Climate campers hit Hamburg

I got bored of writing in the past and thought i would post my latest report i am using on the net from the clima camp in Hamburg. Just to give you a background, I went to Berlin after USA family holiday and then heading around Europe!

Everything had frozen. I stood there with my heart in my mouth waiting to see what would happen next.

The police had given us the three customary warnings to leave after a legal demonstration and we had obeyed under threat of arrest. We moved out in a group, knowing the customary tactics of dividing the group that the German riot police liked to conduct. But suddenly they had charged. Around 30 riot police had rushed headlong into us with batons drawn and eyes bearing on us with provocative intent.

We were nearing the end of the German Clima Camp based from a field in north Hamburg.

The idea of the Clima Camp had been birthed in England and after a few years seasoned campaigners like Tadzio Mueller had imported the idea to Germany, traditionally the home of a sizeable active radical left community.

The idea, like its successful counterpart in Southeast England, was to highlight the problems that increased energy consumption was having on global climate change as well as the problems migrants faced when trying to settling in our beloved EU. Tired of ineffectual lobbying against these multi-national corporations with much more financial muscle and therefore influence, the growing consensus was towards direct action. This included, like in the Kent camp, a protest against a coal power station, namely Hamburg's facility in Moorburg, which is currently under construction and one against the airport and its

At first the police presence was scant as they took a backseat in our primary welcoming demonstration, and then were in small numbers at the second big demo outside a low-cost Aldi supermarket in the city centre, the latter in favour of fair trade products. We would then retreat to our camp, where a huge itinerary of informative workshops and debates were running throughout the ten days we camped there.

Then came the turning point. In order to make our presence felt we decided to take our march to a residential site near Moorburg which would be directly affected by the presence of the coal power station. But instead of remaining there, a decision was made to march on the power station itself. This meant that there would be a clear route towards the station itself and there would be no police to overcome. Hurrying along the streets waving flags and chanting songs, our 300-strong body surged towards the building site, only to be intercepted by riot police coming from behind us to thwart our advance.

However, they were powerless to stop two teams getting into the site and hoisting a banner on a crane and staying in place for a full five hours before being arrested. Others blockaded the entrance to the site, a van providinig the music as we danced in the ring formed by our amour-clad, growling 'spectators'. In the end they stopped our spontaneous action for another ridiculous reason: “This is no longer a demo, it is a party; and you need a separate permit for a party. If you don't go home, we will arrest you!” They then proceeded to remove people forcibly as they sat stubbornly at the entrance to the complex, while others decried their democratic rights in uproarious disapproval.

On the Friday was the demonstration at the airport and we were equally mistreated. One group of around 60 was arrested in entirety, solely for blocking one of the many arteries leading to the airport. The police, now smiling smugly, surrounded the protesters before rounding up the whole group and bussing them off to the cell for a few hours before releasing them unceremoniously after the humiliation. Another group of 300 carried out an 'action' in Terminal 1, where, by means of theatre and music they complemented the main march outside which was again heavily cordoned off by the police. We had evaded capture while marching with the first group and later it was at this main march where the police had charged us.

The silence in those moments seemed to last forever as we questioned the integrity of a democratic system we vehemently criticised as being undemocratic. But for that small matter of minutes we were hoping the strands of freedom of expression that remained would sustain our right to leave the site of the action. And so it was to be. With the press cameras cataloguing the police action deemed inappropriate by our mobile PA system they finally capitulated and fell back allowing us to march to the metro station still clasped arm in arm in solidarity.

The next day the police reacted with more fury, using water cannon to disperse a second march on Moorburg, the rain driving not only vertically but also horizontally in what is one of the wettest regions in Germany.

Many people learned that to exercise the freedom to protest it was necessary to test that freedom and that to push for change was never an easy struggle. But more than anything we made a stand, and as we had come to know, the fight is only lost when we stop fighting.

Now there are plans in motion to start a climate camp in Spain next summer as a prelude to a big meeting of climate campaigners in Copenhagen in September 2009 to coincide with the most important UN Climate Conference to be held since Kyoto. Interested individuals wishing to be part of this movement should contact climatecampspain@gmail.com.

Moroccan desert adventure continues...

Two days later we had them returned except this time with the car having signed out two days before we were going to leave. Most people at this stage fly out so as to have a different exit point but my stubborn refusal to do so because of the 350e ticket to france meant that I would have to leave from the same exit, this time by way of a lift from a German guy with a Mercedes Unimog army 4x4 monster vehicle converted for travelling. Theo and his adopted doggie he had found in the desert in a little hole where he had buried his own pup who was killed in 10 minutes by poison (a marvellous story) said he was going north to Agadir and I could go with him. We managed to cross the first hurdle at the frontier with relative ease, our police contacts having phoned in advance of our imminent arrival. We had even surpassed our 3-day visa by 2 days but it seemed to be no problem as the customs officers stamped us out in their wooden shed with barely a question being raised. Sitting there breathing the air of freedom as we drove easily across the sand-traps of no-man's land in our monster vehicle with metre high wheels and about half a metre of clearance from the ground, we arrived back in Morocco with the sense of coming home.

We then carried on north after a night in Dahkla at our steady 70km/h speed along the only road with signs on its side warning about mines from the 10-year war Morocco waged with the democratically elected Saharaui pro-independence forces of the Polisario, a war only halted by UN peacekeepers and now a ceasefire again in the balance.

After miles of emptiness as far as the eye could see on all sides we arrived in Laayoune and from there tried to take a more interesting route inland through the desert. Stopping in Smara for a night we ate fish and burgers before changing a wheel in the heat of the day and watching troops land in the airport as the military build-up on the frontier continued. We then elected to take our journey into the unknown to near the perilous eastern frontier with Algeria and Tindouf where 200,000 Saharaui refugees now live.

According to the map there was a dirttrack there and at first all was good as we marched onwards along what seemed like a newly-paved road, inevitably to transport munitions for another possible war with sworn-enemy Algeria and the Polisario they backed. But soon we found the road ran out and even the tracks wore thin and divided into all sorts of directions. Postulating in our pot-induced slowness we sought what seemed the most logical route trying to head east all the time. Humming through white sandy plains and up craggy mountain ranges, we felt the loneliness of adventure, our chess games in the Sahara forcing us into brain activity which was sometimes hard to muster.

In the end we came across our road and sure enough we found the military base we were looking for. The only thing was that here we were the only tourists and suddenly, in their state of alert they questioned our veracity. After being escorted by a police truck north to a small village now out of bounds to anyone without military credentials we were questioned thoroughly by the chief of police somewhere on these lines:

“Are you part of an organisation or other association? Are you spies?”

“Err... no,” was our answer as we wrestled with a hunger garnered from not eating all day as we sped to our destination before nightfall. Having realised we were quite innocent they let us catch a bite before becoming the first tourists to sleep in that town for three years. I even managed a great conversation with an interesting educated policeman with a perfect English accent at his lonely post at the entry to this town. We spent the night by the post and then carried on north through some more villages and the undertaking further off-roading through a wondrous valley as the sun set on us lighting the peaks around us in a heart-warming red glow. We fought confusion again and finally arrived at the road we were looking for proceeding through the mountains to the tourist town of Tafrout and then northwest along the ridges of the anti-Atlas toward Agadir. There, we spent some good times with Soufi and his skater friends, as well as my brother who was in the area before heading north alone with my backpack and surfboard tucked under my arm to Imsouanne, a beautiful fishing enclave with some of the most perfect longboard waves there is. Having arrived at this paradisical still under-exploited spot I was walking around in the carpark and was greeted by an Austrian guy with a full-size motor-caravan. After smoking together and getting annihilated at chess he invited me to sleep there where I hung out for a week in the end, passing away the hours catching perfect long rides on borrowed longboards and eating donated sardines from our pro-rainbow Mohamed in his tiny beachside restaurant. All too soon it was time to leave and Europe beckoned with an opportunity to get some writing work with my cousin on a website. I got a trip to Casablanca with some cool French couple and then headed to Rabat where I stayed with an American guy who had managed to go, even out with a Moroccan princess before deciding their weakness for coke wasn't really his thing. We went to a wild diplomatic pool party with other foreigners and prostitutes hanging around innocuously and then spent a day chilling before catching a coach to Tangiers from where I took the ferry straight home to Gibraltar.