Each time a free-floating rumour gets confirmed, and past political behaviour becomes a scandalous spectacle, one cannot resist wondering if such conduct might be going on today. This was the case in 2006, after a grand exposure of espionage the Icelandic state aimed at socialists during the Cold War. During parliamentary discussions following the revelation, Mörður Árnason, MP for the Social-Democratic Alliance (“Samfylkingin”), highlighted the importance of revealing if similar espionage was indeed occurring in present times. If so, he asked, “how is it being conducted? […] Which foreign states have been able to access this information?” Quite typically, those questions were never answered.

Half a decade later, in late 2010, it was revealed that a British police officer, one Mark Kennedy, had travelled around Europe for seven years disguised as environmental and anti-capitalist activist ‘Mark Stone’ and was collecting information about various activist movements and, in some cases, acting as an agent provocateur. Along with the UK, Denmark, Germany, Italy and France — to name but a few of the places where he worked — he did a stint in Iceland’s Eastern highlands in the summer of 2005. In Iceland, he attended a protest camp organised by the environmentalist movement Saving Iceland which targeted the construction of the gargantuan Kárahnjúkar dam and American aluminium giant Alcoa’s smelter in Reyðarfjörður.

The revelation mostly stayed within activist circles and publications, until early 2011, when a public expose of the spy’s true identity lead to the collapse of a UK trial against six climate-change activists, in which Mark’s secretly obtained evidence played a key role. British newspaper The Guardian then took up the case, and the Mark Kennedy saga started to snowball contemporaneously with the broader attention it received, bringing to light a number of other undercover spies.

Sex, Secrecy And Dead Children’s Identities

Shortly after Mark was exposed, Irish and German authorities admitted that he had worked within their jurisdictions and with their knowledge. Due to the ongoing efforts of Andrej Hunko — MP for German left party Die Linke — a truckload of information regarding European cross-border undercover police operations has since seen the light of day.

A recent book on the matter, written by Guardian journalists Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, brings further context to the affair — the mapping of at least 30 years of police espionage and infiltration of environmentalist, anti-racist and anarchist movements in the UK and elsewhere. Among the information revealed, the authors explain how the undercover officers at the Special Demonstration Squad — the undercover unit responsible for the infiltration — had the modus operandi of taking up identities of dead children in order to build up credible alter-egos based on the short lives of real persons.

It has also been revealed that Kennedy — along with others in his position — enjoyed several intimate relationships with some of his prospects, using sex to build up trust and gather information. One infiltrator, Bob Lambert, even fathered a child with one of these women, only to disappear as soon as his undercover employment became too risky. Eight British women who were victims of this tactic have pressed charges against the spies’ employer, the Metropolitan Police, due to the psychological damage they suffered. In a recent episode of investigative TV programme ‘Dispatches’ on Channel 4, some of them described their experience as having been mass-raped by the state, as they would never have consented to sleeping with the police officers had they been aware of their real identities. Adding insult to injury, their claims will not be heard openly — the British High Court recently ruled that it would take place in the secret Investigatory Powers Tribunal.

Saving Hell’s Angels

Enter Iceland, where the big question concerned whether Mark Kennedy had operated with or without the Icelandic authorities’ knowledge and approval. According to the country’s penal code, a foreign party or state’s espionage that takes place within the jurisdiction of the Icelandic state — or is directed at something or someone therein — is illegal and punishable with five-years imprisonment. Had Mark operated without the authorities’ knowledge, it should have caused an international conflict. If he, on the other hand, collaborated with the Icelandic police, it would have equaled the invoking of proactive investigative powers, which the Icelandic police apparently didn’t have at that time.*

Thus the affair entered Iceland’s parliament in late January 2011. Assuming the former version being more likely than the latter, the above-mentioned MP Mörður Árnason asked his fellow party-member and then-Minister for Foreign Affairs, Össur Skarphéðinsson, about the government’s possible actions regarding the matter. After a few lousy personal jokes thrown between the two, Össur claimed he would wait for a report on the matter — conducted by the National Commissioner of the Icelandic Police — which Ögmundur Jónasson, MP for the Left Greens and then Minister of the Interior, had already requested.

But when finally published by the Commissioner’s National Security Unit in May 2011, it was pretty much impossible to estimate the relevance of the report, as the details of Ögmundur’s request were never made public. It was, however, clear that the National Commissioner — whose report literally equated environmentalist activists with Hells Angels — wasn’t about to bring any concrete information out into the public domain.

Lost In Information

Although admitting that the police received information about the activists and their plans via domestic and foreign sources, and that the Icelandic police collaborated with foreign police authorities regarding the protests, the report’s authors nevertheless fully dodged the question regarding the Icelandic police’s alleged collaboration with Mark Kennedy. The main conclusion of the report merely found that “during an overhaul of data at the National Commissioner’s office, no information has come forth enabling an answer regarding whether this agent provocateur […] was here in collaboration with or without the knowledge of the Icelandic police in 2005.”

Despite criticism from Saving Iceland and Árni Finnsson, head of the Iceland Nature Conservation Association, which both accused the minister of condoning cover-ups and evasions by accepting these results, Ögmundur never really touched officially on the issue again. Neither did Össur nor Mörður or — as a matter of fact — anyone else from the establishment.

The truth regarding Kennedy’s operations in Iceland is still not publicly acknowledged, and the absurdity of the issue as it now stands is probably best described by Ögmundur’s own words, taken from an article published on Smugan — a now defunct leftist news-site —  and his last public remark on the report: “The National Commissioner’s report states that the Icelandic police obtained information from abroad concerning the protests at Kárahnjúkar, but that the police do not have information about how this information was obtained.”

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* It is, in fact, questionable if the Iceland police had proactive investigative powers or not. As a result of weak laws and a lack of regulations, it actually seems that until 2011 the police had just about carte blanche regarding whom to spy on and for what reason. See more about it here.

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Click here to go to the support site for the women’s legal action against the Metropolitan Police.

Watch the above-mentioned Dispatches show here below:

The Police’s Dirty Secret (47mins – Dispatches/Channel4 – 24JUN2013) from Casey Oliver on Vimeo.

There is a photograph by Richard Peter of a statue of an angel overlooking the card-house-like ruins of Dresden. During three days in February 1945, the German city was annihilated by the allied forces using a new firestorm technique of simultaneously dropping bombs and incendiary devices onto the city.

The photo resonates with philosopher Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘On the Concept of History,’ in which he adds layers of meaning to a painting by Paul Klee titled ‘Angelus Novus’. Benjamin describes Klee’s angel as ‘The Angel of History’ whose face is turned towards the past. “Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet.”

Wanting to “awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed,” the Angel’s wings are stretched out by a storm from Paradise, which “drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high.”

“That which we call progress,” Benjamin concludes, “is this storm.”

Can You Stand in the Way of Progress?

If the storm disenables us to fix the ruins of the past, what about preventing the storm from blowing? That would not be so simple according to art collective Angeli Novi, comprised of Steinunn Gunnlaugsdóttir and Ólafur Páll Sigurðsson, whose exhibition is currently showing at The Living Art Museum (Nýló).

Under a confrontational title — ‘You Can’t Stand in the Way of Progress,’ shaped as the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ sign of Auschwitz — Angeli Novi have greatly altered the museum’s space with an installation of sculptures, soundscapes, smells and videos, including a 20-minute film of the same title as the exhibition. The film is a kind of kaleidoscopic time machine, examining the plight of generations which, one after the other, become tools and puppets of economic and historical structures.

In a well-cooked and stark manner — adjectives borrowed from Nýló’s director Gunnhildur Hauksdóttir — often shot through with streaks of black humour, the exhibition displays a dark image of Western civilization via versatile manifestations of the horrors embedded in capitalism, industrialism, nationalism, religion, the dualistic and linear thought of occidental culture, and the individual’s buried-alive position in society.

The metaphor here is literal as the only visible body-parts of the film’s thirty protagonists are their heads. The rest are buried under ground. Between themselves, their chewing mouths fight over ceremonial ribbons carrying a collection of Western society’s fundamental values, doctrines and clichés, in a dynamic collision with a collage of significant images behind them — “the history of Western thought,” as author Steinar Bragi points out. Towering over a coffin shaped as a baby’s cot, located in a mausoleum at the museum’s entrance, the same ribbons have been tied onto a funeral wreath. A single cliché, “From the Cradle to the Grave,” hangs between the mouths of two children’s heads that stick out of the black sand below the coffin. A smooth corporate female voice greets the visitors: “Welcome to our world!”

I Sense, Therefore I Think

“It’s very pessimistic,” Steinar Bragi says during our conversation in a bunker-like room of Nýló. “The film shows us disembodied beasts, fighting over the phrases that our entire society is built upon. I always see the head as the rational approach to life, stuck in these dualistic pairs that are so far from reality as I experience it. We have sensibilities, then emotions, and finally there are words and reason. Reason is useful for certain tasks, when one has to go from place A to place B, but it’s only a tool to be used on something far more extensive.”

Steinar and I agree that society is constantly simplified into Cartesian dualism — “I think, therefore I am” — the ground zero of Western thought. And while dualism doesn’t necessarily reject sensibilities and emotions, Steinar maintains that it locates reason on a higher level. “Reason is expected to control, which it certainly does in a small and unglamorous context, but it’s only an expression of what lies beneath.”

Enemies of Progress?

It’s clear that the core of this rationalism is simplification such as how political and social conflicts tend to be reduced to a fight between alleged good and evil forces. This not only brings us to the religious nature of the myth of progress, but also the power of language. Because “although they are hollow and empty and repeatedly chewed on, these phrases are also very powerful,” as literary scholar Benedikt Hjartarson points out. “They conduct the way society is shaped. They manifest the social and economic reality we live with.”

As former director of US aluminium corporation Alcoa Alain Belda told the newspaper Morgunblaðið in March 2003: “Some people are against progress.” He was referring to the opponents of the Kárahnjúkar dams, constructed in Iceland’s highlands to create energy for Alcoa’s smelter. “But fortunately,” he continued, “the world is growing and people are requesting better lives.”

Such an argument equals economic growth and people’s welfare, portraying the megaproject’s opponents as enemies of progress. At the same time it negates the destructive nature of progress, manifested for instance in the culturally genocidal impacts — in the form of displacement of populations — and irreversible environmental destruction often associated with large-scale energy production, and how the lives of whole generations are wasted by wars waged for power and profit.

“We see this contradiction within modernity,” Benedikt continues, “how the idea of progress thrives on destruction and always calls for annihilation.” But unlike the revolutionary destruction encouraged by 19th Century anarchist philosopher Michail Bakunin — who stated, “the passion for destruction is a creative passion too!” — the annihilation inherent to progress is rather used as a stimulus for an unaltered continuum of the status quo under the pretext of development. Thus, the contradictory nature is evident again, as well as the religious one: “The present is never here,” Benedikt says, “it’s always something we are aiming for.”

Violence Intrinsic to Social Contracts

The film displays a great amount of violence, which musician Teitur Magnússon sees with a strong reference to alienation. “One feels like it’s somehow supernatural, like it’s not the work of humanity but rather of a monster that’s eating everything up, and we don’t seem to have any control of it.”

Artist Bryndís Hrönn Ragnarsdóttir furthermore connects this brutality with authority. “Humans aren’t able to handle more power than over themselves,” she says. “As soon as someone is granted higher power, violence enters the picture.” She maintains that some sort of violence is intrinsic to all simplifications — “all of society’s attempts to try and settle upon something” — meaning a wide range of social contracts, from organized religion to written and unwritten rules regarding people’s behaviour.

A Leap Into the Future

As Angeli Novi’s subject is not only complex but also polarized — layered with our cultural history of construction and destruction, repression and revolt — the exhibition doesn’t preach any simple solutions to the great problems it addresses. Such attempts are often just as contradictory as the myth of progress itself, or as philosopher Slavoj Žižek ironically sums up in his analysis of what he calls ‘a decaf reality,’ when the “very thing which causes damage should already be the medicine.”

Thus, one cannot resist wondering if there actually is a way out of the horrors analysed and manifested in the exhibition. Or is humanity bound to be stuck in a premature burial while the seemingly unstoppable catastrophe witnessed by Benjamin’s Angel of History keeps on enlarging into eternity?

With images referring to France’s July Revolution of 1830, Angeli Novi reject such a vision and suggest instead a peculiarly creative approach to revolt. Already during the revolution’s first day, clocks on church towers and palaces all over Paris were shot down and destroyed, signifying the urgent need to nullify predominant social structures and ideologies by putting an end to the time of the oppressors.

In continuum of this rebellious tradition of what philosopher Herbert Marcuse referred to as “arresting time” — directly related to what William Burroughs called “blowing a hole in time” — Angeli Novi transcend the well known demand for “all power to the people” with a leap into the future, granting wings to the mind and calling for all power to the imagination.

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See also:

Saving Iceland: Kárahnjúkar Dam Blown Up in New Film by Angeli Novi

Jón Proppé: Standing in the way of progress

Þóroddur Bjarnason: Jafnvægislist (Icelandic only)

Angeli Novi’s webiste

At the heart of the exhibition, which consists of audio, video and sculptural pieces, is a 20 minute long film in Icelandic and English, bearing the same title as the exhibition. Around 30 people were willingly buried alive during the making of the film, which was shot this year in Greece and Iceland. Soundscapes were created by Örn Karlsson in collaboration with Angeli Novi.

Corporate green-wash and the Kárahnjukar dams play a key role in You Can’t Stand in the Way of Progress. In one of the film’s scenes, the 700 m long and 200 m high central Kárahnjúkar Dam is digitally blown up by the very same explosion that blew up the Dimmugljúfur canyon in March 2003. The first destruction of the 200m deep canyon, which was carved out by the 150 km long river Jökulsá á Dal, played a strategical key role in the conflict about the power plant’s construction, and was meant to signify the government’s determined intention to steamroller Iceland’s eastern highlands in order to produce electricity for the US aluminium corporation ALCOA. As environmentalists warned from the beginning, the construction has turned out to have devastating environmental, social and economical impacts, and contributed also heavily to Iceland’s infamous 2008 economic collapse.

Asked about the cinematic blast, artists Gunnlaugsdóttir and Sigurðsson said: “It was particularly pleasurable to blow up the image of the dam that has now become the main symbol of corporate power abuse and ecocide in Iceland.” Sigurðsson  added that it was “Very appropriate to use for our purpose the same film footage that was used by the Icelandic government in 2003 to dash people’s hopes of saving the Kárahnjúkar area from deeply corrupt forces of corporate greed and governmental stupidity. These same forces have learnt nothing from their past crimes and mistakes and are now lining up for taking power next year in order to continue their destructive rampage through Icelandic nature.”

A press release  from The Living Art Museum states the following:

Angeli Novi create a kind of a kaleidoscopic time machine, examining the plight of generations which, one after the other, become tools and puppets of economic and historical structures. Through symbolism and imagery, Angeli Novi examine the ideological backdrops of these structures, the variously substance-drained core values of occidental culture, as well as as the reoccurring themes of doctrines and clichés in the societal rhetoric, necessary for society to maintain itself.

You Can’t Stand in the Way of Progress opened on 29 September and will run until 2 December. The Living Art Museum is located on Skúlagata 28, 101 Reykjavík.

The Saving Iceland network has spent some time examining the report authored  by the National Commissioner’s ‘National Security Unit’ published on May 17. Already at this stage we would like to make a considerable number of remarks.

First of all we have to express our astonishment if Ögmundur Jónasson, the Minister of the Interior is going to accept as valid the poorly reasoned cover-ups that are resorted to by the report’s authors. It is also remarkable how superficial and simply untrue the Minister’s own interpretation of the report has been so far. Unfortunately the same is true of the coverage of the report made by some of the Icelandic corporate media.

The report’s most serious flaw is of course the fact that it completely evades the responsibility that it was officially intended to assume. The only de facto information about the report’s actual subject is on page 12,  where it is stated that the police received “confidential information” concerning the intended protests against the Kárahnjúkar dam from both domestic and foreign “informers”, and that this information was used to organize the police’s reaction.

On page 18 it says that “during an overhaul of data at the National Commissioner office, no information came to light that makes it possible to ascertain if this British police spy [Mark Kennedy] was here in Iceland with the knowledge of the police or with their collaboration in 2005”. This is obviously an attempt to avoid giving a clear answer to the question of whether the police were aware of Kennedy’s presence here in Iceland, by referring to the supposed non-existence of “data”. According to this, all authorities could always avoid all official obligation to inform simply by deleting or not entering data about certain events. This is a completely unacceptable conclusion.

It is important to note that neither the Interior Minister nor the National Commissioner have answered a list of questions from our lawyer, formally requesting further information about the Icelandic police’s surveillance of individuals within the Saving Iceland network, and, no less importantly, the actual wording of the query made by the Minister of the Interior to the National Commissioner’s National Security Unit. Since the Minister and the National Commissioner do not provide precise answers about the specific stipulations to the enquiry, it is hard to make a clear estimate of the precise extent to which the report avoids giving answers, although it becomes clear, from reading the report, that its authors entirely avoid answering the questions about Saving Iceland and Mark Kennedy that it was reportedly supposed to answer.

It is also unbelievable, in accordance with general research methods, that the report’s authors did not contact individuals who have been active with the Saving Iceland movement, but instead based the chapter about Mark Kennedy on reports from the British newspaper Guardian, which are full of inaccuracies repeatedly corrected by Saving Iceland.

Criminalizing Resistance Constitutes an Assault on Democracy

The report is a textbook example of the violently hostile attitude of the Icelandic authorities’ against political dissidents and groups using civil disobedience, treating them as if they were dealing with criminal organizations. Immediately on the first page of the report the National Commissioner makes himself guilty of criminalizing our movement. As a whole the report partners us, environmentalists, up with the “criminal organization Hells Angels”, which has recently become in Iceland a sort of a cloak for any kind of State intervention that entails curtailing constitutional human rights.

In this context it is very important to be able to know the details of the Interior Minister’s original query (as a matter of fact, it is strange that this is not clearly explained in the report), as it is especially odd to ask for an investigation into two such fundamentally unrelated associations in the same report. Of course it gives a completely wrong picture of the topics that need to be cleared up concerning Saving Iceland, a nature conservation organization, whose actions hardly justify that it be referred to at the same instance as the Hells Angels. This has to be explained by the authorities.

The National Commissioner is even so unfortunate as to blurt out that his office has performed its duties “… concerning the fight against organized crime and direct action-groups like the Saving Iceland organization.” This is an explicit acknowledgement that the National Commissioner considers one of his duties to “fight against” environmentalist groups such as Saving Iceland.

It is very difficult to see where these duties are called upon, in the quoted police law, whose 5th article addresses the Commissioner’s duty to coordinate his operations but says nothing about an obligation to fight against voluntary organizations any more than what can be expected. There is only a description of the Commissioner’s variety of administrative duties, i.e. “… to operate a police investigative department and a national security unit that investigates high treason and the violation of the cabinet government and its supreme authorities, and estimates the threat of terrorism and organized crime.”

It is not in the hands of a police force, in a state that wants to pride itself on upholding democracy, to “fight against” political dissidence. Hence we find ourselves moved to ask if the National Commissioner has completely lost himself in the high jinks and really considers himself to officiate duties in a fascist state like the ones for example under which the people of South-America have often had to live?

In the above-mentioned reference on page 1 it says that the department in question “investigates treason and the violation of the cabinet government and its supreme authorities, and estimates the threat of terrorism and organized crime.” According to this definition it is difficult to see that the National Security Unit had any legal authority to interfere with Saving Iceland, but if deemed so, it would be intriguing to know under which of these topics Saving Iceland has been categorized.

Obvious Evasions

The section of the report relating to Saving Iceland is completely consistent with the previous report about the police’s interference into the affairs of Saving Iceland, written by the director of Iceland’s police academy at the request of the Minister of Justice in 2009. Paragraphs of laws and the police’s modus operandi are patronisingly detailed, but the hoped for analysis is nowhere to be found. (The said report is, incidentally, printed with double-spacing and contains long references to articles of law, possibly in an attempt to conceal how little meaningful analysis it contains. It would be interesting to see what would remain if the long quotes on articles of law are removed and the text printed with single-spacing.)

On page 2 there is a long list of the particular tasks that are in the hands of the National Commissioner’s National Security Unit. Despite of a list in 12 separate parts, there is no mention of which of these tasks concern the topics that were to be investigated in the report.

On page 15 it is stated that the police acted in accordance with information that they received from abroad, as well as from within Iceland. What foreign agency is responsible for informing the Icelandic police? How can it be argued that the police’s response was based on the information they received when the actual information has not been specified? The fact that the protests “might proliferate” is not a valid reason for preventative police actions. The likelihood of sabotage taking place is an unreasoned assertion. The police might have received information saying that very “determined activists” would be likely to join Saving Iceland, but it does not follow that protest is necessarily illegal, and the existence of “activists” does not legitimize the use of police force.

The reports’ authors attempt to convince the Minister, and other readers, with peculiar meticulousness, that according to international police agreements neither the Minister, nor those whose rights the police have violated, should be given access to the evidence. The efforts of the National Commissioner to hide behind confidentiality towards foreign police-spies does little to convince, but rather reveals a determination to avoid exposing the Commissioner’s own involvement in violations of human rights against individuals who have been active with Saving Iceland.

On page 3 there is a chapter about the so-called “third-party-rule”, which the report’s authors attempt to stretch by applying its confidentiality stipulation to include the very same Interior Minister who actually commissioned the report. The Minister is the supreme authority of the Icelandic police, hence it is incomprehensible how he can be considered a “third party” by the report’s authors.

It is worth noting that on page 15, the above-mentioned report by the Police Academy director is quoted as stating that the police did not use eavesdropping in connection with the protests. It may be worth considering if the reason for quoting the 2009 report on this issue is an attempt to avoid exposing the electronic spying that took place. If the National Commissioner considered Saving Iceland to be a great terrorist threat, it is extremely strange if our communications were not tapped. If it really was the case that the National Commissioner had reason to believe that we posed a terrorist threat, and yet he did not order that we were electronically spied on, it is fair to say that he seriously failed his duties.

The 15th article of administration laws nr. 37/1993 deals with information rights and says that “a person or party connected to a particular case has the right to see the relevant documents and other data. The data has to be made available to this person or party, with the only exception if the case is of that essence, or the amount of documents is so high, that it makes revealing data very problematic.” Articles of law about secrecy stipulations do not have limiting effects on the duty to provide documents concerning this article of law.

It is clear that the National Commissioner admits to have worked closely with the British authorities concerning the surveillance of Saving Iceland. He also admits to have received information not only from abroad but also from within Iceland. This information has been gathered by spying, in other words: By violating the privacy of our personal lives. To state that no recorded documents can be found in the offices of the National Commissioner about this co-operation with the British authorities is nothing but obvious evasions.

Independent Investigation

The Minister of the Interior is now issuing the police with expanded proactive investigation permits. In the discussion in parliament following the publication of this report the Minister has been at particular pains that the focus on the issue should be on preventing the police from using these new powers of proactive investigation to violate the rights of political dissident groups. Although the minister has announced in connection with this report, that he thinks that “the authorities’ interference of this sort against politically motivated protest is a direct assault on democracy,” there does not seem to be any real intent behind his words to deal with the Icelandic and British police respective forces documented violations against Saving Iceland.

Thus we ask: Is the Minister of the Interior really condoning the police’s violations, clearly confirmed in the report, of our constitutional right to privacy, and by planting an agent provocateur in our movement for several years, who did his best to entrap us (nota bene, without success!) into major acts of terrorism? Has the Minister, in his fascination with proactive investigation permits, reached the conclusion that the significance and seriousness of law-violations that have already been committed are less serious than those being planned or which have never been committed?

If the Interior Minister considers this report satisfactory we cannot help seriously doubting that while he is in charge of this Ministry the task of tailoring laws and regulations, which he claims to want to promote in order to defend political resistance groups in Iceland from Big Brother’s human rights violations, is in the right hands.

Saving Iceland request that Ögmundur Jónasson send this report back to the National Commissioner on the basis that it simply is unsatisfactory. Otherwise we believe there is a pressing need for an independent investigation to be carried out under the auspices of parties with no obvious interests to protect such as the National Commissioner.

See also:

New Photographic Evidence Shows that the Icelandic Police Lied About their Dealings with Mark Kennedy

In January 2011, when the illegal covert actions of UK police in Icelandic jurisdiction hit the pages of the international media, the local police forces of the two Icelandic towns Seydisfjörður and Eskifjörður in Eastern Iceland issued a statement in response to queries from the Icelandic National Broadcaster (RUV). The Broadcaster asked if the Icelandic police had been aware of the infiltration of the Saving Iceland network by British police spy Mark Kennedy. According to the Broadcaster the two police forces denied that they had had any “dealings with Kennedy during the protests against the Kárahnjúkar dams.”

Saving Iceland can now reveal evidence that shows clearly that the two police forces are not telling the truth about their dealings with Kennedy. The top photograph accompanying this statement shows two Icelandic police officers grappling with Mark Kennedy during a Saving Iceland action that took place on 26 July 2005 at the site of the Kárahnjúkar central dam. Clearly the incident pictured shows that the Icelandic police most certainly had “dealings” with the British spy.

Furthermore, there are numerous witnesses to the event when the Icelandic police detained a number of Saving Iceland activists at Kárahnjúkar, also in July 2005, and the officers collected the passports of the activists in order to register and photocopy them. Kennedy was one of those whose passport was confiscated in this manner by the police. The records of these passports are available to the authorities, unless they have been tampered with by those who are authorised to access the records.

The above shows that the two respective police forces are lying about their dealings with the British police spy. These dealings in fact turn out to have been considerable, although what has been photographed and entered into police records may just be an indication of much deeper involvement of Icelandic authorities.

Who was Kennedy’s runner in Iceland?

It is standard police procedure with the UK police that a spy like Kennedy will always be backed up by a “minder”. This is a police officer which follows the spy where ever he goes at a “safe” distance and which the spy can always get in contact with 24 hours round the clock. Kennedy himself described this procedure in an interview in the Daily Telegraph.

According to Kennedy this agent would travel on his trail where ever he went abroad. One can assume that during Kennedy’s stay at Kárahnjúkar this “minder” agent will have been based in a hotel at Egilsstaðir, the town nearest to the Kárahnjúkar dams, or at Hallormstaður forest, or possibly even, in the event of close collaboration with the Icelandic authorities, in the work camp village at the dam site itself.

It is more than likely that if the British authorities notified Icelandic authorities of the infiltrator in the Saving Iceland camp that, rather than jeopardize the guise of Kennedy, the Icelandic authorities will have been in more regular contact with his “minder”.

A clumsy cover-up

The fact that the Icelandic police find it necessary to use clumsy lies to cover over their involvement with Kennedy and his superiors, indicates that they are responding to orders from above to suppress information that would potentially seriously compromise Icelandic and UK authorities.

The Icelandic police have already as far back as in 2006 confirmed close collaboration with the UK police on the issue of the Saving Iceland network:

“The published confirmation [in the Police Magazine] of close collaboration between British and Icelandic authorities on the issue of Saving Iceland in the winter of 2005-2006 together with the statements of the police in Seydisfjordur and Eskifjordur, that contradict the evidence that Saving Iceland is in possession of, gives ample grounds to assume that the Icelandic authorities were in the know about Mark Kennedy’s infiltration of Saving Iceland.”

So far the the National Commissioner of the Police of Iceland has refused to answer the question posed by the National Broadcaster about if the UK police notified Icelandic authorities about the Kennedy infiltration of Saving Iceland.

Despite the assurances made in January in parliament by Össur Skarphéðinsson, Minister of Foreign Affairs and also Ögmundur Jónasson the Minister of the Interior, that they would do their utmost to uncover the truth of this ugly case they have so far done nothing to come clean about this considerable significant breach of human rights and of Icelandic and international laws.

Icelandic authorities using delaying tactics

At a meeting with the Minister of the Interior Saving Iceland founder Ólafur Páll Sigurdsson requested that he be given access to all official records of the dealings of the police with Saving Iceland, including all records of official spying carried out by the police about himself and other environmentalists involved in the struggle for the preservation of the Icelandic environment.

The Icelandic authorities are deliberately dragging their heels about the Kennedy case. So far nothing has been forthcoming from Icelandic authorities but sophistry, evasions and lies.

The Ministry of the Interior has stated in correspondence with the legal representative of Saving Iceland that no disclosures are to be expected until the report from the National Commissioner sees the light of day. From the tone and context of the correspondence it is implied that it may be a considerable amount of time until the report will be made available.

Hence it can be concluded that the authorities are using this report as tactical means to delay and defuse the serious consequences that the unraveling of the truth may have.

This is in direct contrast with both the German and Irish authorities. Both the German and Irish police have made official statements in which they admit their awareness of Kennedy’s operations within their jurisdictions.

These arrogant tactics of deliberate bureaucratic stalling and red tape sophistry are nothing new when it comes to Icelandic authorities when they want to deflect attention from inconvenient issues and delay the course of transparency and justice.

The reluctance of the Icelandic authorities to own up to the truth in the Kennedy case reveals yet again how this government has far from discontinued the tradition of unaccountability and repressive methods of former Iceland governments. This is most evident in their continued political repression of Icelandic radicals and specifically the new powers of proactive investigations that the Minister of the Interior is attempting to hand over to the Icelandic police.

Recent history shows irrefutably that the Icelandic police can not be trusted to not abuse such powers when it comes to legitimate political groups opposed to government policy. New regulations are not likely to have any more effect on a police force which has grown accustomed to routinely ignore and set aside current legislations regarding the rights of citizens to protest, even clauses dealing with the sanctuary of privacy in the Constitution.

The Saving Iceland network demand that the Icelandic authorities desist from this game of lies and evasions and immediately reveal the facts about not only the Kennedy case but all their records of dealings with Saving Iceland and the spying that they have conducted into the affairs of Saving Iceland and the individuals in our network.

We call on all those who have voiced concern about this blatant violation of civil and human rights and who have expressed their wish to see the truth about this case to mount pressure on the Icelandic government to discontinue this travesty of justice.

Additional references:

 http://www.savingiceland.org/?s=Mark+Ken…
http://www.savingiceland.org/tag/repression/

http://www.savingiceland.org/tag/rvk9/

http://www.savingiceland.org/is/tag/rvk-9/

http://www.savingiceland.org/2010/06/a- … epression/

http://grapevine.is/News/ReadArticle/Bi … Introduced

http://grapevine.is/News/ReadArticle/Sa … ggerating-

http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandrev … _id=372627

In other articles that are concerned with Mark Kennedy’s involvement with British groups the Guardian several times quotes British activists in saying that Kennedy did not act as a strategist or decision maker in their movement, but that he made him himself useful as a driver and an energetic facilitator in day to day logistics. One source is reported by the Guardian in even going so far to say that Kennedy was not considered the sharpest knife in the box. This would make the Guardians’ claims about his supposed vital role in Saving Iceland surprising to say the least.

We have written this further detailed statement to discuss the various claims made in relation to Kennedy’s role in Iceland. These claims include: that Kennedy was pivotal in the birth of Iceland’s environmental movement; that he was instrumental in training Icelanders in direct action; that he was a key figure in various protests in the east of the country; and that he was a key decision maker within Saving Iceland.

Kennedy had no role in the birth of Icelandic environmentalism
Mark Kennedy did not return to Iceland for the 2006 protest camps at Karahnjukar, Snaefell and Reydarfjordur. Although he continued attending some of our gatherings for a while, his activities within the campaign gradually diminished, and finally ceased in 2007.

It appears the Guardian reporters are quite ignorant of Icelandic environmentalism in claiming that Kennedy “played a key role” in forming it. Saving Iceland is by no means the only nature protection group in Iceland. There are several other Icelandic environmentalist groups and NGOs, some older than the Saving Iceland network. Kennedy was also not instrumental in founding Saving Iceland in 2005 as the Guardian claims, as SI was in fact formed in 2004.

Kennedy did not provide training to Icelandic protesters and did not play an important role in actions
Mark Kennedy was never a trainer for Saving Iceland nor did he train any Icelanders. The only training he may have taken part in is training Icelandic policemen during their self confessed “collaboration” with the UK police, in 2005-2006. The purpose of this collaboration was to help Icelandic police to deal with SI activists.

Kennedy did not play a major role in actions in Iceland in 2005. He had already left the protest camp before it was evicted from Karahnjukar, and was not present when we relocated at Vad Farm in Skriddal. Kennedy only participated in two mass lock-ons at the Karahnjukar dam site, prior to the eviction, and consequently he played no part in a number of actions we carried out following the eviction later that summer, both at Karahnjukar and at the construction site of the ALCOA smelter in Reydarfjordur, or the actions we carried out in the Reykjavik area in August. Kennedy also never ran errands to Reykjavik on behalf of SI; as far as we know, he never set foot in the capital.

Thus the following statements published in the Guardian are nonsense: “It was during this campaign that Kennedy showed the Icelandic activists the techniques of ‘lock down’ – when protesters attach themselves to an immobile object – and how to block roads by constructing tripods from scaffolding, placing a protester at the apex” and “Undercover police officer made himself indispensable to the movement, activist claims”. It is worth noting that a reporter who uses the words ‘lock-down’ for a practice that is generally referred to by activists as ‘lock-on’, clearly does not know much about direct action protests.

None of the activists in the first two lock-ons at Karahnjukar in 2005 were actually Icelandic; these were the only actions Kennedy was part of in Iceland. All the people involved apart from Kennedy were highly experienced activists from different countries who had no need of any training or introduction to such methods, by Kennedy or anyone else. Furthermore, road blocks and tripods were not even employed that summer. SI did not use tripods as means of protest until in the summer of 2008 at the site of a Century Aluminum smelter in Hvalfjordur, near Reykjavik, several years after Kennedy had come to Iceland.

Saving Iceland founder Olafur Pall Sigurdsson had already organized several direct action workshops for several days for Icelandic activists in Reykjavik, in collaboration with the Icelandic peace movement in the spring of 2004 and again under the banner of SI in June 2005. These workshops were given by other foreign trainers. Both courses were publicised openly and reported on by the Icelandic media with a certain amount of puzzled amusement.

It is possible that Mark Kennedy exaggerated his importance to Jason Kirkpatrick, one of the Guardian’s sources. Also, the so-called ‘training videos’ Kennedy showed to Kirkpatrick were in fact footage from the real actions at Karahnjukar. DVDs with this footage were in circulation amongst activist and media all over Europe. There have never been any training videos of SI activists, let alone any with Mark Kennedy as a trainer.
The actual direct action training courses in Iceland took place in May 2004 and June 2005, while Kennedy did not come to Iceland until July 2005, after the protests at the G8 summit in Gleneagles. Consequently, Kirkpatrick’s testimony is founded on the boasting claims of a professional liar, i.e. Kennedy.

As regards Kennedy’s involvement in SI info tours and his supposedly vital role in linking Sigurdsson with other European activists. Kennedy’s role was limited to driving and carrying out some of the logistics for a few of the many trips Sigurdsson and others undertook to publicize the struggle to save the Icelandic highlands. To say that Kennedy was vital in introducing SI to foreign activists or that he introduced direct action to Iceland is therefore utterly false.

Kennedy was never a key decision-maker in Saving Iceland
Likewise, the claim that “Kennedy quickly became a […] key decision-maker” in Saving Iceland is completely erroneous. Saving Iceland is not a hierarchical organisation but a loose campaign, we have no leaders and important roles are shared and rotated. We count on a fluid group of inspired and dedicated people contributing from time to time to the best of their capacity and interests. The emphasis on ‘key-decision makers’ is a form of dramatisation that may help sell newspapers, but shows a lack of understanding of the basic mode of organisation of most of the networks that are written about in the Kennedy case. Besides, if most of the British activists did not find Kennedy to be the sharpest knife in the box, why should SI have found him to be any sharper? Several other people were much more capable and dedicated than he was when it came to strategy and decision-making.

During the few years Mark Kennedy was involved with SI, he was simply one of a large and very active group of foreigners who contributed their efforts to the organization. Indeed, the only remarkable thing about Kennedy’s involvement in Saving Iceland is the fact that he was a police spy.

The reports of the Guardian are misleading, they misrepresent the true context of Kennedy’s involvement and are not in keeping with the integrity that the Guardian journalists at first wished to project in their communications with Saving Iceland. Saving Iceland demands to see the real truth that lies behind Kennedy’s heinous personal betrayals in the name of state-sanctioned violations of basic human rights.

Kennedy did act as an agent-provocateur
Saving Iceland can now confirm that Mark Kennedy did certainly act as an agent provocateur within our network, regularly calling for more extreme forms of protest, and that he abused trust in clearly an illegal manner, even using sex as a means to gain access.

We want to see that the truth about his betrayals while under the command of the British authorities, and possibly in collaboration with the Icelandic authorities, be exposed and that those responsible be made to answer for their actions. The British and Icelandic police and governments, for whom Kennedy seems to have gathered information, must end their silence about which agencies and authorities were aware of his undercover work in Iceland.

Kennedy himself has now confirmed, in an interview with the Daily Mail, that when operating in Germany he was always in direct contact with the German authorities and personally passed on information to the German police. This has been confirmed in the Bundestag by high-ranking German police officers. The Daily Mail reports that “Kennedy says he would travel abroad with fellow activists, and feed information back to his British superiors to share with other nations. ‘Activism has no borders,’ he says. ‘I would never go abroad without authority from my superiors and the local police.’” Why should the case be any different when it comes to Icelandic authorities?

Illegal Icelandic collaboration with British services?
Saving Iceland will in the next few days publish evidence that shows that the police in Seydisfjordur and Eskifjordur did not tell the truth in their statement to the Icelandic National Broadcaster by stating that they did not have any “dealings” with Mark Stone/Kennedy in 2005. Later, after a lengthy delay in answering, the Icelandic State Police, “refused to comment” on the National Broadcasters’ question if the State Police was aware of a British police spy in SI. Saving Iceland asks: What are the State Police hiding?

Finally, on 2 February, Haraldur Johannesen, head of the Icelandic State Police, asserted in a meeting with Ögmundur Jonasson, the Icelandic Minister of Internal Affairs, that the State Police had no idea that the British agent was operating in Icelandic jurisdiction. (Update.) Apparently the Minister ordered the police officer to submit a report about this.

Icelandic legislation does not allow pre-emptive investigations. If the British police was operating without the knowledge of Icelandic authorities they were clearly violating Icelandic jurisdiction. If the Icelandic police received any of the information gathered by Mark Kennedy they broke the law.

The published confirmation [in the Police Magazine] of close collaboration between British and Icelandic authorities on the issue of Saving Iceland in the winter of 2005-2006 together with the statements of the police in Seydisfjordur and Eskifjordur, that contradict the evidence that Saving Iceland is in possession of, gives ample grounds to assume that the Icelandic authorities were in the know about Mark Kennedy’s infiltration of Saving Iceland.

Instead of reporting made-up spectacle, the Guardian and other media should now focus on breaking open the silence of the British and Icelandic governments as regards to whom Kennedy’s information was passed on and which agencies/authorities were aware of his undercover work in Iceland.

Environmental network Saving Iceland declares full solidarity with the Reykjavik Nine defendants (RVK9), who face between one and sixteen years in prison for exercising their democratic right to peacefully protest against a disgraced parliament, on 8 December 2008.

These nine people have been picked out of the thousands whose protests brought down the previous government, whose corruption and ineptitude was responsible for the historical crisis Icelandic society is still being torn up by. This same government has now been confirmed by the Special Investigation Committee report (SIC – an apt acronym) as instrumental in the abuse that lead to the complete crash of the Icelandic economy; and as a major force in the severe corruption, democracy deficit and ethical crisis which have since emerged as the underlying reasons for the total failure of Icelandic democracy.

Criminalizing political opponents, even those who use non-violent civil disobedience, is an old diversion tactic used by states worldwide. This act of political repression is in glaring contradiction to the sanctimonious declarations of ‘shouldering responsibility’ and ‘taking heed of lessons’ paid by the parties responsible for the crisis. Icelanders should take seriously the systematic abuse of power which has been uncovered in the Icelandic establishment.

So far not one individual from the political or financial community, many of whom have been identified from all sides as the culprits of the crisis, has been tried in Icelandic courts. That the young people of the RVK9 are to be the first individuals to be tried as a result of the crisis speaks clearly for the climate of denial that now pervades the atmosphere in Icelandic society, and for the scandalous reluctance of the Icelandic state and its political class to take responsibility or draw lessons from the crisis.

The case against the RVK9 is a blatant diversion tactic executed by an utterly irresponsible power community in complete denial of the disgraceful scenario that Icelandic democracy has found itself in. We are witnessing a discredited establishment attempting to scapegoat people for protesting against a parliament that has been universally condemned as corrupt, inept and disqualified. Saving Iceland questions whether the Icelandic State will reclaim any respect for its institutions, particularly by destroying the lives of these nine individuals and their families?

The severe irregularities in Icelandic society are no news to the Saving Iceland network. When Icelandic society was in the grip of the greed frenzy that lead to the collapse, we were among the very few who stepped forward to expose and challenge these developments. As a result we experienced both vilification by the Icelandic corporate media and political persecution by the Icelandic courts and police.

The present ‘left wing’ government is not only continuing the culture of political repression, but is actually significantly increasing it. Now the state intends to take revenge with hefty prison sentences. This is in retaliation for what really only amounts to a benign act of non-violent civil disobedience. The underlying justification of this repression is that of a deterrent against further civil disobedience.

Saving Iceland would like to call the urgent attention of international human rights and civil liberties NGOs to the attack on the legislated rights of protestors in Iceland. These rights are both constitutionally and internationally legislated.

Even though the offices of parliament were recently discovered responsible for pursuing and pressing charges against the RVK9, the president of the parliament has claimed that the RVK9 case is out of the hands of the executive power and now in the ‘safe’ hands of the legislative power. What irony! Every Icelander knows that in Iceland there is still no clear division between the executive and legislative power. This is in keeping with the frequent accusations that Iceland is but a ‘banana republic’. It is still the case that the Icelandic courts (municipal and high) have been rigged systematically by cronies of the Conservative party. The legislative system in Iceland is just as discredited as the political establishment and financial sectors.

One must deduce that the chaos that has so far followed each RVK9 hearing, including even a riot scenario, has been allowed to escalate to such an extent as part of a deliberate and cynical attempt by the establishment to provide a politically destabilizing and unfavorable presentation of the defendants. The extensive errors of judgement displayed by the judge have simply increased tensions and further contributed to the farcical nature of the proceedings.

This is evident in the way that the still neoliberal media has persistently presented the case. The Icelandic media has repeatedly called for heavy sentences of the defendants and consistently declared their guilt as self evident. This has gone so far that one lawyer, Ragnar Adalsteinsson, has declared that the RVK9 have no chance of receiving a fair trial.

When the national broadcasting agency finally gained access to and televised CCTV footage of the defendants entering parliament, it became clear that the charges of violence and bodily harm to parliament staff were entirely unfounded.

One of the main arguments that the Icelandic media has pursued against the defendants was that they had introduced a culture of violence into Icelandic protests and therefore had to be dealt with in a severe manner. In spite of the case’s high prominence, the presentation on national TV of irrefutable evidence which exposes the charges of violence as base lies, was met with stony silence by the rest of the Icelandic media. This is a glaring example of the reluctance of Iceland’s media (itself severely reprimanded by the SIC as willing servants of those responsible for the crisis) to learn its lessons and shoulder responsibility for years of negating the democratic ethos of journalism.

We would also call to attention the vindictive motivation of the charges against the RVK9. It is reinforced by the fact that the supposedly centre-left Peoples Alliance party, which leads the present government, shared power with the Conservative party in the government which was overthrown by the protest movement. Within the present ‘left wing’ government, the vindictiveness of the previous two parties is catered for by the persistence of charges against the RVK9.

Clearly the Left-Green party, which attained power as a consequence of the protest movement and now shares leadership with PA, will not seriously pressurize their coalition partner to withdraw the charges. It looks as if the protestors are being sacrificed in order to pacify those squirming in the international spotlight for their responsibility in generating the crisis. This amounts to a total betrayal of the call for greater democracy and ethical politics whose demand swept the Left-Greens to power in 2009.

As stated, Saving Iceland are in complete solidarity with the RVK9, and also their families. Individuals in the Saving Iceland network are no strangers to the feelings of criminalization and being dragged through the courts, on trumped up charges, for acts of non-violent civil disobedience. We have learned that it is one of the underlying aims of the state to use such court cases to disrupt our lives and those of our loved ones by maintaining an extended shadow on our future. This is a deliberate and systematically employed tactic aimed at choking our voices and spirits. It is crucial that society identifies this state tactic of persecuting political opponents through criminalization as the cynical political repression that it truly is.

The act of the RVK9 against the parliament of Iceland on 8 December 2008 focused the public protests against the corrupt government and significantly contributed to its downfall. This fact alone should persuade the Icelandic people that they ought to be grateful for the courage displayed by the RVK9; that they should oppose the RVK9’s being dragged through lengthy court cases and possible prison sentences. Thus we call on the people in Iceland to actively support the defendants and to stop the disgraceful violation of justice that this case constitutes.

Saving Iceland is also compelled to call for urgent scrutiny and intervention into Icelandic affairs by the international community and NGOs concerned with civil liberties and human rights.

Finally, Saving Iceland demands the immediate withdrawal of the charges against the RVK9 and, further, that the Icelandic parliament and State should issue an official apology to the defendants and their families for this act of sheer political repression.

Ólafur Páll Sigurdsson is a poet, film-maker and literary scholar. He founded the Saving Iceland network in 2004.

www.rvk9.org

Saving Iceland applauds the symbolic hits that the three pro-heavy industry political parties were dealt in the form of liberal splashes of green skyr (traditional Icelandic dairy product) on Monday.

According to Saving Iceland’s sources, three different groups, not just one, like the corporate media have claimed, did these actions almost simultaneously. Saving Iceland has also been informed that the activists were all Icelandic. It appears that this is a powerful group of activists, fighting the heavy industrialization of Iceland. Saving Iceland declares full support with the group.

The forces that stand behind Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn (Conservatives), Framsóknarflokkurinn (Right-wing opportunists) and Samfylkingin (New Labour equivalents), are guilty of what is tantamount to high treason with their heavy industry policy. Judging from their election propaganda, there is no sign that the parties have been willing to learn anything from the economic collapse about the expansion effects on the economy by heavy industry.

At the same time as these parties’ policy of uncontrollable greed has been pursued with the consequences of immense irreversible destruction of the country’s unique nature, this policy has just as much harmed Icelandic society as a whole.

The abuse of power, the gagings of scientists and other repression that was used in the Kárahnjúkar case has already had very serious consequences for Iceland. The same political parties that are behind the Kárahnjúkar Dams are continuing the same campaign of dirty tricks, with the aim to prevent informed democratic decision procedures when it comes to the utilization of the country’s natural resources.

The heavy industry machine is far from having been defeated. Though, Saving Iceland is well aware that our struggle through the years has had a great and permanent impact on Icelandic society. This influence has been very visible in the political reawakening that has taken place in Iceland this winter and the struggle that e.g. toppled the thoroughly corrupt government of Sjálfstæðisflokkur and Samfylking. Without the examples and the experience that Saving Iceland has planted in the Icelandic grassroots it is by no means certain that the nation would have been able to rid itself of the last government. It can be stated without doubt that Saving Iceland has nourished and inspired the grassroots struggle in Iceland.

Although it seems that a part of the Icelandic left has still not perfectly grasped the connection between the campaign against heavy industrialization and the struggle against capitalistic exploitation. Saving Iceland completely rejected environmentalism that is based on nationalism and sentimentality, and has from the beginning of the movement lead the path for the unification of anti-capitalistic struggle and environmentalism. Saving Iceland has identified the manner in which heavy industrialization is a direct attack on the ambitions of Iceland’s working classes for better realization of individual potential and living and working conditions. If some Icelandic leftists do not give up their Stalinist factory fetishism and instead unite in the effort against the heavy industry policy, they will fall into the trap of actually supporting capitalistic globalization and at the same time the neocolonialist policy of Icelandic and foreign capitalists to entangle the Icelandic people in the servitude of low paid primary production.

Saving Iceland has constantly pointed out how the one sided heavy industry policy and its unwholesome expansion effects posed a grave threat to the Icelandic economy. These warnings have turned out to be well reasoned and horribly accurate. Though the heavy industry policy alone did not cause the economical collapse, there is no doubt that it was a major part of its causes.

We always pointed out the considerable democracy deficit in Icelandic society, high corruption in the official sector, the routine professional repression that was tolerated here and how the media has completely failed its duty as a democratic watchdog. During the last years this criticism has been almost like a solitary voice in the desert. But finally after the political awakening that took place after the collapse, all the issues raised by our critique have become self evident and fundamental components in the public debate here in Iceland.

Saving Iceland pointed out the close relations between the aluminium industry and the arms industry: almost one-third of all produced aluminium is used for weapons production. Saving Iceland pointed out the human right crimes which are repeatedly committed by the same aluminium producers that now have settled in Iceland. Also the horrendous environmental and social impacts that follow the mining of bauxite all over the world and have lead to cultural genocides in India, Africa, South America and elsewhere.

Ignoring these facts about the aluminium industry is a sign of grotesquely amoral hypocrisy that is in breach of Iceland’s international obligations as well as the much declared and flaunted ‘human values’ of this society.

Trying to hide the facts about the drastic environmental and economical impacts of the heavy industry policy on the Icelandic environement and society is a ruthless game of deception that only serves to benefit few dubious corporate profiteers.

The heavy industry policy of Sjálfstæðisflokkur, Framsóknarflokkur and Samfylking is bankrupted, economically as well as ethically and intellectually. Its continuation shows these political parties’ utter lack of a sense of responsibility and credibility.

Now the heavy industry parties’ are desperately trying to hang on by their nails with their election propaganda, trying to convince voters that since the economic collapse Icelanders can not afford to protect the country’s natural resources from ruthless exploitation. This exposes their bloody minded calculations not to halt until they have managed to rob the Icelandic people of all their natural resources. This is a clear sign of how heavy industry is not concerned with the interests of either the human population, or the land. Here, only the interests of foreign corporations and their corrupt Icelandic servants are at heart. The International Monetary Fund’s strong influence on affairs in Iceland is a part of this conspiracy of a rat-race for the country’s resources.

The heavy industry parties live in the hope that people have not learned anything from the experience that the so called ‘Kárahnjúkar-problem’, the economic collapse and its repercussions have brought.

Even though Samfylkingin have been in power for the shortest time, the party holds responsibility no less than the other parties. Its so-called environmental policy for the parliamentary elections in 2007 – entitled “Beautiful Iceland” – turned out to be a base deception, hatched out with the only aim to lure the votes of environmentalists. The recent vote in parliament concerning the building of a Century owned aluminium smelter in Helguvík, displays an unbelievable subservience to foreign corporations. It shows why Samfylkingin can never be trusted when it comes to environmental issues.

The green myth about sustainability and renewable energy that the Icelandic government is trying to deceive the outside world with, is a deliberate falsification when the energy is in fact sold to highly polluting heavy industry and entails, in all instances, massive irreversible negative impact on the environment.

Saving Iceland hopes that Icelandic voters will see through these deceptions of the heavy industry parties and realize that the heavy industrialization of the island is one of the fundamental parts of the policy of blind greed that has caused the great crisis that we are experiencing now.

Natural resources retain most of their real value when environmental considerations are not systematically shunned and only paid lip service to, but never observed in deed.

Last Sunday, an anonymous journalist from Morgunblaðið wrote about Saving Iceland under the title “Action Groups and Cells”. He talked about Saving Iceland’s upcoming action camp in Hellisheiði and brougth forward a list of actions that people could anticipate from those attending the camp this summer, i.e. “try to get the police into a fight, chain themselves to whatever is near to them, do minimum sabotage, disturb companies’ legal operations or public traffic”. According to him, this kind of behaviour has characterized Saving Iceland’s activities for the last years.

We at Saving Iceland, use direct action and civil disobedience in our actions against capitalism in the form of Iceland’s heavy industrialization – and we do not deny that. Although we do not chain ourselves to whatever is around us, but to machinery, machinery which is being used to destroy the nature. Thus we stop the destruction for some limited time. One does not lock lock on to a huge machine “just because” – one does it because of ideals and with a spirit of resistance.

Saving Iceland has until now not committed any sabotage, apart from financially harming the companies that financially benefit from destruction, oppression and violence. We stop operations, which for sure are most of the time legal operations, but since when is there an equal sign between what is legal and just? The question is not that simple, because if it would be so, the most horrible atrocious acts of the history of mankind could be justified behind the idea of “law and order”.

The construction of the Century/Nordural aluminium smelter in Helguvík is legal in the sense that Century has a permission to construct a smelter. The company lacks any other other permission; it has neither the contracts for energy production nor permission for greenhouse gases emissions, or a working permit. Really there is nothing that indicates that the company will ever get all of the permissions it needs to operate the smelter. Still, it celebrates the breaking of ground for  the smelter and acts as if everything is in order. By using this tactic, it becomes harder and harder to deny the company the needed permission, since it constructs as much as possible whenever it gets one of these permissions. Thus the construction of the smelter is legal but at the same time, absolutely unethical.

Saving Iceland does not pick fights with the police but for sure reacts when the police uses violence. In August 2006, the police officer Arinbjörn Snorrason, drove a jeep into Ólafur Páll Sigurðsson, one of the attendants in Saving Iceland’s action camp in Snæfell. The latter was miraculously all right after the attack. When he brought charges against Snorrason the State Prosecutor refused to press charges. Later Sigurdsson was charged for having sabotaged the police car that Snorrason used to drive into him. No evidence was presented to the judge, no reports were taken from those who witnessed the attack and the only witnesses in court were four policemen, who all sat in the car that was driven into Sigurðsson. He was acquitted, which though did not change the fact that because of all the media attention around the court case, his name was repeatedly linked to sabotage. We have to react to these kind of lies and false accusations.

The Morgunblaðið journalist calls us “professional protesters” without explaining what he means. But most likely he means that we get paid for our participation in the actions. In the end of the summer of 2007, RÚV (the National Broadcaster) declared that those who take part in Saving Iceland’s action get paid for it and in addition get a special “bonus” for being arrested. Without bringing forth any evidence or quoting sources – RÚV refused to retract their statement. Following this statement, the word “professional protester” got stuck in the discussion about Saving Iceland and it is now repeatedly used when the group comes up in a discussions. No one has ever been able to prove this myth, let alone confirming where these payments are supposed to come from. Still, the concept seems to be so stuck in the rhetoric that it does not need any explanations or rationalisation. With the above mentioned article, Morgunblaðið follows in RÚV’s footsteps.

In the end the journalist brings forward an absurd claim, where he says that our actions damage the otherwise good cause of environmentalism. We have heard this claim many times before but never has it been sustained with any arguments or rationalisation. It would however be interesting to get an explanation about how and why our actions can damage the cause.

But we will for sure never get this explanation because radical resistance simply can not destroy any cause. Did Claus von Staufeenberg’s attempt to murder Afold Hitler damage the fight against Nazism? Did Nelson Mandela’s participation in militant resistance damage the fight against South-Africa’s apartheid policy? Can people really turn around in their opinion about the heavy industrialization of Iceland only because people who share their opinions believe in different methods? No, because the resistance tactics do not change the facts. Crane-climbing does not change the fact that nature is being destroyed because of energy production for heavy industry. Those who chain themselves to machinery do not change the fact that cultural genocides are taking place in the third world because of bauxite mining for aluminium production, and that children are being murdered all around the world, e.g. in Afghanistan and Iraq, with weapons produced by Alcoa.

Saving Iceland is not above criticism. But the criticism has to be built on something else than untruths and myths so it can be taken seriously.

Sigurðsson pressed charges against Snorrason and the police, but the State Prosecutor said he did not see any reason for taking the charges any further after only talking to the police that were in the car and not to any of the numerous civilian witnesses. A little later the case was turned around, when the police made a counter charge against Sigurðsson, which went to court April 21nd 2008.

Since Sigurðsson was on a suspended prison sentence because of this action against an international aluminium conference in Reykjavík, 2005, there was a risk that Sigurðsson would have to sit in jail for a long time, as well as paying compensation for the supposed damage to the vehicle.

Four witnesses were brought to court; the four police officers who sat in the car that was driven into Sigurðsson. No civilian witnesses bore witness and neither the prosecutor nor the police had seen any reason to take reports from the civilians that were present at the incident in the highlands. No evidence was presented and even though one of the police officers said he had taken photographs, the other ones either said that no photos had been taken and one said that it would not have been worth taking any photos “because the bump would not have been visible on a photograph.”(Oh what a surprise!).

In retrospect, there is good reason to ask what was the police’s real reason for pressing charges against Sigurðsson. Was it some sort of revenge by the state or was it supposed to show activists where the power really lies in this country? Even try to make an example for further court cases and at the same time try to stop the development of radical resistance in Iceland? Most likely all of this.

Even though Sigurðsson has now been acquitted it is impossible to avoid the fact that the original charges pressed against police officer Snorrason were thrown out by the prosecutor. Now when the judge has spoken there surely is a reason to consider taking Sigurdsson’s charges up again. Snorrason’s violent behavior was repeated again and again in the summer of 2006.

There is no reason to celebrate too much the outcome of this trial, since many other individuals who have taken part in Saving Iceland’s actions have been sentenced on dubious grounds for their participation by the very same judge, who avoids meticulously taking any stance on the issue if the police should be rewarded with “damage” payments when they try to kill or seriously injure non-violent protestors!

The 14th of August 2006, several protestors went into the office of Hönnun, a engineering company, to protest against their involvement in the destruction of Kárahnjúkar and the building of Alcoa’s Aluminium smelter in Reyðarfjörður. Later that same year they were sentenced the same judge for housebreaking and an attempt to limit the freedom of the company’s workers. As is seen clearly on this video (which also shows which side used violence!), the door of the office was completely open during the protest and no one was kept “imprisoned”. The sentence was based on lies.

These are just two examples of state harassment against Saving Iceland’s activists. The police have repeatedly searched activist’s houses and tents without warrants, used violence during arrests and tried to get protestors deported from the country because of their involvement in resistance against heavy industry.

Because of a demand, made by the Left Green party in Iceland, Björn Bjarnason, the minister of justice is now writing a report about every single arrest and police action against Saving Iceland’s activists during the last three years. The report should be finished in the end of this month.

On Monday 21st April 2008 Saving Iceland Founder, Olafur Pall Sigurdsson, will appear before the District Court of East Iceland charged with property damage. The charge relates to an incident at Snæfell Mountain protest camp in the end of July 2006.

All the civilian witnesses recount that a police 4×4 was deliberately driven into Sigurdsson at a potentially fatal speed. The driver, officer 8716 Arinbjorn Snorrason, a high ranking officer in charge of operations at Kárahnjúkar, also attempted to run over other protestors on multiple occasions that same summer, at Lindur (now submerged location of a SI action camp) and at an action on Desjarárstífla dam construction site.

In the run up to the incident the police in the vehicle driven by Snorrason had arrived at the camp in order to harass and provoke the protestors. The police were photographing protestors from inside the stationary vehicle as they queued up for lunch outside a kitchen tent. A small group of people, including Sigurdsson, went towards the police car. Suddenly and without warning Snorrason accelerated aggressively towards Sigurdsson who stood in the road, hitting him. All who were present were amazed that he survived the assault relatively unscathed.

Since the incident could realistically have cost him his life Sigurdsson made a formal charge against the police. The State Prosecutor declared half a year later that he saw no reason to allow this charge to go further after talking to the police that were present. Despite several civilian witnesses being willing to give evidence against the police, they were never approached for statement. The State Prosecutor has refused to take any action to investigate what could have lead to Sigurdsson’s death, except of course talking to the perpetrators, who made a counter charge. Now, almost two years later, the case will be heard at the District Court.

The demand is that Sigurdsson should pay a compensation for damage to the vehicle (supposedly resulting from when it was driven into him), and that he be punished according to law. When the incident took place Sigurdsson was still legally bound by a suspended prison sentence for splashing ‘skyr’ (a yogurt like liquid) with two other protestors over delegates of an international aluminium conference that took place in Reykjavik in June 2005. Consequently, if Sigurdsson is convicted of damaging the police car, he could be imprisoned.

The protestors accuse the police of wanting to take revenge on Saving Iceland. “This mix of personal malice and complete lack of respect for the democratic right to protest is typical for the Icelandic police when it comes to SI protestors.” says a spokesperson for Saving Iceland. “Saving Iceland are of the opinion that this actual criminal act of the police, intended to cause physical harm to Sigurdsson, has been allowed by the State Prosecutor to be turned into a farcical political trial disguised as a routine ‘criminal damage’ case. If this court case will result in Sigurdsson having to serve time in prison he will clearly be doing so as a political prisoner of the Icelandic State. Icelandic authorities should not think that they will be allowed to keep such scandalous abuse of justice secret from the international community.”

Additional background information

Earlier this year Thorsteinn Davidsson was appointed District Judge of East Iceland, his father; David Oddsson (Former Prime Minister of long standing and now Chairman of the National Bank) is widely considered to be one of the masterminds behind the government’s heavy industry policy. The appointment of Davidsson as District Judge caused huge waves of indignation in Iceland and a hail of accusations of nepotism, even from high places in the judicial system. “Perhaps sensing that the veneer of respectability covering this blatant fit up is wearing too thin Davidsson has stepped down as judge in Sigurdsson’s case.” said the SI spokesperson.

Most people who were at any of the three different Saving Iceland camps in the summer of 2006 have some anecdote about officer Snorrason. Whether he attempted to run them over, slashed at their belongings with a knife, cable tied them face down in the mud for hours or almost broke their necks with a pair of bolt cutters. “Everyone remembers him as dangerous and erratic.” said the spokesperson.

These are certainly not the first instances of reports about state repression of Saving Iceland activists. Police have consistently entered dwellings without warrants, used excessive force when arresting protestors and on one occasion attacked and hospitalized Johann Axelsson, an elderly professor who was a witness to an illegal arrest. Throughout the summers of 2005 and 2006 marked and unmarked police cars tailed SI vehicles from one side of the island to the other. In Reykjavik in August 2005, as this surveillance continued, the Assistant Head of the State Police categorically denied (in Frettabladid newspaper) that any activists were under surveillance – that is until the police were caught out and filmed (and televised) following Sigurdsson in his car around the same roundabout several rounds by veteran TV reporter Omar Ragnarsson. In 2005 the Directorate of Immigration drew up a ‘blacklist’ of foreign activists that police were to hunt down and deport, first the DoI denied the existence of the list, then when proved not to be telling the truth; admitted finally that the deportations attempts had no legal foundations.

More recently the police attempted to have environmental scientist Miriam Rose deported, shortly after she had been made to serve 8 days imprisonment in the isolation unit of a men’s prison for her involvement in opposing heavy industry projects, on the grounds that she was ‘A serious threat to the fundamental values of society’.

These constant police violations of both international and Icelandic laws regarding the rights of protestors have in this month (April) prompted the Left Green Party to demand that the Minister of Justice write a report about the conduct of the police against SI protestor. The demand was voted in favor of in the Icelandic Parliament by an overwhelming majority. The case against Sigurdsson will commence on Monday at 13.00 hrs in room 101 at the Reykjavik District Court. Here are some articles in the news about this case and the solidarity demonstration that took place before and while the case went on (Only in Icelandic though…):

• Saving Iceland mótmæla ákærunni á hendur Ólafi
• Mótmælendur velta því upp hvort Ísland sé lögregluríki
• Mótmæltu ákæru á hendur stofnanda Saving Iceland

We understand that the report has already been transmitted in various versions on RUV radio. In the 8 o’clock news it is stated directly that the ELF are responsible for the website www.savingiceland.org. Quoting RUV: “… The group [ELF] maintain a website devoted to the struggle against heavy industry in Iceland.”

Anyone who has done the slightest amount of research would find that the ELF maintain their own website www.earthliberationfront.com. As far as we are aware the ELF are US based and have never before been concerned with environmental issues in Iceland. Clearly RUV did not bother to find out about this until just before the 12.20pm news. But this did not prompt the RUV news department to correct their earlier inaccuracies regarding the Saving Iceland website.

It is made clear in the SI report (see /?p=668) about this ELF action that the ELF declaration is from the Earth First! Action Reports website  http://www.earthfirst.org.uk/actionrepor…). Earth First! Action Reports is a website where anyone can report actions without editorial control. RUV did not report the real origin of the story until 12.20pm. Until then RUV preferred to quote savingiceland.org as if it was the original source for the story and thus implicate SI by association. This is not simply sloppy journalism but could be also understood as an attempt to incriminate Saving Iceland.

In light of the fact that this concerns a criminal investigation it is very serious that RUV does not check its sources more thoroughly. The e-mail address of Saving Iceland is in several prominent places on our website, yet RUV has not written to us with any queries regarding this matter prior to these transmissions.

In the lunch time news at 12.20pm Olafur Pall Sigurdsson is mentioned as the “spokesman of Saving Iceland”. It is true that OPS is one of the founders of SI and was one of the spokespersons for the protest camp in the summer of 2005. Since then many other people have spoken on behalf of SI in accordance with our policy of rotating that particular function. Never during the protests in the summer of 2006 did OPS speak on behalf of Saving Iceland and he has not been advertised since as freely available to comment on any issue regarding SI. To single one individual out and mention his name in association with this news without his consent is questionable and smacks of highly irresponsible attempts at scapegoating, hardly worthy of a National Broadcast Service.

We would like to take the opportunity to point out that the item of news in question has been on our website for almost four weeks. Yet no Icelandic media has chosen to report the story all this time until now. Why RUV chooses to pick up on it finally at this time could pose some interesting questions. This is particularly so in view of the fact that the referendum on the ALCAN smelter in Hafnarfjordur is more imminent now than it was four weeks ago.

We suggest that people take a hard look at the kind of journalism RUV is practising here.

In view of these grave misrepresentations by RUV we would like to draw attention to the following questions:

Is RUV, by picking up this by now old news item, at this time and reporting it in the manner we have shown above, seeking to influence voters in the upcoming referendum in Hafnarfjordur?

If the above is the case then RUV is breaking its commitment to impartial reporting and is guilty of attempting to marginalise a legitimate organisation (and furthermore an individual) that have never been proven to commit acts such as described in the news report.

Furthermore, if this is true then RUV are taking an active role as a tool for those extremist elements who would like to see the cause of environmental struggle in Iceland smeared. We trust that the people of Hafnarfjordur will see through such crude attempts at propaganda when they cast their votes at the end of March.

We would like to stress the fact again that still so far no one from RUV has written to Saving Iceland to seek any clarification in spite of the address being freely available. This casts even more doubts on the professional integrity of the RUV news department in this matter.

Saving Iceland are compelled to demand that the RUV news department make an immediate public and truthful correction of the facts and issue a clear apology.

 www.savingiceland.org reports on environmental issues in Iceland and as such we are not responsible for the incidents we report, unless we state so. By merely reporting an action we certainly do not implicate ourselves in it, nor do we condone or condemn it more than any other news outlet does by reporting the same action.

With regards from the Saving Iceland Collective

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Alvarlegar athugasemdir við fréttaflutning RÚV af skemmdarverkum í Hafnarfirði – Þýtt og endursagt á íslensku

NORTH OF VATNAJOKULL GLACIER, Iceland — In the depths of winter there is almost nothing to see here but snow and rock: snow across the uneven, unearthly landscape, snow on the mist-shrouded mountains, snow stretching to what looks like the edge of the world.

But tucked into Iceland’s central highlands, where the Karahnjukar mountain meets two powerful rivers flowing north from Europe’s largest glacier, a nearly completed jigsaw of dams, tunnels and reservoirs has begun to reshape the wilderness.

This is the $3 billion Karahnjukar Hydropower Project, a sprawling enterprise to harness the rivers for electricity that will be used for a single purpose: to fuel a new aluminum smelter owned by Alcoa, the world’s largest aluminum company. It has been the focus of the angriest and most divisive battle in recent Icelandic history.

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The culmination of years of effort by the center-right government to increase international investment in Iceland, the project has already begun to revitalize Iceland’s underpopulated east. But it has also mobilized an angry and growing coalition of people who feel that the authorities have sacrificed Iceland’s most precious asset — the pristine land itself — to heavy industry from abroad.

Now, with proposals on the table for three more power-plant-and-aluminum-smelter projects, environmentalists say the chance to protect Iceland’s spectacular, and spectacularly fragile, natural beauty is running out.

“If all of these projects get through, then it’s a total environmental apocalypse for the Icelandic highlands; they’ll have developed every single major glacial river and geothermal field for heavy industry,” said Olafur Pall Sigurdsson, one of the organizers of Saving Iceland, a coalition of groups opposing further development.

“It is a very rare nature that we are the guardians of, and we are squandering it,” he said.

The basic issue of how to balance development and nature is the same here as in environmental fights everywhere. But the details are always slightly askew in Iceland, which sits temperamentally as well as geographically on its own, floating between Europe and America.

One of the most unspoiled places in the developed world, Iceland is slightly larger than Indiana, with a population of about 300,000 people (Indiana’s is 6.3 million). Two-thirds live in the capital, Reykjavik; the rest are spread across 39,800 square miles of volcanic rock, treeless tundra and scrubby plains. Seventy percent of the land is uninhabitable.

Icelanders tend to view their unpredictable environment — carved from volcanoes and ice and full of stunning waterfalls, geysers, fjords and glaciers — with respect and awe. The air is so pure that the Kyoto Protocol gave Iceland the right to increase its greenhouse emissions by 10 percent from 1990 levels.

The pending proposals call for four more dams, as many as eight new geothermal and hydroelectric power plants, two new smelters (one owned by Alcoa) and the expansion of capacity at an existing smelter. If all are built, foreign companies would have the capacity to produce as much as 1.6 million tons of aluminum in Iceland a year.

They are also allowed to pollute: another Kyoto exception gave power-intensive industries that use renewable energy in Iceland the right to emit an extra 1.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year until 2012.

As a whole, the new smelters would require about eight times the amount of electricity currently used for all of Iceland’s domestic consumption, putting a huge strain on the country’s rivers and thermal fields, said Hjorleifur Guttormsson, who was Iceland’s energy and industry minister from 1980 to 1985. Mr. Guttormsson, a naturalist, said pollution was another concern: aluminum plants are heavy emitters of sulfur dioxide, hydrogen fluoride and other chemicals.

But Alcoa says it has fitted state-of-the-art pollution controls in its new plant and has already fulfilled its companywide pledge to reduce total greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from their 1990 level.

A spokesman for the company, Kevin Lowery, said the new smelter would produce 1.8 metric tons of carbon dioxide for every metric ton of aluminum it produced — a total of 541,000 metric tons a year — compared with 13 metric tons of carbon dioxide per metric ton of aluminum for a coal-fired smelter. “The emissions from this facility will be less than for any other facility of this size elsewhere in the world,” he said.

Jon Sigurdsson, minister of industry and commerce, said the proposals were subject to multiple hurdles, including, in some cases, local referendums. The government has always applied rigorous environmental standards to development projects, he said, and is preparing legislation that would set out a master plan for the country, designating which areas are to be protected and which have the potential for development.

“We stand on the threshold of a new era,” he said. “We wish to take both sides into consideration in a new general framework that will accept environmental concerns as being as important as other concerns.”

Sigurdur Arnalds, a spokesman for Landsvirkjun, the national power company, which is developing the Karahnjukar project, said: “Democracy will have the final say. Naturally, we will not build up every possibility we have; we have to stop someplace.”

Iceland is a prosperous country, but its prosperity is concentrated in Reykjavik. The government has long sought ways to bolster the economy by exploiting the country’s second- biggest natural resource, after fish: electric power, derived from a vast network of rivers and from underground geothermal fields.

But since the power cannot feasibly be exported, the idea has been to import demand. Aluminum seems a perfect fit. It is a power-intensive industry that needs easy access to ports for importing raw materials and exporting the finished product. Iceland has clean, available power, abundant coasts and proximity to the lucrative European market.

Iceland’s first aluminum plant was built in the 1960s; there are now two, both near Reykjavik.

“The government has done everything in its power to make way for these plants,” Kolbrun Halldorsdottir, a member of Parliament from the Left-Green Movement, said. “They have been fixed to this scheme like Saudi Arabia is fixed to oil. They don’t believe in entrepreneurship, job opportunities in our culture, tourism. They only believe in aluminum.”

The Karahnjukar project, years in planning, had the support of the center-right coalition government, which has been in power for 12 years. In opinion polls, the majority of Icelanders have consistently supported it, too, saying it would bring jobs and money to the eastern fjords.

But environmentalists say the project will devastate some 3 percent of Iceland’s land mass, destroying or affecting 60 waterfalls; causing widespread soil erosion that will send sand and dust blowing across the highlands and onto farms; and flooding an area covered in unusual moss and used by reindeer, nesting pink-footed geese and myriad birds, like the gyrfalcon and the ptarmigan.

They say, too, that the dam is inherently unstable, built on an unusually thin, fractured crust of earth near one of the most volcanically volatile areas in the world. Just south, the Vatnajokull glacier is melting rapidly from global warming, adding to the geological uncertainty.

In 2001, the Icelandic Planning Agency rejected the Karahnjukar plan, ruling that any economic benefits would not compensate for the potential environmental harm. But Iceland’s environment minister at the time overturned the decision, set some new conditions and allowed the project to go ahead.

Opponents now say that many Icelanders did not appreciate its scale or potential impact.

“People were kind of misled, and I don’t think even the politicians really understood what was going on,” said Andri Snaer Magnason, a poet, playwright and novelist. Last year, Mr. Magnason, 31, published “Dreamland,” a devastating polemic that puts Iceland’s environmental issues into a global perspective. The book has sold 18,000 copies — the equivalent, in percentage terms, of 18 million copies in the United States.

In September, Omar Ragnarsson, one of the country’s most respected television reporters, announced that he could no longer cover the Karahnjukar project with a journalist’s impartiality and would campaign against it. In a country where public demonstrations are rare, he led an antidam rally in Reykjavik, attended by 8,000 to 13,000 people.

When seen up close, the project dominates the landscape. At 2,400 feet wide and 650 feet tall, the dam is the highest of its kind in Europe. The reservoir, which will eventually cover 22 square miles, stretches out across one side, where land used to be; an empty riverbed carved far down in the rock stretches from the other side, where water used to be.

The harnessed water is to be sent through 45 miles of tunnels blasted into the mountains to a new hydropower station built deep inside a mountain in the Fljotsdalur Valley.

Finally, the electricity is to be sent along 32 miles of overland transmission lines to the Alcoa smelter, a milelong building on the edge of a fjord in the town of Reydarfjordur.

The smelter is supposed to begin producing aluminum by this summer, and the initial effects are obvious: there is a building boom going on in the east. “It’s like gold fever, or when everyone is drunk — and you know that the hangover will come,” said Greta Osk Sigurdardottir, a cattle and dairy farmer who lives in the area and who opposes the project.

Reydarfjordur, population 650, has its first mall. Housing prices have gone up. People are moving back, and the extra money has begun to give the town modern amenities, said Helga Jonsdottir, the mayor of Reydarfjordur and five other villages.

But others are not so happy. Gudmundur M. H. Beck spent his first 57 years in Reydarfjordur, raising sheep and chickens on his family’s farm. When 18 electricity pylons were built across the land and the government passed regulations forbidding grazing there, Mr. Beck took his animals to the slaughterhouse and moved north, where he lives near unspoiled mountains and lakes and is taking history classes, he said.

“This is the most horrible thing that has ever been done here,” he said. “I really have no words to describe it.”

The smelter is low, but dominates the coast. Shopping at a sporting-goods store at the mall, Krilla Bjork, 61, said she was thrilled at all the new stores and houses. Of the smelter, she said, “It’s not beautiful, but I accept it because it’s necessary.”

The New York Times, 04 February 2007
Smokestacks in a White Wilderness Divide Iceland

Will this Man of Aluminium
Realize what he’s done,
Once he’s done what he is about to start?
He’s got aluminium, but he’s got no heart!”

UPDATE 2007: Recently Alcan had to give up its participation in the bauxite mine because of protests against its human rights violations and environmental devastation. Alcan has been accused of cultural genocide in Kashipur because mining and dams have already displaced 150,000 mainly tribal people there.

Canadian mining and aluminium giant Alcan (in Iceland Alcan Iceland Ltd. and ISAL) want to get their hands on one of the world’s richest deposits of bauxite – the raw material for aluminium – in the Kashipur region of India. The $1.4 billion monster strip-mine and refinery promises to displace up to 20,000 people, destroy their livelihoods and culture, contaminate food and water sources and obliterate their spiritual sites.

Villagers have been fighting the mine for the past 12 years but in November 2004 politicians decided that the Alcan mining project was to be launched at any cost – since then repression has been seriously stepped up. People have been murdered by the police and recently it surfaced that the ALCOA sharks have smelt the blood and are now showing interest in joining in…

Photos from everyday life and resistance in Kashipur

www.kashipur.info

ALCAN CSR Profile 2005 pdf – Can ALCAN claim to be the Best? It’s Corporate and Social Responsibility in Question

The campaign against heavy industry is making progress and it seems that there are more and more Icelanders who are no longer willing to stand by and watch as Iceland is turned into an industrial wasteland (like much of Europe already is). Some of us will soon go back to the 18 different countries which we came from; countries where industrialisation has left us with pollution, illness and disease. We must cross borders to support each other, as these corporations see borders only in terms of how they can be used to divide people. Meanwhile they take our land and profit from our work.

Most importantly, we hope that we have inspired and encouraged others to take action against the destruction of nature in whatever way they are able. People have to realise the importance and fragility of the wilderness before it is (soon) too late. There is no infinite wilderness to be exploited, nor is there infinite time to wait around for a miracle to help us.

We have enjoyed an immense level of support and co-operation from a wide range of people in Iceland. Thank-you to all of the amazing people who have helped so far in the struggle against this horrific destruction of nature which only benefits the rich executives of multinational corporations.

Eyjabakkar are being destroyed!

A bridge was blocked at Kárahnjúkar by ten people at the same time that over forty people blocked a crossroads by the worksite at the dams that are being built at Eyjabakkar. Both blockades were successful and although police arrived with riotshields there was no violence or arrests.

Apparently the police bragged about some contraption they have recently aquired which has hooks to drag away protestors which have locked on to each other. A policeman said it might “scratch a few arses”. SI ask if the Icelandic police realise that if they are going to subject protestors yet again to their reckless stupidity and inexperience they may cause serious physical harm to people. If a number of people who have locked on to each other in armtubes are to be “dragged” away it it will very likely result in a number of broken arms and other serious injuries. We demand that this be looked into by responsible people.

From the blockade of the Landsvirkjun bridge at at Kárahnjúkar

The protestors issued a statement were they point out that although most people think that the wetlands of Eyjabakkar were saved from destruction by publick outcry and a pedition which collected 45.000 signatures in the year of 2000 there are at least four dams being built at Eyjabkkar as part of the Kárahnjúkar project. This will cause great damage to the Eyjabakkar area and threaten them further as ALCOA is likely to demand a future expansion of their factory in Reydarfjördur. In addition these dams at Eyjabakkar will destroy a procession of unique and much loved waterfalls.

According to the planning permission the main dam at Eyjbakkar is supposed to be 32m high. The dam is in fact being raised by 5 metres!

The central dam at Kárahnjúkar has also been sneakily raised by 10 metres. Both additions are illegal and will add to the devastation of the nature of the Eastern highlands.

ALCOA out of Iceland! Let the wilderness be in peace!

In the summer and autumn of 2005 the Icelandic authorities performed numerous illegal arrests, violated the rights of people in custody, entered illegally the dwellings of protestors, violated severely the peace and right of privacy of individuals with thuggish surveillance, threats and intimidating behaviour.

The Directorate of Immigration finally ruled that it had no right to deport any of the foreign people who demonstrated summer 2005 against the heavy industry policy of the Icelandic government.

The threats of deportations were in fact nothing but illegal persecution of people who were exercising their democratic rights to protest against the crimes of a highly autocratic and corrupt government. This is exactly what was pointed out in the article ‘Surprise, surprise!‘ as early as September 2005.

No actual deportations of anti-dam protestors took place. Had they taken place they would have been illegal!

People who were on the Icelandic Directorate of Immigration list for possible deportation are all perfectly free to travel back to Iceland.

The area around the town of Vessigny, also known as Union Village will get a Aluminum Smelter plus a handful of other gas based industries. The mega acre site is currently totally cleared of all vegetation, people in the surrounding area are asked to move and the contract for delivery of one cash and carry Chinese smelter plant has been signed. An “agreement in principle” has also been signed with Aloca for the Chatham smelter.

The area between (and including) the village of Chatham and Cap de Ville is earmarked for an Alcoa Aluminum Smelter producing 340,000 tons of Aluminum per year. By the way, that is US$10 billion dollars worth of Aluminum which exceeds the entire annual budget of the country by 4 billion.

Also part of this package will be power plants for these aluminum smelters, power plants that are large enough to provide the entire island with electricity, doubling the country’s electricity consumption. It is probably a mere coincidence that just at the same time these projects have been announced, Trinidadian’s electricity rates are to be increased between by 7 and 35 % per year annually.

There is no infastructure in place anywhere in this area. Roads are extremely small and in bad condition. One large size truck can back up traffic for miles and residents have been protesting for better roads while being teargased by the local authorities. A highway has been promised for many years but right now, there is none. Already heavy traffic due to industrial activities in the Pt. fortin area makes traveling the area a nightmare.

People are being forcefully moved from their homes in the areas earmarked and surrounding the mega industrial sites. Some of them were promised as much as $15,000 US to compensate for the loss of their homes, just enough to maybe buy a car.

Except for San Fernando, which is just outside of the Master Plan area, there are no proper hospitals in the entire Master Plan area. Except for one hospital promised many years ago and still not even started in Pt. Fortin

The majority, if not all of the planned mega industries are based on Natural Gas. The problem is that there are only 17 years of proven and probable gas reserves remaining. In 1999, there were 40 years of Gas reserves left. Obviously, somebody can’t count. Or more than likely, the gas is depleting faster than we thought. These mega gas guzzzling projects can seriously impact the nation’s economoy and ability to survive. Where will our electricity come from a few years down the road? Will we have to import gas and oil in 2020?

Both mega industrial sites in Chatham and Union Village are built in seismically unstable areas. The Union Village site is a stone’s throw from the pitch lake and partially on top of a fault line. The Chatham site is just a few miles from a major fault line, actually the LNG Gas tanks are right on top of that fault line. Natural gas breaking through the earth’s crust occassionally creates mystery islands just off the coast of Chatham. One of them exploded before sinking back into the sea.

The mega projects are done under the guise of providing jobs for South Trinidad residents. As much as 2,000 construction jobs have been promised, yet there is a shortage of construction workers in the country. Over 80% of workers that are now building Alcoa’s Iceland facilities are foreign workers. The same is already been predicted in Trinidad. Where will these workers be housed? How much of Alcoa’s 10 billion US dollars annual Aluminum production will the average Trinidadian see in his pocket book?

What about the environment? The 340,000 ton Alcoa facility alone will produced the equivalent CO2 of 240,000 cars. Alcoa has not told anybody what they plan to do with the extremely toxic waste their smelter will produce. There’s a lot of secrecy and misdirection and our call for a national debate has been ignored by Alcoa and all other parties involved.

The Master Plan in a Nutshell: Two Aluminum Smelters within 10 miles each other, one within 3 miles of a major town (Pt. Fortin) the other within 6 miles of that same town. About 25,000 people live within a ten mile radius of these smelters. All this on a 1864 sq. mile Caribbean Island with one of the highest population densities on the planet of 550 people per square mile. (lush with rainforests and spectacular bird watching according to Trinidad’s tourist brochures)

Iceland, you are not alone in this madness. See the eerie similarites with Iceland’s Industrial Vision 2020 at www.nosmeltertnt.com

Yesterdays workshop was an example of the reception that the tour has had thus far. From Dublin to Bilbao, from Porto to Lisboa and now Madrid, the interest and the hospitality has been wonderful and inspiring. A big thanks to all our hosts so far, thanks for the messages of support and we look forward to working with you all again soon.
We are again in Madrid today, the 27th March and will be visiting Traficantes de Suenos.
Tommorrow we head to Valencia inspired and encouraged by the solidarity and effort in the struggle against the climatic and environmental destructive effects of heavy industry.

Hasta luego

Many people shoved support for the action and some expressed interest in coming to this years’ summer camp.