NATO Defeated by EarthFirst! in the Netherlands

For two years Groen­Front! — Dutch & Bel­gian Earth­First! — have been fight­ing with the local com­mu­ni­ty in Schin­veld, in the south­east of the coun­try, to pre­serve a for­est that would be destroyed for the sake of the NATO air­force base across the Ger­man bor­der. A direct action camp was evict­ed in Jan­u­ary, and 15 acres were destroyed, but 35 acres saved. Groen­Front! was prepar­ing to reoc­cu­py the woods awat­ing the final out­come of a legal bat­tle between the local coun­cil and nation­al gov­ern­ment, but now to great sur­prise, the pro­tes­tors have been vin­di­cat­ed and the forests are def­i­nite­ly saved from NATO’s bloody claws. On July 18th the Dutch high­est admin­is­tra­tive court ruled that the log­ging of Schiveld for­est is ille­gal. This means the min­istry of defence can­not con­tin­ue the log­ging of the for­est as request­ed by NATO, it also means the log­ging of the first six hectares in Jan­u­ary 2006 was ille­gal. The for­est would need to be destroyed to allow AWACS radar planes to lift off with more fuel in order to fly direct­ly to Afghanistan and Iraq.

For two years Groen­Front! — Dutch & Bel­gian Earth­First! — have been fight­ing with the local com­mu­ni­ty in Schin­veld, in the south­east of the coun­try, to pre­serve a for­est that would be destroyed for the sake of the NATO air­force base across the Ger­man bor­der. A direct action camp was evict­ed in Jan­u­ary, and 15 acres were destroyed, but 35 acres saved. Groen­Front! was prepar­ing to reoc­cu­py the woods awat­ing the final out­come of a legal bat­tle between the local coun­cil and nation­al gov­ern­ment, but now to great sur­prise, the pro­tes­tors have been vin­di­cat­ed and the forests are def­i­nite­ly saved from NATO’s bloody claws. On July 18th the Dutch high­est admin­is­tra­tive court ruled that the log­ging of Schiveld for­est is ille­gal. This means the min­istry of defence can­not con­tin­ue the log­ging of the for­est as request­ed by NATO, it also means the log­ging of the first six hectares in Jan­u­ary 2006 was ille­gal. The for­est would need to be destroyed to allow AWACS radar planes to lift off with more fuel in order to fly direct­ly to Afghanistan and Iraq.

For almost 30 years local pro­tes­tors in Schin­veld have fought against NATO, first to stop the reopen­ing of the base, then to reduce the nui­sance caused by the out­dat­ed AWACS radar planes, and, since the evic­tion of the action camp and the log­ging in 2006, rad­i­calised by GroenFront!‘s for­est camp, to close down the base.

When NATO want­ed 20 hectares of the for­est cut and it looked as if the local coun­cil would be over­ruled by the min­istries of defence (own­er of the for­est) and infra­struc­ture, they con­tact­ed Groen­Front! and start­ed a cam­paign where Schin­veld was high­light­ed in the New York Times.

Groen­Front! and the local com­mu­ni­ty protest group Stop Awacs start­ed a series of small­er actions. After thethe spring of 2005, the num­ber of actions increased when the min­is­ter of infra­struc­ture gave out a log­ging per­mit on August 3rd 2005, after a Nim­by-leg­is­la­tion pro­ce­dure (not in my back yard).
The local coun­cil and Stop Awacs tried to stop the log­ging until the final rul­ing (the one that came today) would have been made, but the court decid­ed against that on the 2nd of Decem­ber 2005. On Sun­day Decem­ber 4th 2005, Groen­Front! occu­pied the for­est and start­ed an inten­sive inter­na­tion­al cam­paign.

The camp was evict­ed on Jan­u­ary 9th 2006, the after­noon before about 2000 locals walked their demo in sup­port of the activist into the for­est, in spite of a restric­tion order, and cheered at the inter­na­tion­al group of more than 100 activist occu­py­ing the trees at that moment. Before the police could start evict­ing the trees, they had to remove sev­er­al hun­dred locals who stayed in the woods after the demon­stra­tion, try­ing to avoid police block­ades and com­mit­ting oth­er forms of civ­il dis­obe­di­ence as the may­or used emer­gency leg­is­la­tion against his own peo­ple.