ters and fund­ing its wars were devot­ed to alter­na­tive forms of ener­gy, peo­ple would­n’t be suf­fer­ing these out­rages, and the plan­et would be safe.”

london[at]climatecamp.org.uk

Watch the Video http://www.youandifilms.com/2010/06/bloody-oil-drum-em-out/