Day Six: Reclaim Power action

Day Six

I didn’t realize how nervous I was about the Reclaim Power action until I tried to sleep. We had to be at Tangby station at 8am – due to uncertainty about whether trains would be cancelled etc the organizers had counseled us to leave a large margin of time to get there. I was meeting Karin, Freye and Matt (my ‘affinity’ group) near the central station at 6.45am. Fear of oversleeping and of the action itself meant I slept poorly.
Matt arrived at the meeting point with a banner he’d begged off some Brits. It was the Canadian flag with ‘Tar Sands – Climate Crime’ written on it. He looked younger than 18, with glasses, an oversized jacket and paltry accumulation of facial hair posing as a moustache. Karin and Freye, the Swedes, had a white banner with beautiful clouds painted on it. I don’t know what it meant.
The plan was to march to the Bella Center, where the negotiations were happening, and scale two sets of fences to disrupt the sessions and hold a ‘people’s assembly’ with delegates and NGO observers that would be staging a walk-out. Indigenous delegates had reportedly been treated with contempt and disdain, and poor nations were being undermined and sold-out, the deal was shaping up to be unacceptable to the Global South: these were to be their reasons for protest.
The message was that global citizens could reclaim power from politicians who were failing to lead, the aim was to set an example of democratic action to produce solutions to address the justice concerns of the movement.
More than statements about the procedural aspects of treaty making, the concrete calls for action of Climate Justice Now! Include:
1.Leave fossil fuels in the ground – no new prospecting for fossil fuels, no extension of infrastructure for extraction, no new investment.
2.The developing world must pay its ecological debt to the developing world – i.e reparations to the developing world by ecological destruction caused by first world industry in the form of funds for climate change adaptation and/or technology transfer.

The demonstration was split into a several blocs. The blue bloc was the biggest section and had legal permission to march to (but not into) the Bella Center. The green bloc was split into two and would move faster and more purposely, dovetailing at the fences and leading the assault over them. A ‘bike bloc’ was further supposed to flank various blocs to afford them more protection. We were all instructed to form chains along the side of the blocs to prevent the police from entering them and breaking the masses into easily digestible, arrestible portions.
We massed outside in Tanby station in the freezing cold. There was a long delay to the start of the march as police searched the truck that would be a centerpiece of the protest.
When we set off it was in high spirits. A twenty-or-so piece samba band drummed, jangled and spun in the midst of the march. Our chains flanked the road and French clowns with water pistols mocked and teased the police as they walked beside us. We chanted ‘this is what democracy looks like’, sang Bella Ciao, and shouted ‘What do we want?” – “Climate justice!’ – ‘When do we want it?’ -‘Now!’.
As we walked I wondered where the other blocs were. When we arrived at the Bella Center it seemed that blue bloc was on its own. There was then some confusion as commands were slow to filter through. It seemed like there were too few of us. Several attempts were made on the fence but soon the police began to gain the upper hand and we were being corralled away from the center.
Protesters on the front line pushed bravely against the assault made by the police, without raising their hands against them. The police moved the crowd back – as we chanted “We are peaceful, what are you?” – by beating them with truncheons and spraying them with pepper spray.
This confrontation continued for I don’t know how long, until the protesters had been pushed right back down one road and it seemed impossible to get to the fences. 200 accredited attendees did leave the Bella Center, but police refused to let them leave the compound or join the protesters. They were also denied access back into the Bella Center. A truce was called with the police and the people’s assembly was held there, around a parachute on the road.
Many of the speakers that were supposed to lead the assembly were detained in the Bella Center. Instead of hearing their words we split into smaller groups and discussed ourselves what we thought the solutions were to climate change. Spokespeople took the mikes and presented our findings back to the crowd, concerning primarily creating institutional arrangements conducive to resilient communities, and the strengthening of a broad- based movement to fight for these changes and communicate concerns and solutions widely.

DAY FOUR: Climate change is a class war

Naomi Klein steps onto the brightly lit stage. The crowd is crammed way past capacity, way past safety. The sides of the sky blue circus tent bulge. You can smell hash, sweat, dreads, and expectation. Another young person in black elbows past trying to get some mythical place where they can actually see the speakers. Another digital is raised in the air to capture it all. She says: “ Climate change is a class war,” and a real conversation begins.
This conversation does not delve into the arguments behind this statement in great detail. These people are in this tent, in this mad-max-y, hippified, liberated, part of Copenhagen, because they understand the ‘cruel geographic ironies’ of climate change that Klein touches on. That a small minority of people have created a huge majority of the emissions, but that the poorest, least culpable countries will bear the most dire consequences.
These people all know that if the US landmass, like that of the Maldives, peaked at 1m above sea level that this would be a very, very different conference. That 1.5C would be the target, that carbon markets would be seen as ‘the final enclosure of the last space to hadn’t been privatised’ (Klein’s words, i.e a disgrace of a solution), that we’d have wrapped this up about 5 years ago. These people know that if these talks were really capable of addressing climate change they’d turn the world upside down – because when one does the accounting for industrialization it is the North that owes the South a huge ecological (and social) debt.
But this conversation, from which I’m already digressing, rather concerned a little piece of direct action that’s planned for the 16th. Climate Justice Action is planning to march to the Bella Center, storm it and occupy it. Tonight much of what was discussed between those masses of people was the manner in which this should be done. There are many a black-clad summit hopper here – northern activists used to confrontational direct action, with communities and identities based on anarchist principles of the ilk that seek out conflict with a system they see as inherently corrupt.
But what Klein and the other speakers tried to stress is that what is being built is mass-movement, one that includes groups with very different cultures of protests, and many people form the South that have a lot more to lose from being arrested than a night in jail.
The talk ended on an uneasy note. Their leaders had made good appeal to reason and strategy, but they had been more than a few contradictory mutterings. People fled the stuffy tent. Some of them came back inside to dance to electro beats delivered by DJ covered in projected images of riot police. Some of them joined other parties in Christiana…