Saving Iceland remember him with great affection and gratitude for his friendship and his love of Icelandic nature.

Armand, whose name was George Herman van Loenhout, only spent two days in hospital with pneumonia before he died. Since childhood he had suffered from asthma and was not expected to live beyond 20. Hence Armand called “every day a bonus.” “I’ve already had 49 additional years, so I can not complain,” he said earlier this year.

During a career lasting fifty years Armand wrote and recorded at least eleven solo studio albums and dozens of singles. One of his greatest hits was “Ben ik te min” (Am I not worthy?) which stayed for 14 weeks in the Dutch Top 40 in 1967. Armand was writing and performing to the very last. Some recent collaborations were with young Hip-Hop artists Nina feat Ali B & Brownie Dutch, and recordings and performances with Dutch band De Kik.

Armand traveled extensively around Iceland and wrote several songs in support of the fight against the corporate energy projects and heavy industry endangering the Icelandic environment. For us here in Saving Iceland it was a real privilege to witness the professional way in which he approached the writing of his lyrics and his genuine concern for accuracy and proper research of the Icelandic situation. Not to mention his warmth and humour, and irreverence for authority.

Although it is with great sadness that we salute our dear friend Armand, we can proudly testify that he lived a life full of song and colour, and that he was an inspiration to generations.

Armand’s music for Iceland:

Brave Cops of Iceland: Download

Ísland, ég elska þig. Ofwel: IJsland, ik hou van jou: Download

European Affair: Download

Video:

Armand sings on a Saving Iceland picketline at the Icelandic Consulate in Rotterdam in March 2007.

 https://ssl.direkte-aktie.net/media/ijsl…

Armand on YouTube with well over two million views!

See also:

Week of Iceland Actions in the Low Countries

Dutch Folk Singer Fighting for Icelandic Nature

Armand voelt zich niet te min foor protest op IJsland

Armand website

Haukur Már Helgason

Last week’s Thursday, the majority of Alþingi’s Industrial Affairs Committee (AIAC) announced its intention to to re-categorize eight sites as “utilizable” options for the construction of hydroelectric power plants. These have until now been categorized, either as for preservation, or as on “standby”. These are categories defined by the Master Plan for nature conservation and utilization of energy resources, as bound by law. The re-categorization would serve as the first legal step towards potential construction.

The proposal had neither been announced on the committee’s schedule, before its introduction, nor introduced in writing beforehand. The committee’s majority gave interested parties a week’s notice to submit comments on the proposal, which is admittedly faster than we managed to report on it.

Reasoning

When asked, by Vísir, why the proposal was made with such haste, without any prior process in the committee or an open, public debate, Jón Gunnarsson, chair of the committee on behalf of the Independence party, replied that “it is simply about time to express the majority’s intention to increase the number of options for utilization.”

The proposal is in accordance with statements made by the Minister of Industry, Ragnheiður Elín Árnadóttir, at Landsvirkjun’s autumn meeting earlier that week, as reported by Kjarninn. In her speech at the occasion the Minister said: “I will speak frankly. I think it is urgent that we move on to new options for energy development, in addition to our current electricity production, whether that is in hydropower, geothermal or wind power. I think there are valid resons to re-categorize more power plant options as utilizable.”

Opposition

As the proposal was introduced to Alþingi, members of the opposition rose against the plans.

Róbert Marshall, Alþingi member in opposition on behalf of Bright Future, has called the lack of process “deadly serious” and “a war declaration against the preservation of nature in the country”. Steingrímur J. Sigfússon, the Left-Greens’ former Financial Minister, concurred, calling the proposal the end of peace over the topic, as did the former Environmental Minister on behalf of the Left-Greens, Svandís Svavarsdóttir, who called the proposal “a determined declaration of war”. Katrín Júlíusdóttir, former Minister of Industry, on behalf of the Social-Democrats’ Coalition commented that the proposal was obviously not a “private jest” of the committee’s chair, but clearly orchestrated by the government as such.

Lilja Rafney Magnúsdóttir, the Left-Greens’ representative in AIAC, and the committee’s vice chair, condemned the proposal. According to her, Minister of the Environment, Sigurður Ingi Jóhannsson, specifically requested fast proposals on these eight options. She says that she considered the data available on all options to be insufficient, except for the potential plant at Hvammur.

That same Thursday, the Icelandic Environment Association (Landvernd), released a statement, opposing the proposal. According to Landvernd’s statement, five of the eight options have were not processed in accordance with law. Landvernd says that the proposal “constitutes a serious breach of attempts to reach a consensus over the utilization of the country’s energy resources.” It furthermore claims that the AIAC’s majority thereby goes against the Master Plan’s intention and main goals.

Landsvernd’s board says that if Alþingi agrees on the proposal, any and all decisions deriving thereof will “constitute a legal offense and should be considered null and void”. Guðmundur Ingi Guðbrandsson, Landvernd’s manager, has since stated that if the plans will proceed, the high lands of Iceland will become a completely different sort of place.

The Iceland Nature Conservation Association (INCA) also opposes the plans. The association released a statement, pointing out that if current ministers or members of Alþingi oppose the Master Plan legislation, they must propose an amendment to the law, but, until then, adhere to law as it is.

The options

Mid-October, Environmental Minister Sigurður Ingi Jóhannsson already proposed re-categorizing one of the eight areas, “the plant option in Hvammur”, as utilizable. This was in accordance with proposals made by AIAC last March. Leaders of the parties in opposition then objected to the decision-making process, saying that such proposals should be processed by Alþingi’s Environmental Committee before being put to vote. The Hvammar plant would produce 20 MW of power.

The other seven options to be re-catogorized are: the lagoon Hágöngulón (two options, totalling 135 MW); Skrokkalda, also related to Hágöngulón (45 MW); the river Hólmsá by Atley (65 MW); lake Hagavatn (20 MW), the waterfall Urriðafoss (140 MW); and Holt (57 MW).

The last two, as well as the plant at Hvammur, would all harvest the river Þjórsá, the country’s longest river. The eight options total at 555 MW.

Backstory: Kárahnjúkar

The latest power plant construction in Iceland took place at Kárahnjúkar. The 690 MW hydropower plant at Kárahnjúkar is the largest of its type in Europe. It fuels Alcoa’s aluminum smelter in Reyðarfjörður. The largest power plant in the country before Kárahnjúkar, was the Búrfell hydropower plant, on-line since 1969, at 270 MW. The Icelandic government and the national power company Landsvirkjun committed to the dam’s construction in 2002, which was concluded in 2008. The total cost of the construction was around USD 1.3 billion. The largest contractor was the Italian firm Impregilo. The construction was heavily contested, for its environmental and economic effects, for the treatment of the workers involved and for a lack of transparency and accountability during the prior decision- and policy-making process.

At least four workers were killed in accidents on site, and scores were injured. “I have worked on dam projects all over the world and no-one has even been killed on any of the schemes. To have this number of incidents on a site is not usual,” commented International Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD) vice president Dr Andy Hughes at the time.

During the construction, the country saw new kinds of protest actions, involving civil disobedience and direct action, led by the organization Saving Iceland. Andri Snær Magnason’s 2006 book Draumalandið – The Dream Land – contesting Iceland’s energy policies, and calling for a reinvigorated environmentalism, became a bestseller at the time. Ómar Ragnarsson, a beloved entertainer and TV journalist for decades, resigned from his work at State broadcaster RÚV to focus on documenting the environmental effects of the Kárahnjúkar plant and campaigning against further construction on that scale.

In the eyes of many, however, the greatest impact was the environmental damage done to a significant part of the country’s wilderness and fragile eco-system, as one thousand square kilometers of land were submerged by the dam. Along with Saving Iceland, INCA was at the forefront of the struggle against the plant’s construction.

Few would contest that the dam construction at Kárahnjúkar was the most dividing topic of debate in the country during the first decade of this century, until the 2008 economic crash. Alþingi’s Independent Investigative Committee, established to investigate the advent of the crash, was not alone in relating the expansive effect of construction on this unprecedented scale to the succeeding crisis.

[Correction: Apart from a 2 MW plant in Kaldakvísl, n]o new power plants have arisen since the construction at Kárahnjúkar. Which plays the bigger role, environmentalist campaigns, or the economic crash which ensued, may be debated. What remains at stake is not any single construction project, as such, but the pro-heavy industry policy, continuous through multiple governments through the last fifty years.

Earlier this November, before the latest turn of events, INCA pointed out that at least three of the options that Landsvirkjun already categorized as “utilizable” were considered for preservation according to the still current Master Plan. Due to this, the association protested the Landsvirkjun’s vice president Ragna Árnadóttir’s recent claims, that the company intended to reach a wide consensus on the use of energy resources.

Landvernd and Landsvirkjun

Landvernd, the Icelandic Environment Association, was founded in 1969. It is among the the country’s leading environmental NGOs, runs several educational programs, lobby groups and reviews parliamentary bills and motions. In the last two decades, its emphasis has moved from the conservation of soil and vegetation towards protecting Iceland’s wilderness and landscapes, not least in the country’s uninhabited central highlands. It has initiated civil disobedience actions, its website citing the Mayday Green Walk in 2013 as an example.

Landsvirkjun is the country’s largest electricity provider, operating seventeen power plants, on a scale from Hafið’s 2MW to Kárahnjúkar’s 690MW. The largest hydroelectric power plant serving the public, rather than industry alone, is the plant at Búrfell, at 270MW.

Original source: Grapevine

British police officers undercover in protest movements have been shown to have regularly operated outside the UK. Activists, lawyers and MPs have all called for an independent public inquiry in order to reveal the full extent of the practice.

Two-and-a-half years after the unmasking of Mark Kennedy and other police spies in protest movements, new information has emerged that reveals the extent to which police forces across Europe colluded in their deployment. Accusations have been made that police infiltrators were at the forefront of planning protests, acting as agent provocateurs. European law enforcement agencies coordinated these activities in secretive, unaccountable transnational working groups. Police officers formed long-term, intimate relationships with activists, had children with them, and became part of their extended families. The identities of dead children were stolen to create cover “legends.”

Rather than provide answers, this information has given rise to more questions:

• On what grounds was infiltration authorised?

• Did national police forces have knowledge of foreign undercover officers operating on their territory and, if so, did they benefit from information obtained by those officers?

• Is forming relationships with “targets” – including having children with them – official state policy?

• To what extent are undercover deployments demonstrative of coordinated European police operations?

• How many – if any – of the groups infiltrated by undercover agents can be said to warrant such levels of intrusion, and how is this assessed?

Legal challenges and political inquiries have been made – and are ongoing – in an attempt to find answers to some of these questions. Official reviews have been carried out in a number of countries, but those that have been made public – for example in Iceland and the UK – have been condemned as lacklustre and shallow by political activists, journalists and elected representatives. [1] The majority of these reviews have been kept secret, providing no answers to those affected by the actions of undercover officers, while those who authorised and took part in the operations have yet to be called to account. While officials may have occasionally wrung their hands and expressed concern, no heads have rolled – yet. [2]

Repeated calls have been made in the UK for an independent public inquiry into the use of police spies to infiltrate movements, including by a former Director of Public Prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, which have so far been resisted. [3] This article illustrates significant collusion amongst European police forces and arguably only a Europe-wide inquiry, for example by the European Parliament, can go some way towards establishing the extent to which authorities across the continent have undermined civil liberties and human rights.

Operation Herne: 40 Years of Undercover Operations

The largest official review to date is the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Herne, an inquiry that claims to be examining every undercover operation undertaken by the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a now-disbanded Metropolitan Police unit that was established after anti-Vietnam war protests in 1968 and operated until 2008. Giving evidence to parliament’s Home Affairs Committee in February this year, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Patricia Gallan told MPs sitting as part of the Home Affairs Committee (HAC):

I must stress we are looking at the activities of a unit… which was initially funded by the Home Office and set up in 1968 and ran for 40 years. There is not a dusty file sitting somewhere within Scotland Yard that we can pull out that will provide all the answers. There are more than 50,000 documents, paper and electronic, that we need to sift through. [4]

Gallan said 31 staff – 20 police officers and 11 police staff – are working on the review and that “the estimated cost to date has been £1.25 million.” The police recently admitted that Herne will take approximately three years to complete. MPs sitting on the Committee expressed disquiet at the cost and the time that the review has so far taken and were particularly critical of undercover police officers building “legends” from the stolen identities of dead children.

The Guardian reported in February that the Metropolitan Police “stole the identities of an estimated 80 dead children and issued fake passports in their names for use by undercover officers.” It was a practice that began in 1968 but which the Met said was not “currently” authorised. The Met subsequently announced an investigation – part of Operation Herne – into “past arrangements for undercover identities used by SDS officers.” [5] Deputy Assistant Commissioner Gallan told the HAC that prior to the Guardian article she knew of only one stolen identity, which she had found out about in September 2012. However, as far back as March 2010 ‘Officer A’ (now known in the press by his cover name Pete Black) told The Guardian that obtaining a cover identity involved “applying for the birth certificate of someone who died at an early age and using this to fabricate a cover story.” [6] The police have yet to contact any of the families of the children whose identities were used by the police. [7]

“Ghoulish and Disrespectful”

The HAC published its report on undercover policing in early March 2013 concluding that the use of dead infants’ identities was “ghoulish and disrespectful” and “abhorrent”, stating that “it must never occur again.” The committee demanded not only that the investigation (and Operation Herne as a whole) be “expedited with all possible haste”, but that “once the identity of the senior responsible leaders has been established, the matter should be referred directly to the IPCC [Independent Police Complaints Commission], which should then investigate the matter itself.” The investigation remains in the hands of the police.

Two days after Gallan gave evidence to the HAC, Met Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe replaced her with Chief Constable Mick Creedon of Derbyshire Police “because he believed that public confidence would best be preserved by appointing an independent chief constable.” [8] The HAC noted that “senior leaders were aware of these issues [i.e. objectivity and independence] for several months before the change in leadership” and that “it is important that in future objectivity is ensured from the outset and not only when an operation comes under scrutiny.” Creedon’s most notable public statement on Herne so far relates to the use of dead children’s identities. He admitted in a letter to the HAC that it was “common practice.” [9]

The appointment of a high-ranking police officer from a different force does not guarantee that Operation Herne will get to the truth of the matter. Even were the IPCC given full responsibility for the investigation – rather than simply a “supervisory” role as is currently the case – based on past experience, many would question its ability to carry out its work impartially, even if it is soon to be awarded new powers and access to increased resources. [10] Those who make complaints against the police have found themselves frustrated with the IPCC; its ineffectiveness is one reason why so many people – from political activists to the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Assembly and Association – have demanded an independent public inquiry into the undercover policing saga. As The Guardian’s Rob Evans put it:

This [Herne] appears to be a review of 40 years of undercover operations covering serious allegations of misconduct, but the public is being told nothing about what is going on. Like all the other 11 inquiries set up following disclosures surrounding the police spies, it is being held behind closed doors, with no input from those who were affected by the spying. It is a far cry from an over-arching full public inquiry which many including former DPP [Director of Public Prosecutions], Ken MacDonald, have called for, but there are no prizes for guessing what the authorities would prefer. [11]

Legal Challenge: Police Obtain Secret Hearing

An ongoing court case has reinforced the perception that the authorities would prefer as little transparency and accountability as possible. In December 2011, eight women announced that they were bringing a court case against the Metropolitan Police for the actions of five officers: Mark Kennedy, Jim Boyling, Bob Lambert, Mark Jenner, and John Dines. A statement issued that month said:

The five undercover officers were all engaged in infiltrating environmental and social justice campaign groups between the mid 1980’s and 2010 and had relationships with the women lasting from 7 months and the longest spanning 9 years.

The women assert that the actions of the undercover officers breached their rights as protected by the European Convention on Human Rights, including Article 3 (no one shall be subject to inhumane or degrading treatment) and Article 8 (respect for private and family life, including the right to form relationships without unjustified interference by the state). The women are also seeking [common law] claims for deceit, assault, misfeasance in public office and negligence, and seek to highlight and prevent the continuation of psychological, emotional and sexual abuse of campaigners and others by undercover police officers. [12]

In January 2013, an initial hearing in the High Court (AKJ and others v Commissioner of the Police for the Metropolis and Association of Chief Police Officers) ruled in favour of an application by the Met for some parts of the case to be heard in the secretive Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT). [13] The IPT was established as part of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA); legislation that is supposed to provide a legal framework for state surveillance and undercover operations. In hearings before the tribunal “complainants do not see the evidence from the state and have no automatic right to an oral hearing. Neither can they appeal against its decision.” [14] All eight complainants are bringing claims under common law, but only three of them – those who suffered violations after 2000, when the Human Rights Act came into force – can bring human rights claims. They will have to go through the IPT before their common law claims are heard. Solicitor Harriet Wistrich explained after the case: “there is nothing to stop us proceeding with the claims on behalf of the other five claimants.” However,she notes that “given the approach by the police so far, they may apply to strike out our case on different grounds.” [15]

Mr Tugendhat used the sexual adventures of Ian Fleming’s fictional spy James Bond to reason why parliament, when enacting RIPA, would have had intimate sexual relationships in mind as something that may be used by spies. Tugendhat said that:

James Bond is the most famous fictional example of a member of the intelligence services who used relationships with women to obtain information, or access to persons or property. Since he was writing a light entertainment, Ian Fleming did not dwell on the extent to which his hero used deception, still less upon the psychological harm he might have done to the women concerned. But fictional accounts (and there are others) lend credence to the view that the intelligence and police services have for many years deployed both men and women officers to form personal relationships of an intimate sexual nature (whether or not they were physical relationships) in order to obtain information or access… In the 1980s and the 1990s, when RIPA and other statutes were passing through Parliament, everyone in public life would, in my view, have assumed, whether rightly or wrongly, that the intelligence services and the police did from time to time deploy officers as CHIS [covert human intelligence sources] in this way.” [16]

The ruling was condemned by the women who brought the case:

[W]e want to see an end to sexual and psychological abuse of campaigners for social justice and others by undercover police officers. We are outraged that the High Court has allowed the police to use the IPT to preserve the secrecy of their abusive and manipulative operations in order to prevent public scrutiny and challenge. In comparison, the privacy of citizens spied on by secret police is being given no such protection, which is contrary to the principles we would expect in a democratic society. It is unacceptable that state agents can cultivate intimate and long lasting relationships with political activists in order to gain so called intelligence on political movements. We intend to continue this fight. [17]

There have been some positive legal developments following the exposure of police infiltration of the environmental movement. In July 2012, after the Ratcliffe-on-Soar case in which 20 convictions were overturned when it was revealed that the prosecution had not disclosed to the defence evidence gathered by Mark Kennedy, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, stated that “he had concerns about the safety of the convictions following the Drax power station protest in 2008,” after which 29 people were convicted for halting a train that was carrying coal to the power station. [18] He invited them to appeal, a process which is ongoing. Potential appeals against convictions in other cases are also being considered.

On the whole, however, the law does not seem to be working in favour of activists who have been spied upon. ‘Alison’ (not her real name), one of those who is part of the case recounted above, told the HAC that she submitted to the Metropolitan Police a subject access request under the Data Protection Act, a right intended to allow people to know – with exceptions – what information is held on them by organisations, whether public or private. She was told in a response that “the Commissioner has no information on [her] that he is required to supply.”

The ongoing commitment of the Metropolitan police to secrecy over the undercover infiltration saga is reflected elsewhere. Jenny Jones, a Green Party member of the elected London Assembly, said earlier this year that the Met had been “deliberately obstructive” following her efforts to obtain answers on a number of issues related to undercover officers. The police said in one letter to Jones that ongoing legal proceedings and “the covert nature of undercover policing” meant they were “not prepared to put much of the information you seek in the public domain.” [19] Given that disturbing revelations about undercover policing continue to emerge, it seems that secrecy is as much a damage limitation exercise as it is an attempt to ensure that police infiltration tactics remain covert.

Questions Across Europe

Mark Kennedy is believed to be the best-travelled of the police’s former undercover operatives, having been to Ireland, Germany, Spain, Denmark, France, the USA, Italy, and Iceland, amongst other places. [20] His exposure led to demands in many of those countries for official information about his activities, but as will be demonstrated, in most cases this has not been forthcoming or failed to reveal anything substantial. What some of these enquiries have revealed is that authorities across Europe appear to be collaborating to ensure that as little substantive information as possible comes to light on undercover police operations.

Ireland

A report drawn up by the Garda Síochána in the months following Kennedy’s exposure as a spy has never been published. Kennedy spent a significant amount of time in Ireland, participating in workshops and demonstrations, including those against the EU summit in May 2004. [21] In January 2011 the Irish Examiner reported claims that, for the summit, Kennedy “brought a van from Britain containing crash helmets and offered to purchase broom handles to be used in combating gardaí.” An activist who played host to Kennedy said that “he was always very supportive of ‘direct action’ protest. It’s disturbing that he would seem to have been acting as a ‘agent provocateur’ attempting to get people into trouble.” [22]

Days later, the Examiner again reported on Kennedy’s activities. Despite repeatedly telling the paper that they had “no information” on the case, it was reported that “Garda bosses will admit in a report to Justice Minister Brendan Smith that they knew about [Kennedy’s] presence [in Ireland].” The Examiner revealed that “senior Garda intelligence officers – attached to the Crime and Security Branch – had known all along about Mr Kennedy after being informed by the British Metropolitan police. Crime and Security did not inform local senior gardaí in the areas where Kennedy was active for fear of blowing his cover.” [23] In April 2011, a Sinn Fein representative in the Dáil, the Irish parliament, complained that “we have still to receive a report on what exactly he was doing in this country, on whose behalf he was working and whether the Gardaí were aware that he was here.” It appears that this report reached only a very limited number of officials. [24]

Iceland

In Iceland, the National Security Unit of the National Commissioner published a report on Kennedy’s activities in the country in May 2011. It included details of his infiltration of the environmental group Saving Iceland between 2005 and 2007. The Reykjavík Grapevine [25] noted that Kennedy undertook:

[P]roactive investigations to collect information in order to prevent possible actions…the Iceland police did not have such powers in 2005 and still do not. That should have made any local cooperation with the British spy illegal, just as any other proactive spying initiative would have been.

Saving Iceland was less than impressed with the report: “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.” According to Saving Iceland, the report says that:

During an overhaul of data at the National Commissioner’s office, no information came to light that makes it possible to ascertain if [Mark Kennedy] was here in Iceland with the knowledge of the police or with their collaboration in 2005. [26]

Saving Iceland criticised the report and argued that neither the Minister of the Interior nor the National Commissioner had answered questions from their lawyer seeking further information on police surveillance of the group and clarification of the specific wording of the terms of reference given by the Interior Ministry to the National Commissioner. The group said that it is clear that the authors “entirely avoid answering the questions about Saving Iceland and Mark Kennedy that it was reportedly supposed to answer.” Furthermore:

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 cooperation with the British authorities is nothing but obvious evasions.

Germany

In Germany, where both Mark Kennedy and a spy still known only by his cover name Mark Jacobs were deployed a number of times, parliamentary representatives for Die Linke have repeatedly made use of the right to ask extended questions of the Federal Government to obtain further information on the activities of individual undercover operatives and international police networks engaged in infiltration and surveillance. These efforts have yielded significant new information. Most recently the German Interior Ministry stated that entering into sexual relationships as part of an investigation is not permitted in any area of the Federal Government’s responsibility, a stipulation that also applies to foreign police agents operating in Germany. However, questions have also frequently been answered with the statement: “For reasons of confidentiality, the Federal Government is not able to respond to these questions in the part of the answer to this minor interpellation that is intended for publication.” [27]

Die Linke MP Andrej Hunko wrote to the British Home Secretary Theresa May in February 2013 outlining the German government’s acknowledgement that no undercover officers operating on German territory can lawfully engage in sexual relationships, and stated that the German Interior Ministry and the Federal police (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA) must “obtain clarification from the British authorities as to whether Mark Kennedy or ‘Mark Jacobs’ also used personal and sexual relationships in Germany in order to obtain information. And the same applies to any of their fellow officers.” He also sought clarification over whether British officers may have covertly recorded conversations, because “spying operations like that require a warrant” and so there may have been “yet another infringement of the law.”

Hunko has requested that May identifies “who was responsible for ordering their deployment to Berlin and which German authorities received reports about it” so that “action may also be taken against any infringements of law by British police officers in the capital of Germany.” This is going to take some work, especially as the Berlin police have recently said that neither Kennedy nor Jacobs ever worked for them. A letter from a Berlin politician to Hunko said that “as a result of their review, the Berlin police announced that neither the former British undercover agent, Mr Mark Kennedy, nor a person named Marco Jacob had been used by the Berlin police.”

In a reply three weeks later from Damien Green, the UK’s Minister for Police and Criminal Justice, Hunko’s requests were rejected with arguments that have been used repeatedly by the police since the initial exposure of undercover officers. Green refused to confirm or deny whether ‘Mark Jacobs’ was a British undercover officer due to the fact that his identity had not been confirmed in the exceptional manner that Kennedy’s was following his exposure. He went on: “My officials and those of the Bundesministerium des Innern have already been in contact about these issues…We will ensure that the German authorities are regularly updated as to the progress of the investigation, known as Operation Herne, which is currently underway.”

In response to Hunko’s statement that it needed to be made clear under whose authority Kennedy was acting and what exactly he did whilst in Germany (potentially covertly recording conversations, for example), the minister dodged the request for assistance in establishing whether the law had been broken: “If you have evidence that German law has been broken, I would recommend you to pass it on to the Bundesministerium des Innern, who can then make an investigative request of the British police or the IPCC via the usual international diplomatic channels.” He summed up: “the current investigation and litigation must be allowed to run their course and therefore, I cannot provide you with more detail about past undercover police operations.”

France

In November 2012, lawyers acting on behalf of Yildune Lévy initiated court proceedings demanding that the French Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence (Direction central du renseignement intérieur, DCRI, akin to UK’s MI5) be forced to reveal the contents of a dossier on which criminal charges against her and a number of others are partially based. In 2008, Lévy was arrested along with Julien Coupat and seven others as part of the ‘Tarnac Nine’ affair in which they were accused of “criminal association for the purposes of terrorist activity.” [28] All were subsequently bailed. Lévy’s lawyers are demanding that a dossier compiled by the DCRI be revealed to the defence an argument that bears similarity to the Ratcliffe-on-Soar case in the UK which collapsed after it was revealed that the prosecution had failed to disclose evidence gathered by Mark Kennedy. [29] In this case too, it is alleged that information contained in the dossier “is largely based on information supplied by [Kennedy].” [30]

Lévy’s lawyers argue that the dossier submitted to the court by the DCRI does not contain any substantive evidence that could lead to the accusations against her: facts included in the dossier are not necessarily relevant to the charges; the interpretation of those facts is not necessarily correct; and the means by which those facts have been obtained is questionable. It is also argued that revealing the contents of the dossier will shed more light on the role of Mark Kennedy, who was present in Tarnac and allegedly supplied much of the information used by DCRI to bring charges against Lévy and others. As would be expected, the British authorities – in particular the National Public Order Intelligence Unit for whom Kennedy worked – were also recipients of the information obtained by Kennedy. [31] This included information gathered whilst in New York at the same time as Julien Coupat, much of which apparently also made its way to the FBI. Lévy’s lawyers argue that “access to all the elements of the dossier is an absolutely indispensable prerequisite” for obtaining a fair trial. Proceedings are ongoing.

A European Inquiry?

In the UK there have been repeated calls for an independent public inquiry into the police spies saga. Activists, MPs, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, and the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Assembly and Association, Maina Kiai, have all made the argument that only an open and independent public inquiry will reveal the full extent of the practice. In January 2013, Kiai said:

The case of Kennedy and other undercover officers is shocking as the groups in question were not engaged in criminal activities. The duration of this infiltration, and the resultant trauma and suspicion it has caused, are unacceptable in a democracy. [32]

Police and politicians have so far failed to be moved by such statements, saying that ongoing legal proceedings and Operation Herne must be allowed to conclude before any action can be considered. Mick Creedon, the officer now in charge of Herne, has told MPs that the inquiry “will last at least another three years.” [33] Even then, much of the report is unlikely to be made public. Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Craig Mackey told the London Assembly’s Police and Crime Committee in October last year: “I don’t know what will be in there, I don’t know what the scope will be…So there may be things that are perfectly acceptable to put in the public domain. There may be other parts…that cannot be.” [34]

While an inquiry in the UK would go some way to establishing exactly what the role of the UK’s police forces and state authorities in infiltrating protest movements over decades has been, it is clear that British authorities have undertaken significant collaborative efforts with their foreign counterparts, a point that raises troubling legal issues. There is much that remains unknown about the remit and powers of international police networks such as the European Cooperation Group on Undercover Activities, the Cross-Border Surveillance Working Group and the International Working Group on Undercover Policing. [35] Meanwhile, the more formal forum of the Council of the European Union has been used in the past to discuss different national legal frameworks for the deployment of undercover officers and to find ways of overcoming obstacles. [36] The German and UK delegations to the Council have also lobbied for undercover deployments to be removed from the scope of the European Investigation Order – their inclusion would have gone some way to harmonising the legal framework and potentially increasing parliamentary accountability. (Even if they were included it is unclear whether the European Investigation Order is a desirable piece of legislation. One analysis argues that “many of the changes proposed to the current legal framework would constitute a reduction in human rights protection and even…an attack on the national sovereignty of Member States.”) [37]

The deficiencies of reports issued and enquiries undertaken so far at national level has led to an ongoing effort to try and establish some form of Europe-wide inquiry, perhaps via the European Parliament. Such an initiative is not without precedent – the European Parliament undertook a major inquiry into the CIA’s rendition operations which went some way towards uncovering the extent of European state complicity in the USA’s global kidnap and torture programme. One problem such an inquiry would have is its inability to compel individuals or agencies to provide evidence. As has been demonstrated, those involved in directing and carrying out the infiltration of protest movements have not been keen to release information about it. European parliamentary questions to the Council and Commission are being prepared on the issue of accountability under national, European and international law for human rights violations committed by undercover police officers. This may be the first step on a long road towards stitching together what is currently a patchwork of attempts across Europe to obtain answers and accountability.
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Undercover Cops Uncovered

The following is a list of undercover officers involved in infiltrating and disrupting protest movements and social justice campaigns who have been exposed in the last few years. The first name listed is their cover name. If there is a name in brackets, it is the individual’s real name. It is worth noting that the Metropolitan Police have only officially acknowledged that Mark Kennedy was an undercover police officer; they refuse to do so for any other individual.

Bob Robinson (Robert/Bob Lambert) [38]

Infiltrated London Greenpeace and the Animal Liberation Front from 1984-88. Had a child with one of his “targets”. Has been accused in parliament by Caroline Lucas MP of participating in an arson attack on a department store. Later promoted to Head of Operations in the Special Demonstration Squad. Went on to run Special Branch’s Muslim Contact Unit. Awarded MBE for services to policing. Currently works as an academic at St Andrews University.

Jim Sutton (Andrew James Boyling) [39]

Infiltrated Reclaim the Streets from 1995-2000. Formed a relationship with a “target”, disappeared, and resurfaced a year later admitting to the woman that he was a police officer. They married and had two children but divorced in 2009.

John Barker (John Dines) [40]

Infiltrated a number of groups including London Greenpeace and squatting groups between 1987 and 1992. Had a five-year relationship with one of his “targets”.

Lynn Watson [41]

Based in Leeds, from 2003-08 she infiltrated numerous environmental, anti-capitalist and peace groups: Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp, UK Action Medics Collective, Drax Climate Camp, Dissent! and others.

Mark Cassidy (Mark Jenner) [42]

Infiltrated the Colin Roach Centre, the Building Workers Group, Hackney Community Defence Association and, allegedly, Anti- Fascist Action and Red Action between 1995 and 2000. Had a four-year relationship with a woman now known publicly as ‘Alison’. Bob Lambert was his boss.

Simon Wellings [47]

Was exposed after five years with the group Globalise Resistance (2001-05) when he accidentally phoned an activist friend whilst discussing photos of and information on the group with officers at a police station.

Mark Stone (Mark Kennedy) [44]

Spent seven years undercover, from 2003 until exposure in October 2010 by former friends and comrades. Travelled far and wide across the UK and Europe and worked with groups such as Dissent!, Rising Tide, Saving Iceland, Workers’ Solidarity Movements, Rossport Solidarity, Climate Camp, Climate Justice Action and others.

Peter Daley/Pete Black (Peter Francis) [45]

Infiltrated anti-racist and anti-road campaigns between 1993 and 1997 and slept with two activists during that time. He was in Special Branch before joining the Special Demonstration Squad where he used the identity of a four-year old who had died of leukaemia as his cover. His real name is unknown but he went to the press with stories of his time as an undercover officer in March 2010, before the exposure of Mark Kennedy in October.

Rod Richardson [46]

Infiltrated anti-capitalist and hunt saboteur groups, in particular working with groups protesting against political summits such as the G20. Went abroad to Sweden, France and Italy at various times.

Mark/Marco Jacobs [43]

Operated from 2004 to 2009, infiltrated anarchist, anti-militarist and migration campaigns. Travelled abroad to Germany and France (on a number of occasions with Mark Kennedy).

Unnamed Officer

Cover name and real name unknown, but was noted in a January 2012 article in the Guardian that outlined Bob Lambert’s fathering of a child with an activist. The article said that he was “sent to spy on activists some years ago” and “had a short-lived relationship with a political activist which produced a child.” After leaving the relationship and the child, he used ongoing police monitoring reports to “regularly read details of her life,” watching “as she grew older and brought up their child as a single parent.” [48]
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Endnotes

[1] See notes [3], [4], [11], [19], [24], [25], [26], [32], [35]

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ken Macdonald, Police undercover work has gone badly wrong. We need a public inquiry, The Guardian, 4.2.13: http://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2013/feb/04/police-ipcc

[4] House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, Undercover Policing: Interim Report, 26.2.13: http://www.statewatch.org/news/2013/mar/…

[5] Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, Police spies stole identities of dead children, The Guardian, 3.2.13: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/feb/03…

[6] Tony Thompson, Inside the lonely and violent world of the Yard’s elite undercover unit, The Guardian, 14.3.10: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/mar/14…

[7] Heather Saul, Families of dead children whose identities were used by undercover police have not been informed, The Independent, 16.7.13: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/cri…

[8] Ibid. at [4] Informants, spies and subversion 21

[9] Jamie Grierson, Dead children’s names used as aliases by undercover police at Scotland Yard, The Independent, 17.5.13: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/cri…

[10] Alan Travis, Theresa May to expand IPCC in crackdown on police corruption, The Guardian, 12.2.13: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/…

[11] Rob Evans, Secretive review into claim that police spy set fire to Debenhams, The Guardian, 25.6.12: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/undercover-…

[12] Legal action against Metropolitan police, Police Spies Out of Lives, 16.12.11: http://policespiesoutoflives.org.uk/lega…

[13] [2013] EWHC 32 (QB), High Court Judgment, 17.1.13: http://www.statewatch.org/news/2013/jan/…

[14] Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, Police spies court case suggests sexual relations with activists were routine, The Guardian, 17.1.13: http://www. guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jan/17/spies-sexual-relations-activists-routine

[15] Harriet Wistrich, Explaining the judgment over secret tribunal, Police Spies Out of Lives, 23.1.13: http://policespiesoutoflives.org.uk/expl…

[16] Ibid. at [13]

[17] Outrage as High Court permits Secrecy over Undercover Policing, Police Spies Out of Lives, 17.1.13: http://policespiesoutoflives.org.uk/outr…

[18] Keir Starmer QC invites Drax power station protesters to appeal, BBC News, 3.7.12: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-yor…

[19] Getting answers from the police on undercover deployments “will be a long process”, Statewatch News Online, January 2013: http://database.statewatch.org/article.a…

[20] Mark Kennedy: A chronology of his activities, Powerbase: http://www. powerbase.info

[21] Scott Millar, Questions remain over undercover activists, Irish Examiner, 22.1.11: http://www.irishexaminer.com/archives/20…

[22] Ibid.

[23] Cormac O’Keeffe and Scott Millar, Presence of undercover officer ‘known to Gardai’, Irish Examiner, 26.1.11: http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/pre…

[24] Daíl debates, 19.4.11: http://oireachtasdebates.oireachtas.ie/d…

[25] Snorri Páll Jónsson Úlfhildarson, Back to the future, The Reykjavík Grapevine, 21.5.12: http://grapevine.is/Home/ReadArticle/BAC…

[26] Covers-ups and evasions condoned by the Minister of the Interior, Saving Iceland, 20.5.11: http://www.savingiceland.org/2011/05/cov…

[27] German Bundestag, Answer of the Federal Government, 31.5.12: http:// www.statewatch.org

[28] U.S. support committee for the Tarnac 9 formed, Infoshop News, 30.9.08: http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?sto…

[29] Danny Chivers, Undercover and over-the-top: The collapse of the Ratcliffe trial, New Internationalist Magazine, 12.1.11: http://newint.org/features/web-exclusive…

[30] L’espion anglais qui a piégé le groupe de Tarnac, Le Monde, 8.11.12: http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/20…

[31] Camille Poloni (translation into English by Élodie Chatelais), Mark Kennedy: A mole in Tarnac: http://euro-police.noblogs.org/2012/04/m…

[32] UN Special Rapporteur calls for a “judge-led public inquiry” into undercover police operations and condemns a number of other police practices, Statewatch News Online, January 2013: http://database.statewatch.org/article.a…

[33] Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, Police spies’ use of dead children’s identities was common, MPs told, The Guardian, 17.5.13: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/may/17…

[34] Ibid. at [19]

[35] See the Statewatch News Online coverage of these groups for more information: Parliamentary questions in Germany reveal further information on European police project aimed at enhancing covert investigative techniques, November 2012: http://database.statewatch.org/article.a…; Another secretive European police working group revealed as governments remain tight-lipped on other police networks and the activities of Mark Kennedy, August 2012: http://database.statewatch.org/article.a…; Parliamentary scrutiny unveils undercover “secret police networks”, February 2012: http://database.statewatch.org/article.a…

[36] Overview of replies to questionnaire on undercover officers – texts of national legislation: http://database.statewatch.org/article.a…; Undercover police: Latest: Overview of replies to questionnaire on undercover officers: http://database.statewatch.org/article.a…

[37] Steve Peers, The proposed European Investigation Order: Assault on human rights and national sovereignty, Statewatch analysis, May 2010: http://www.statewatch.org/analyses/no-96…

[38] Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, Progressive academic Bob Lambert is former police spy, The Guardian, 16.10.11: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/oct/1…

[39] Paul Lewis, Rob Evans and Rowenna Davis, Ex-wife of police spy tells how she fell in love and had children with him, The Guardian, 19.1.11: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2…

[40] Amelia Hill, Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, Brother of boy whose identity was stolen by police spies demands apology, The Guardian, 6.2.13: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/feb/0…

[41] Rajeev Syal and Martin Wainwright, Undercover police: Officer A named as Lynn Watson, The Guardian, 19.1.11: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jan/1…

[42] Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, Police spies: in bed with a fictional character, The Guardian, 1.3.13: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/mar/0…

[43] Rajeev Syal, Undercover police: Officer B identified as Mark Jacobs, The Guardian, 19.1.11: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jan/1…

[44] Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, Undercover officer spied on green activists, The Guardian, 9.1.11: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jan/0…

[45] Stephen Wright and Richard Pendlebury, SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: A very troubled undercover cop and growing doubts over the police ‘plot’ to smear the Lawrence family, Daily Mail, 19.7.13: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-…

[46] Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, Rod Richardson: the mystery of the protester who was not who he claimed, The Guardian, 6.2.13: http://www. theguardian.com

[47] Meirion Jones and Anna Adams, Undercover police work revealed by phone blunder, BBC News, 25.3.11: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12867187

[48] Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, Undercover police had children with activists, The Guardian, 20.1.12: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jan/20…

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.

People can let off steam, get angry, shudder at the thought of it… ‘Who do these politicians think they are?’ ‘Scumbag generals!’ […] And they get more and more angry, and then, burp! A little liberatory burp to relieve their social indigestion.

These words came to mind last month when Iceland’s media reported upon the current situation of river Lagarfljót in the east of Iceland. “Lagarfljót is dead,” some of them even stated, citing the words of author and environmentalist Andri Snær Magnason regarding a revelation of the fact that the river’s ecosystem has literally been killed by the the gigantic Kárahnjúkar Dams. The dams were built in Iceland’s eastern highlands in the years between 2002 and 2006, solely to provide electricity for aluminium giant and arms producer Alcoa’s smelter in the eastern municipality of Reyðarfjörður.

The revelation of Lagarfljót’s current situation originates in a report made by Landsvirkjun, Iceland’s state owned energy company and owner of the 690 MW Kárahnjúkar power plant, the main conclusions of which were made public last month. Although covered as breaking news and somewhat of a scandal, this particular revelation can hardly be considered as surprising news.

Quite the contrary, environmentalists and scientists have repeatedly pointed out the mega-project’s devastating irreversible environmental impacts — in addition to the social and economical ones of course — and have, in fact, done so ever since the plan was brought onto the drawing tables to begin with. Such warnings, however, were systematically silenced by Iceland’s authorities and dismissed as “political rather than scientific”, propaganda against progress and opposition to “green energy” — only to be proven right time and time again during the last half a decade.

AQUATIC ECOSYSTEMS SHOULD RECEIVE MORE ATTENTION

One of the Kárahnjúkar plant’s functions depends on diverting glacial river Jökulsá á Dal into another glacial river Jökulsá í Fljótsdal, the latter of which feeds Lagarfljót. This means that huge amounts of glacial turbidity are funnelled into the river, quantitatively heretofore unknown in Lagarfljót. This has, in return, led to the disintegration of Lagarfljót’s ecosystem, gargantuan land erosion on the banks of the river, serious decrease in fish population and parallel negative impacts on the area’s bird life.

As reported by Saving Iceland in late 2011, when the dams impacts on Lagarfljót had become a subject matter of Iceland’s media, the glacial turbidity has severely altered Lagarfljót’s colour. Therefore, sunlight doesn’t reach deep enough into the water, bringing about a decrease of photosynthesis — the fundamental basis for organic production — and thereby a systematic reduction of nourishment for the fish population. Recent research conducted by Iceland’s Institute of Freshwater Fisheries show that in the area around Egilsstaðir, a municipality located on the banks of Lagarfljót, the river’s visibility is currently less than 20cm deep compared to 60cm before the dams were constructed. As a result of this, not only is there less fish in the river — the size of the fish has also seen a serious decrease.

Following last month’s revelation, ichthyologist Guðni Guðbergsson at the Institute of Freshwater Fisheries, highlighted in an interview with RÚV (Iceland’s National Broadcasting Service) that the destruction of Lagarfljót’s ecosystem had certainly been foreseen and repeatedly pointed out. He also maintained that aquatic environment tends to be kept out of the discourse on hydro dams. “People see what is aboveground, they see vegetation, soil erosion and drift,” he stated, “but when it comes to aquatic ecosystems, people don’t seem to see it very clearly. This biosphere should receive more attention.”

BENDING ALL THE RULES

All of the above-mentioned had been warned of before the dams construction took place, most importantly in a 2001 ruling by Skipulagsstofnun (Iceland’s National Planning Agency) which, after reviewing the Kárahnjúkar plant’s Environmental Impact Assessment, concluded that “the development would result in great hydrological changes, which would have an effect, for example, on the groundwater level in low-lying areas adjacent to Jökulsá í Fljótsdal and Lagarfljót, which in turn would have an impact on vegetation, bird-life and agriculture.” The impacts on Lagarfljót being only one of the dams numerous all-too-obvious negative impacts, Skipulagsstofnun opposed the project as a whole “on grounds of its considerable impact on the environment and the unsatisfactory information presented regarding individual parts of the project and its consequences for the environment.”

However, Iceland’s then Minister of the Environment, Siv Friðleifsdóttir, notoriously overturned the agency’s ruling and permitted the construction. Although her act of overturning her own agency’s ruling is certainly a unique one, it was nevertheless fully harmonious with the mega-project’s overall modus operandi: For instance, during Alcoa and the Icelandic government’s signature ceremony in 2003, Friðrik Sophusson, then director of Landsvirkjun, and Valgerður Sverrisdóttir, then Minister of Industry, boasted of “bending all the rules, just for this project” while speaking to the US ambassador in Iceland.

A BIOLOGICAL WONDER TURNED INTO DESERT

As already mentioned, the destruction of Lagarfljót is only one of the dams irreversible impacts on the whole North-East part of Iceland, the most densely vegetated area north of Vatnajökull — the world’s largest non-arctic glacier — and one of the few regions in Iceland where soil and vegetation were more or less intact. Altogether, the project affects 3,000 square km of land, no less than 3% of Iceland’s total landmass, extending from the edge of Vatnajökull to the estuary of the Héraðsflói glacial river.

Sixty major waterfalls were destroyed and innumerable unique geological formations drowned, not to forget Kringilsárrani — the calving ground of a third of Iceland’s reindeer population — which was partly drowned and devastated in full by the project. In 1975, Kringilsárrani had been officially declared as protected but in order to enable the Kárahnjúkar dams and the 57 km2 Hálslón reservoir, Siv Fiðleifsdóttir decided to reduce the reserve by one fourth in 2003. When criticized for this infamous act, Siv stated that “although some place is declared protected, it doesn’t mean that it will be protected forever.”

The dams have also blocked silt emissions of the two aforementioned glacial rivers, Jökulsá á Dal and Jökulsá í Fljótsdal, resulting in the receding of the combined delta of the two rivers — destroying a unique nature habitat in the delta. In their 2003 article, published in World Birdwatch, ornithologists Einar Þorleifsson and Jóhann Óli Hilmarsson outlined another problem of great importance:

All glacier rivers are heavy with sediments, and the two rivers are muddy brown in summer and carry huge amounts of sediment, both glacial mud and sand. The Jökulsá á Dal river is exceptional in the way that it carries on average 13 times more sediment than any other Icelandic river, 10 million metric tons per year and during glacial surges the amount is many times more. When the river has been dammed this sediment will mostly settle in the reservoir.

In contravention of the claim that Kárahnjúkar’s hydro electricity is a “green and renewable energy source,” it is estimated that the reservoir will silt up in between forty and eighty years, turning this once most biologically diverse regions of the Icelandic highlands into a desert. While this destruction is slowly but systematically taking place, the dry dusty silt banks caused by the reservoir’s fluctuating water levels are already causing dust storms affecting the vegetation of over 3000 sq km, as explained in Einar and Jóhann’s article:

The reservoir will be filled with water in autumn but in spring 2/3 of the lake bottom are dry and the prevailing warm mountain wind will blow from the south-west, taking the light dry glacial sediment mud in the air and causing considerable problems for the vegetation in the highlands and for the people in the farmlands located in the valleys. To add to the problem the 120 km of mostly dry riverbed of Jökulsá á Dal will only have water in the autumn, leaving the mud to be blown by the wind in spring.

This development is already so severe that residents of the Eastfjords municipality Stöðvafjörður, with whom Saving Iceland recently spoke, stated that the wind-blown dust has been of such a great deal during the summers that they have often been unable to see the sky clearly.

All of the above-mentioned is only a part of the Kárahnjúkar dams over-all impacts, about which one can read thoroughly here. Among other factors that should not be forgotten in terms of hydro power would be the dams’ often underestimated contribution to global warming — for instance via reservoirs’ production of CO2 and methane (see here and here) — as well as glacial rivers’ important role in reducing pollution on earth by binding gases that cause global warming, and how mega-dams inhibit this function by hindering the rivers’ carrying of sediments out to sea.

TEXTBOOK EXAMPLE OF CORRUPTION AND ABUSE OF POWER

“Lagarfljót wasn’t destroyed by accident,” Andri Snær Magnason also said after the recent revelation, but rather “consciously destroyed by corrupt politicians who didn’t respect society’s rules, disregarded professional processes, and couldn’t tolerate informed discussion.” The same can, of course, be said about the Kárahnjúkar ecological, social and economical disaster as a whole, the process of which was one huge textbook example of corruption and abuse of power.

Responding to same news, Svandís Svavarsdóttir, Iceland’s current Minister of the Environment, cited a recent report by the European Environment Agency, titled “Late Lessons from Early Warnings,” in which the results of a major research project into mega-project’s environmental impacts and public discussion are published. One of the damning results, the report states, is that in 84 out of 88 instances included in the research, early warnings of negative impacts on the environment and public health proved to be correct.

This was certainly the case in Iceland where environmentalists and scientists who warned of all those foreseeable impacts, both before and during the construction, found themselves silenced and dismissed by the authorities who systematically attempted to suppress any opposition and keep their plans unaltered.

One of the most notorious examples of this took place after the publication of Susan DeMuth’s highly informative article, “Power Driven,” printed in The Guardian in 2003, in which she highlighted all the up-front disastrous impacts of the project. The reaction in Iceland was mixed: While the article served as a great gift to Icelandic environmentalists’ struggle — tour guide Lára Hanna Einarsdóttir suggesting “that an Icelandic journalist would have lost their job if he or she had been so outspoken” — the reaction of the project’s prime movers was one of fury and hysteria. Mike Baltzell, president of Alcoa Primary Development and one of the company’s main negotiators in Iceland, wrote to The Guardian accusing DeMuth of “creating a number of misconceptions” regarding the company’s forthcoming smelter. Iceland’s Ambassador in the UK and Landsvirkjun’s Sophusson took a step further, contacting the British newspaper in a complaint about the article’s content and offering the editor to send another journalist to Iceland in order to get “the real story” — an offer to which the paper never even bothered to reply.

Another example is that of Grímur Björnsson, geophysicist working at Reykjavík Energy at that time, who was forbidden from revealing his findings, which were suppressed and kept from parliament because they showed the Kárahnjúkar dams to be unsafe. His 2002 report, highly critical of the dams, was stamped as confidential by his superior at the time. Valgerður Sverrisdóttir, then Minister of Industry, subsequently failed to reveal the details of the report to parliament before parliamentarians voted on the dams, as she was legally obliged to do. Adding insult to injury, Grímur was finally deprived of his freedom of expression when his superior at Reykjavík Energy — taking sides with Landsvirkjun — prohibited him to speak officially about the Kárahnjúkar dams without permission from the latter company’s director at that time, Friðrik Sophusson.

THE SHADOW OF POLLUTED MINDS

Similar methods applied to the East-fjords and other communities close to the dams and the smelter, where the project’s opponents were systematically ridiculed, terrorized and threatened. One of them is Þórhallur Þorsteinsson who, in a thorough interview with newspaper DV last spring, described how he and other environmentalists from the East were persecuted for their opposition to the dams. In an attempt to get him fired from his job, politicians from the region even called his supervisor at the State Electric Power Works, for which he worked at the time, complaining about his active and vocal opposition. Another environmentalist, elementary school teacher Karen Egilsdóttir, had to put up with parents calling her school’s headmaster, demanding that their kids would be exempt from attending her classes.

Farmer Guðmundur Beck — described by DeMuth as “the lone voice of resistance in Reyðarfjörður” — was also harassed because of his outspoken opposition towards the dams and the smelter. After spending his first 57 years on his family’s farm where he raised chicken and sheep, he was forced to close down the farm after he was banned from grazing his sheep and 18 electricity pylons were built across his land. Moreover, he was literally ostracised from Reyðarfjörður where Alcoa’s presence had altered society in a way thus described by Guðundur at Saving Iceland’s 2007 international conference:

In the East-fjords, we used to have self-sustaining communities that have now been destroyed and converted into places attracting gold diggers. Around the smelter, there will now be a community where nobody can live, work or feed themselves without bowing down for “Alcoa Director” Mr. Tómas.* — We live in the shadow of polluted minds.

(*Mr. Tómas” is Tómas Már Sigurðsson, Managing Director of Alcoa Fjarðaál at that time but currently president of Alcoa’s European Region and Global Primary Products Europe. Read Guðmundur’s whole speech in the second issue of Saving Iceland’s Voices of the Wilderness magazine.)

A LESSON TO LEARN?

All of this leads us to the fact that Icelandic energy companies are now planning to go ahead and construct a number of large-scale power plants — most of them located in highly sensitive geothermal areas — despite a seemingly non-stop tsunami of revelations regarding the negative environmental and public health impacts of already operating geothermal plants of such size. This would, as thoroughly outlined by Saving Iceland, lead to the literal ecocide of highly unique geothermal fields in the Reykjanes peninsula as well as in North Iceland.

Two of the latter areas are Þeistareykir and Bjarnarflag, not far from river Laxá and lake Mývatn, where Landsvirkjun wants to build power plants to provide energy to heavy industry projects in the north. Large-scale geothermal exploitation at Hellisheiði, south-west Iceland, has already proven to be disastrous for the environment, creating thousands of earthquakes and a number of polluted effluent water lagoons. The Hellisheiði plant has also spread enormous amounts of sulphide pollution over the nearby town of Hveragerði and the capital area of Reykjavík, leading to an increase in the purchasing of asthma medicine. Another geothermal plant, Nesjavallavirkjun, has had just as grave impacts, leading for instance to the partial biological death of lake Þingvallavatn, into which affluent water from the plant has been pumped.

Responding to criticism, Landsvirkjun has claimed that the Bjarnarflag plant’s effluent water will be pumped down below lake Mývatn’s ground water streams. However, the company has resisted answering critical questions regarding how they plan to avoid all the possible problems — similar to those at Hellisheiði and Nesjavellir — which might occur because of the pumping and thus impact the ecosystem of Mývatn and its neighbouring environment. In view of this, some have suggested that Iceland’s next man made ecological disaster will be manifested in a headline similar to last month’s one — this time stating that “Mývatn is dead!”

Concluding the current Lagarfljót scandal — only one manifestation of the foreseen and systematically warned of Kárahnjúkar scandal — the remaining question must be: Will Icelanders learn a lesson from this textbook example of political corruption and abuse of power?

Recent polls regarding the coming parliament elections on April 27, suggests that the answer is negative as the heavy-industry-friendly Framsóknarflokkur (The Progressive Party), for which both Siv Friðleifsdóttir and Valgerður Sverrisdóttir sat in parliament, seems to be about to get into power again after being all but voted out of parliament in the 2007 elections. Following the Progressives, the right-wing conservative Sjálfstæðisflokkur (The Independence Party) is currently the second biggest party, meaning that a right-wing government, supportive of — and in fact highly interrelated to — the aluminium and energy industries, is likely to come into office in only a few days from now.

In such a case, Iceland will be landed with the very same government that was responsible for the Kárahnjúkar disaster as well as so many other political maleficences, including the financial hazardousness that lead to the 2008 economic collapse and Iceland’s support of the invasion in Iraq — only with new heads standing out of the same old suits. Sadly but truly, this would fit perfectly with the words of Dario Fo’s Maniac when he states on behalf of the establishment:

Let the scandal come, because on the basis of that scandal a more durable power of the state will be founded!

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 purpose of the interpellation, a written parliamentary question, was to heighten awareness of the following little-known police structures:

• the Cross-Border Surveillance Working Group (CSW), comprising mobile task forces on surveillance techniques, drawn from 12 EU Member States and Europol;
• Europol’s analysis work file entitled Dolphin, which entails the surveillance of left-wing activists in areas such as animal rights and anarchism;
• the Remote Forensic Software User Group, which was created by the Bundeskriminalamt, the German Federal Criminal Police Office, to promote sales of German Trojan software abroad.
• the European Cooperation Group on Undercover Activities (ECG), comprising spy chiefs from Member States of the EU and from countries such as Russia, Switzerland, Turkey and Ukraine;
• the International Working Group on Undercover Policing (IWG), comprising spy chiefs from European countries as well as from countries such as the United States, Israel, New Zealand and Australia;

Hunko went on to say:

“One of the main parts of the interpellation focused on the undercover activity of British police officer Mark Kennedy, whose infiltration of European leftist movements exemplifies police cooperation conducted beyond the bounds of parliamentary oversight. It remains unclear under whose orders the undercover investigator was operating during the years of his activity.

Kennedy used his infiltration of the Icelandic environmental movement to worm his way into leftist circles from Finland to Portugal through the information events he staged. The Icelandic police are stubbornly rejecting requests from the Minister of Justice to release full details of his activity into the public domain, claiming that disclosure would prejudice British security interests. Even though Members of the Icelandic Parliament have a right to ask questions on police matters, they are not being given any information.

The exposure of the British police officer, by contrast, has been the focus of deliberations in the European Cooperation Group on Undercover Activities (ECG), of which Iceland is not a member. The Federal Government has not revealed the substance of German and British contributions to this discussion. The remit of the ECG, which meets behind closed doors, includes the creation of false identities and the examination of legal frameworks in the countries that send and host undercover agents.

Foreign police officers must obtain authorisation before entering the territory of a sovereign state. They must not commit any criminal offences during their stay. Kennedy, however, sought to impress activists in Berlin by setting fire to a refuse container. Arrested by the police, he even concealed his true identity from the public prosecutor. This is illegal, as the Federal Government has indicated now.

Last year, Germany, together with Britain, urged the European Commission to exempt cross-border undercover activities from a planned new directive establishing a European Investigation Order. This would also make parliamentary oversight of such activities even more difficult.

The necessity of this parliamentary oversight is illustrated by the government use of software to hack into personal computers. In 2008, the German Federal Criminal Police Office established a cross-border Remote Forensic Software User Group with a view to helping police forces in other countries to introduce German spyware.

The Federal Criminal Police Office has also sent delegations to Canada, Israel, the United States and other countries to discuss Trojan programs with police forces and intelligence services. Although the German supreme court had imposed rigid limits in 2007 on the widespread practice of searching entire computer systems, representatives of the Criminal Police Office travelled to the United Kingdom and other destinations to ‘share experience’ on that practice.

Even in the national context it is difficult to detect illegal practices on the part of police forces and intelligence services. Securing judicial convictions for criminal offences is even harder. How much more, then, must the increasingly cross-border nature of police cooperation muddy these waters.

This is why the activity of undercover police networks must be relentlessly exposed. This applies especially to cooperation with the private business sector, which became just as blatant in the case of spyware as it had been in the criminalisation of animal-rights activism, to the benefit of British companies such as Gamma International, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca.

I call on the UK Government to disclose all information regarding the activity of Mark Kennedy in Germany and to inform all interested parties retrospectively of his activity. This is the only way in which key questions can be answered, such as whether he had sexual relations on false pretences with targets or contacts in Germany, as he did in the UK.

I must assume in any case that the use of British undercover agents to infiltrate left-wing movements was unlawful, because no police officer is allowed to spend years investigating activists in the absence of any specific grounds for suspicion or any other defined investigative objective.”
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Click here to download the answer to the parliamentary question concerning secretly operating international networks of police forces (in English).

Follow the Mark Kennedy tag on Saving Iceland’s website in order to find further information, news, articles and press releases regarding the Mark Kennedy affair.

The Mark Kennedy case illustrated how deeply Iceland is involved in European secret police networks that have been infiltrating environmentalist, anarchist and other leftist resistance movements since the late 1990s. The exposure of the undercover policeman also showed that it is near impossible to bring illegal practises of cross-border policing to courts: It is mostly unclear, which police authority in which country is responsible. In 2005 Kennedy infiltrated the Saving Iceland campaign, which resisted the dams at Kárahnjúkar in Iceland’s eastern highlands. He used his Icelandic connections and experience for a European-wide speaking tour to infiltrate activist groups in numerous countries.

Iceland is also involved in policing the EU migration regime, which will start the huge surveillance network EUROSUR in two years. This satellite surveillance involving usage of drones is complemented by the “Smart Border Package” facilitating border crossing by using biometric features and other technical tools. At the same time the EU changes the Schengen Border Codex, in which Iceland is also taking part. The agreement was one of the most important achievements for free travel within the EU. Now France and Germany constrain more border controls to block international protesters or exclude countries like Greece from the Schengen system. Iceland uses the measure, for example, to control the movements of motorcycle gangs.

To block unwanted migrants crossing the Evros river between Greece and Turkey, the EU is running a research program regarding the usage of land robots for border surveillance. The EU border agency FRONTEX, for which the Icelandic Coast Guard has worked in the Mediterranean, is now operating together with the Turkish government and is helping to install a police and customs centre at the common border with Bulgaria and Greece. For the first time, this structure includes the police agency EUROPOL, whose guidelines normally exclude the fight against migration.

To the contrary, the main pillar of EUROPOL becomes the control of so called “cybercrime” and “cyberterrorism”. The agency is running large databases, surveillance technology and digital forensic tools to support the police forces of the 27 member states in cross-border operations. EUROPOL is more and more controlling alleged “suspicious” behaviour on the internet, which leads to more need of safety for cyber activists as well as all citizens.

In his talk, Monroy will explain briefly the police networks built up by the European Union concerning undercover policing, the fight against unwanted migration and cyberspace. Monroy will also attempt to explain how Iceland is involved in or affected by current and future projects.

The talk will take place in the Reykjavík Academia, which also houses Iceland’s only anarchist library, on Monday July 23 at 20:00. The Academia is located at Hringbraut 121, 107 Reykjavík. The talk will be in English and entrance is free.

For more information write to savingiceland [at] riseup.net

Saving Iceland’s archive of articles regarding the Mark Kennedy case

Matthias Monroy, journalist and political activist

On May 21, however, DV published an interview with Þórhallur Þorsteinsson, one of the people from Eastern Iceland who had the courage to oppose the construction. In the interview, which turns Janne’s claims upside down, it emerges how heavy the oppression was in the East during the preamble and the building of the dams and smelter was — people where “oppressed into obedience” as Þórhallur phrases it. He talks about his experience, loss of friends, murder threats, the attempts of influential people to dispel him from his work, and the way the Icelandic police — and the national church — dealt with the protest camps organized by Saving Iceland, which lead him to wonder if he actually lived in a police state.

Þórhallur Þorsteinsson is one of the people from Eastern Iceland who protested against the construction of the Kárahnjúkar dams. For that sake, he was bandied about as an “environmentalist traitor”, accused of standing in the way of the progress of society. Influential people attempted to dispel him from his job, he had to answer for his opinions in front of his employers, and his friends turned against him. The preparations for the construction started in 1999, but the construction itself started in 2002. The power plant started operating in 2007 but the wounds have not healed though a few years have passed since the conflict reached its climax.

“There are certain homes here in Egilsstaðir that I do not enter due to the conflict. Before, I used to visit these homes once or twice a week. I am not sure if I would be welcome there today. Maybe. But in these homes I was, without grounds, hurt so badly that I have no reason to go there again. Now I greet these people but I have no reason to enter their homes. I was virtually persecuted,” Þórhallur says, sitting in an armchair in his home in Egilsstaðir.

His home bears strong signs for his love of nature, his bookshelves are filled with books about the Icelandic highlands, nature and animals. For decades, Þórhallur has travelled in the highlands and did thus know this area [the land destroyed by the Kárahnjúkar dams] better than most people. “I had been travelling in this area for decades. I had gone there hiking and driving and I have also flown over it. I went there in winters just as in the summers. I went there as a guide and I knew the area very well. So I am not one of those who just speak about this area but have never got to know it.”

Not only did he know the land but also cared for it. He was hurt to see it drowned by the reservoir and has never managed to accept its destruction. “I am immensely unhappy with everything regarding this project. The dams, the [Alcoa] aluminium smelter, the environmental impacts, and additionally, it has not brought us what was expected. Thus I find hardly anything positive about this,” Þórhallur says.

“The sacrifice of this part of the highlands, the environmental impacts of these constructions, just can not be justified. Waterfalls by the dozen, many of them extremely beautiful, are rapidly disappearing and are just about waterless. A highly remarkable land went under water, under the reservoir, for instance Hálsinn which was the main breeding ground for reindeer. Additionally, this was the only place in Iceland with continuous vegetation from the sea, all the way up to the glacier. This has now be interrupted by Hálslón [the reservoir].”

The Resistance in the East

During the journalist’s trip around Eastern Iceland, many of the locals spoke a lot about how artists from 101 Reykjavík [the center of the city] protested against the construction. Þórhallur, however, points out that the original resistance against the project was formed in the local region. “People tend to forget this fact all the time, as they only speak about 101 Reykjavík. Before the conflict started, an association for the protection of Eastern Iceland’s highlands was founded here. It was founded with the purpose of opposing the construction — Kárahnjúkar had not even entered public discussion at that point although we, of course, knew about it.”

About thirty people joined the inaugural meeting and agreed upon the importance of such an association. Soon, a few people left the organization. “Those who had an opposite opinion compared to what people generally thought about the project were oppressed. The picture was painted in a way suggesting that the residents of Eastern Iceland should stand together. The rest of us, who were against the project, were not considered true members of this society. And we were not good citizens at all. In people’s minds, we were traitors. We were the people who wanted to send people back to the turf huts, as they used to say. We were said to be against development, against creating a good future for our children. All this was thrown at us, that the children would not come back home after studying, that they would not get any jobs. By opposing the construction, I was, in these people’s minds, taking away their children’s future livelihood, preventing the creation of jobs, and lowering real estate prices here in the east. I got to hear all of this. This is how it was.”

The First Protests

At a certain point, the verbal abuse was taken further than can be considered normal. “My life was threatened. A man that I used to work with met me in the street and said that I ought to be shot. Of course, it was painful to live through this, it hurt because they were trying to oppress me. They personified the issue so they could portray me as if I was taking something away from people, as if I was preventing the people here from living an ordinary life. This was the attitude.

I have lived here since I was a little kid and from early age I have been contributing to this community. I have partaken in building it up, socially and as an individual. I have been here all my life. Despite my opposition to this construction, I did not consider myself being any less of a member of this community. Nothing of what I have done justifies the accusations of me wanting to ruin this community. I was simply against this construction. But just like others, I was to be suppressed into obedience.”

Despite all this, Þórhallur refused to throw away his ideals and stay silent. Determined not to be silenced, he continued his fight with both words and actions. “I am probably the only resident in Eastern Iceland who ever has been fined for opposing the Kárahnjúkar dams [in fact Gudmundur Mar Beck, farmer at Kollaleyra in Reydarfjordur (site of the ALCOA smelter) was also fined a hefty sum for protesting against the project. Ed. SI.org]. Along with others, I blockaded a bridge over river Besstastaðaá and was fined,” he says and adds that he did happily pay the fine. “This action was symbolic for the situation at that time, as a token of the fact that the case had become insolvable. We didn’t intend to completely prevent these people from continuing their way,” Þórhallur says. These people were the board of Landsvirkjun [Iceland’s national energy company] as well as Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir, then mayor of Reykjavík [later Minister for Foreign Affairs in the government that was toppled by protesters during the winter of 2008-9], and the area that was at stake at that time was Eyjabakkar wetlands. “We read two statements out loud, from the Association for the Protection of Eastern Iceland’s Highlands, and after that the protest was over.”

He does not regret this, even though he had to face the consequences his actions. “I was there in my spare time but at this time I worked for the The State Electric Power Works. Following the protest, we witnessed one of the worst witch-hunting periods in the history of Eastern Iceland. The severity is very memorable to me.”

Harsh Attacks

This protest had been organized by Þórhallur as well as Karen Egilsdóttir, who was an elementary school teacher, and Hrafnkell A. Jónsson, who has now passed away. “Parents phoned the school’s headmaster and demanded that their kids would not have to go to her classes. Politicians in the East systematically tried to get me fired from my job. They phoned both the State’s and the Region’s electric utility directors, demanding that I would be fired because of a thing I did in my spare time. These same men constantly interrupted the Chairman of RARIK [Iceland State Electricity] and I had to stand up for my opinions. I had to show up in front of the Region’s electric utility director and proof that I had been at the protest during my spare time. And as my words were not enough, I had to get my supervisor to come and proof it. Everything was tried. It was harsh.

And when I was informed that very influential people in the East, respected members of their society, were trying to get back at me and get me dispelled from work because of my opinions, I got a very strange feeling regarding what kind of a society I live in.

I also witnessed the behaviour of the police who chased protesters around the highlands, which made me wonder if I lived in a police state. The police tried to prevent protesters from resting by putting wailing sirens on during the middle of the nights, they constantly drove past them and around their cars, took photographs during darkness using flash, and blocked roads so that people could not bring them food. I saw all of this taking place.”

Always Knew of More Opponents

For two years in a row, the protesters set up camps in the highlands. During the first summer [2005], the protest camp was pitched on a land owned by the Bishop’s Office. “The church’s tolerance was not greater than so that the Bishop’s Office asked for the protesters to be removed. The second year I brought them food by taking an alternate route to their camp when the police had closed the main road. I supported these people because they were doing a job that many of us here, the locals, could not do. They were protesting against something that very few people from the East felt up to, due to the way those who dared to protest were treated. We were monitored and the word, about what kind of a people we were, was spread around. That is the reason why many people contacted me, people who otherwise did not dare to voice their opinion, did not dare to join the struggle. I always knew that I spoke on behalf of more people than just myself.”

Thus, when Saving Iceland contacted Þórhallur, he was more than willing to help. He was a spokesperson of the Icelandic Touring Association and explained to Saving Iceland that it would be just about impossible to expel them from the camping area at Snæfell, which had been open to the public for many decades. Eventually, a ten days long camp was to be set up there. “Then the word started to spread and I received a phone call from the Bishop’s Office, asking me if we could stop the camp from taking place. I told them that this camping area had been open to the public ever since the hut was built, but I invited them to come to the East and try to expel them themselves. A few days later, Landsvirkjun’s public relation manager called me and brought up the same thing. He asked about the possibility of putting a limit on the amount of people allowed to stay at the camp, if the health and safety authorities would agree upon this amount of people, etc. etc. I told him the same: “This is an open camping area and we do not choose who gets to stay and who not.” You get the picture of how the situation was at this time.”

Not everybody was happy within the Touring Association. “Some of the board members were against it and conflicts took place within the association. I asked them what they intended to do, if the Association would then, in the future, pick out people allowed onto the camping areas. I said to them: These people just enter the camping area, follow the current rules and pay their fee. While so, we can not do anything. Then, some of the people realized how far they had stepped over limits.

So the protesters came to Snæfell and stayed for ten days. That worked out pretty well but then they went to other places [within the intended reservoir. Ed. SI] and came up against all sorts of misfortunes.”

A Protection Cancelled

He also points out how politicians behaved in the Kárahnjúkar issue. “It is interesting to look at the current discussion about the Energy Master Plan. Some people now say that politicians are interfering with specialists’ work. In that case, it is worth remembering the fact that the Kárahnjúkar dams were removed from the Master Plan and were only briefly considered in that context. Those who decided this were politicians. The project underwent an Environmental Impact Assessment and Iceland’s Planning Agency rejected it due to the drastic and irreversible environmental impacts. But then the case was simply taken into a political process and soon it was decided to go ahead and build the dams, despite the Planning Agency’s view that the environmental impacts were unacceptable.

The way this case was handled should actually be an ample reason for an investigation. This area’s official protection was cancelled so the land could be drowned. Never before had this happened in Iceland, but it was nevertheless done by Siv Fiðleifsdóttir, then Minister of the Environment. That is her monument: being the one Minister of the Environment, responsible for the most severe environmental destruction,” Þórhallur says plain-spoken.

The Old People Got Away

He believes that only the further damming of Þjórsárver wetlands would have been a even bigger environmental sacrifice. “Thereafter came Kárahnjúkar. But this is all about politics, Icelanders have no time for politics. The Danes have done fine without heavy industry. This is always just a question of a political policy, and for decades, the inhabitants of Reyðarfjörður [where the Alcoa smelter is located] have been promised that someone will come and do something for them. In such a position, people tend to forget their survival instinct.

The exchange rate was way too high and all the local fishing industry left. Fishing company Skinney Þinganes moved all their business to Höfn in Hornafjörður, while Samherji [another seafood company incidentally owned by the family of Halldor Asgrimsson, one of two main perpetrators of the Karahnjukar dams] bought fishing quota from Stöðvarfjörður and Eskifjörður and took it away from there. But because an aluminium smelter was on its way, people believed that this was no problem. It is always possible to starve people into obedience. It is easy to change the mentality in such a way that it simply receives. All of a sudden the smelter appeared as some sort of a life buoy. The positive side of it is that now there are much younger people living in Fjarðabyggð [combined municipality of a few towns, including Reyðafjörður] than before. The old people got away. But behind this is the sacrifice. The sacrifice was too big and it was the whole region’s sacrifice. We sacrificed this for the benefits of a North American corporation. We sacrificed everything for too little. While all this took place, people were supposed to stand together and they spoke about the region as a totality. But immediately as the construction was over, all such solidarity disappeared.”

Direct and Indirect Payments

He is, nevertheless, able to understand why the region’s people were in favour of the construction and focused on getting a smelter. “I understand them very well, as they got something out of it. But it is clear that we got too little. 200 people from here work in the smelter, I think. 200 jobs — that is not enough for such a sacrifice. 500 jobs would also not have been enough when compared with the land that was destroyed. But people can be bought up if they are handed money. And I understand farmers who had never seen any real money but were all of sudden promised amounts which they would, in any other case, not have been able to even dream of. But is that the way we want it to be? That people can be mislead by money?

If they would have stood their ground and rejected all of , if the Fljótsdalshérað region would have rejected this, and the local politicians and the public — then this would never have become true. Now, some people state that we never had anything to say about it, but these are people who have a bad conscience because they did not fight against the construction.

Everywhere in the world, except Iceland, these “counterbalance steps” as they are called, would have been considered bribery. Basically, local politicians were bought up. Farmers and influential people were hired on good salaries and farmers got fertilizer to use on uncultivated land. All such indirect payments to influential people certainly have an impact on what decisions are made and on what premises they are made. Some farmers received compensation due to the destruction, but to pay compensation to only one generation is not acceptable. It would have made much more sense to link the compensation with the power plant’s electricity production and pay them to those living in the area on an annual basis.”

Gullfoss Falls Could be Forgotten

Asked about the actual value of the land now lost, Þórhallur answers: “This land used to be an attraction. The waterfalls that have now dried up, the vegetated land that went under water, the wilderness which is becoming increasingly precious. Being able to live with such quality is like nothing else. If well organized, hundreds of thousands of travellers could have been been shown this land without the land being harmed. Seen from a long-term perspective, that could have created more money than the dams.”

Think about the fact that the Gullfoss waterfalls and the hot spring Geysir did not use to be popular tourist places. It was not easy to get to them, say fifty or hundred years ago. We can not sacrifice something just because only a few people know about it. Using that same argument, we could as well dry up Gullfoss, as in a few decades we would forget about it and the next generations would not know what a beautiful waterfall used to flow there. We can not think in that way. One generation can not treat Iceland’s nature, this national treasure, in such a way.

I first drove to Hafrahvammar canyon in 1972 and, in fact, roads and paths have been there for many decades, but they were quite difficult to pass. That could easily have been changed and thus, the access to the area could have been increased.”

“The Same Horrific Situation Far and Wide”

In the end he says that the aluminium smelter has not lived up to society’s expectations. “It still has not been possible to staff the smelter with Icelanders. Only Icelandic-speaking people are hired there but despite all the unemployment and all the advertising, sub-contractors partly staff their companies with foreigners, as Icelanders are not willing to take on these jobs. The labour turnover has been about 25 percent. Despite the fiasco the nation has went through [the 2008 economic collapse], this is not considered a decent option for a working place.

Was the hole purpose of drowning this land, destroying this nature, drying up these waterfalls, to be able to import migratory workers from abroad? Do some of the unemployed people on Suðurnes not want to come to the East, move into all the empty apartments and work in the smelter in Reyðarfjörður? Isn’t there something wrong? Why do people not apply for jobs here?” Þórhallur asks and adds that the pot-rooms and the cast-house are not really desirable workplaces, though some other jobs in the smelter might lure some. “One has to work 12 hours shifts and I know no-one who works in the smelter and looks at it as their future job. I also know people who used to work there but quit because of the long shifts. They did not want to sacrifice their family life for the job. People will work there until they find a better job. If the economy recovers in a few years time, how will this end? Will we end up having to staff the smelter solely with foreign labour on season?

This was supposed to save everything but the same horrific situation is evident far and wide. The smelter had, for instance, no positive impacts in nearby places like Stöðvarfjörður and Breiðdalsvík.

The planned population increase in Eastern Iceland never took place, and as the senselessness was absolute, everything collapsed. No-one lives in the houses that were built — streets were laid but no houses built on them. The municipality is bankrupted, as it is expensive to go into such a construction and to sit up with this half-finished street-system. This situation might recover in a few decades, but it still was not worth it.”

This simply means that until spring last year, the police literally had a carte blanche regarding whom to spy on and for whatever reasons they chose. Unbeknownst the public, the instructions allowed unrestricted espionage.

“Good things happen slowly,” Björn Bjarnason, Iceland’s former Minister of Justice, wrote on his blog in March of last year when his successor in office, Minister of the Interior Ögmundur Jónasson, called for a press conference to announce that the police would soon be granted proactive investigation powers.

While Ögmundur and other Left Green MPs often criticised Björn for his aggressive efforts to increase police powers during the latter’s six years in office, he is now advocating for increased police powers as part of The State’s crusade against purported organised crime, which is believed to be predominantly manifested in a number of motorcycle gangs, including the Hells Angels.

A bill that he proposed to parliament last month does not contain the infinite investigation powers that the police have openly asked for, but does nevertheless allow them to start investigating people who they believe are planning acts that would fall under the category of organised crime and are punishable by at least four years of imprisonment.

While the case is usually presented as the police’s struggle to gain greater justifiable investigative powers — in which they have supposedly not fully succeeded — the fact is that, from at least July 1999 to May 2011, the police had unrestricted authority to monitor whomever they wanted due to poorly defined regulations.

THE HEADLINE THAT NEVER WAS

“UNRESTRICTED SPYING WAS PERMITTED!” should have appeared as a headline all over the Icelandic media last year. Yet it was strangely absent, despite an official acknowledgement from the Minister of Interior that this was indeed the case that unrestricted spying on Icelandic citizens had been tolerated and allowed. The matter concerned Mark Kennedy, the British police spy whose seven-year long undercover operations were exposed and reported in the international media last year. Disguised as activist ‘Mark Stone,’ he travelled through Europe collecting intelligence about anarchists, environmentalist and animal rights activists. He was for instance stationed in Iceland’s eastern highlands in 2005, where environmentalist network Saving Iceland was protesting the construction of the Kárahnjúkar dams.

In most of the countries where Kennedy operated — short of Ireland and Germany — the authorities have remained silent about the matter. But a newly released report on police units providing intelligence in the UK, carried out by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), clearly outlines the aim of the National Police Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), for which Kennedy worked: “the main objective of the NPOIU has been gathering intelligence” such as “knowledge about the infiltrated protest groups, their aims and links with other groups, their plans and methods, and the people involved in suspected serious crime.”

In other words, using proactive investigations to collect information so as to prevent possible action.

As Minister of Foreign Affairs Össur Skarphéðinsson remarked during a parliamentary discussion about Mark Kennedy last year, the Icelandic police did not have such powers in 2005 and still do not. That should have made any co-operation with the British spy illegal, just as any other proactive spying initiative would have been.

SO MANY MEN SO MANY MINDS

Following Kennedy’s exposé, Ögmundur called for an investigation of the Icelandic police authorities’ possible knowledge or collaboration with the British spy, which resulted in a report conducted by the National Police Commissioner’s National Security Unit (NSU). The report acknowledged that information regarding the protest camp at Kárahnjúkar, its organisers and participants, was passed to the Icelandic authorities. According to the report, this information then lead to a “collaboration with foreign police authorities concerning protest groups abroad and the intended protests under the banner of Saving Iceland.”

“This is the big news,” Ögmundur declared on his blog in May 2011, after the report was published. “Espionage was employed with the Icelandic authorities’ knowledge and will.” He emphasised this point in parliament last March, stating: “The infiltrator [Kennedy] was able to operate at Kárahnjúkar because of very unclear regulations regarding the police’s investigation methods. The legislation was far from strong enough, as well as there were rules in force that never appeared in front of the public.”

The rules he mentioned are instructions by the State Prosecutor from 1999. For some background: according to laws on criminal proceedings, the respective minister — Minister of Justice until 2010, Minister of the Interior since — should pass regulations regarding specific police protocols such as the use of informers and infiltrators. But these regulations did not exist until last May following a request by the National Security Unit. Instead they were substituted by those State Prosecutor’s instructions which, due to their less formal status (compared with laws and regulations) were not published in a conspicuous manner but rather filed away in drawers and cabinets, so to speak.

Although these instructions are hard too find, they still are accessible and, according to the document, their purpose was simply to “prevent criminal activities,” for instance with the use of an informer “who supplies the police with information about criminal activities or people linked with criminal activities.” Most notably, the document’s eleven pages are free of a single definition of what criminal activities the instructions concern, unlike the regulations created last spring, which are confined to “well-founded suspicion” of acts or plans of acts that are punishable by at least eight years of imprisonment.

This simply means that until spring last year, the police literally had a carte blanche regarding whom to spy on and for whatever reasons they chose. Unbeknownst the public, the instructions allowed unrestricted espionage. These powers are now partly lost due to Mark Kennedy’s exposé and the following the NSU investigation.

THE PERMISSIONS TO COME

While admitting that he had not even seen the bill submitted by Ögmundur last month, Snorri Magnússon, Chairperson of the Police Federation of Iceland, still maintained to newspaper Fréttablaðið that the proposed permissions were too limited. Snorri explained that the police want permissions similar to what their colleagues in Scandinavia work with which allow them, as he noted, to “lawfully monitor certain groups in society though they are not necessarily about to commit crimes today or tomorrow, and collect intelligence on them, which then might lead to official cases.”

This is not included in Ögmundur’s bill, which states that in order to justify the use of proactive investigation powers, the police has to know or suspect the planning of a violation of penal code article 175a, punishable with at least four years of imprisonment. Its execution has to be an operation of an “organised crime association” defined as a “companionship of three or more persons with the main objective to systematically commit criminal acts, directly or indirectly for profit.”

The bill has only been briefly debated in parliament and has yet to go through second and third discussion before undergoing voting. But judging on the discussion in parliament last month, it will receive majority support — only members of The Movement have seriously criticised the proactive investigation powers.

One of them, Margrét Tryggvadóttir, recently pointed out that the police seem to have quite a decent overview of the given crime groups, even claiming to know their exact number of members. Along with recent admissions that for the last couple of years the police has received judicial permissions for wire-tapping in more than 99% of requested instances, this got her to question the real need for increased powers. Author and film-maker Haukur Már Helgason echoed this criticism in a series of blog posts last year, nominating “the brand name Hell’s Angels” as “the biggest favour done to expansion-greedy police force.”

Nonetheless, the police and members of three parties who together make up two thirds of parliament are asking for more. In a parliamentary proposition submitted last year they ask the Minister of the Interior to prepare another bill, this time regarding the aforementioned Scandinavian investigation powers. The proposition is currently in the midst of parliamentary process and though Ögmundur might claim he does not like it, it is questionable if he could actually resist such a majority will. Additionally, recent polls suggest that the right wing conservative Independence Party will gain a majority in the coming 2013 parliamentary elections, in which case it is certain that the police will not have to wait too long for the “good things” to happen.

Despite what has been presented by official police statements and through most media coverage, this would certainly not be an indicative of a new period of increased investigation powers. It would be a step backwards into an already realised future.

German MP Andrej Hunko states that European police authorities are overtly and covertly planning increased surveillance of activists

Perhaps this is no longer common knowledge, but it still is a documented fact that the police authorities in the Western world operated in such a way throughout the whole of the 20th century.

“Though we have not yet managed to change the laws, we have managed to bring attention to the cause, which is very important.” So says Andrej Hunko who lately has been struggling against police spying on people involved with social movements in Europe. Hunko, who is a MP for the German left-wing party ‘Die Linke’, is concerned about the increased use of such espionage, especially as movements located on the political left wing are increasingly labelled as “leftist extremist and terrorists groups” that “have to” be monitored closely.

“I am concerned about this development. I am utterly opposed to the systematic criminalisation of international activists.” Among other things, Hunko, who is a member of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Parliament, points out that plans are now being made to co-ordinate the laws of the member-states of the European Union, so that police spies from one country will be able to operate in another country without the special permissions that have been required. Hunko believes that this will subvert the work of social movements in Europe. “All this is happening very quickly and without an informed discussion, neither among members of national parliaments nor among members of the European Parliament, not to mention the public in those countries.”

Espionage Permitted in Iceland

In the beginning of March, I met Hunko at his office in the German parliament. Having forgotten to bring my passport, I was at first denied entrance into the German parliament. A woman sitting at the reception shook her head with a strict expression and maintained that she could do nothing to help me. But as I stood bewildered in the building’s lobby, I was suddenly greeted by a tall, smiling man, whose gait was light, his hair long and gray. Before long the doors opened up and he invited me to come along. After passing through security guards and metal detectors we started our journey and Hunko spoke briefly about the parliament building — this huge wing that consumed the two of us as we walked up the stairs towards his office.

Those who have followed DV’s coverage about the case of Mark Kennedy, the British police spy and agent provocateur, do probably already recognize Andrej Hunko. He has continuously kept the Kennedy case in the spotlight in Europe and has demanded answers from both the German and the European Parliaments. As for a short revision, it can be mentioned that Mark Kennedy, who operated under the alias Mark Stone, infiltrated the Icelandic environmentalist movement Saving Iceland at Kárahnjúkar in 2005. There, Kennedy surveyed the group’s operations, recorded discussions, documented and gathered information, which he then passed on to the British police and possibly the Icelandic authorities as well.

An article published in DV in May last year under the title “Espionage Against Saving Iceland Permitted”, revealed that according to Icelandic laws, Kennedy was allowed to spy on Saving Iceland. This has never been refuted by the Icelandic police authorities and Hunko believes that just as the German police, the Icelandic police were aware of Kennedy’s activities.

Police-Saboteurs

During a telephone interview with DV about a year ago, Hunko stated his opinion that Kennedy’s case is a sign of the threat faced by European social movements. Now, a year later, he reiterated his concerns regarding that by using agent provocateurs like Kennedy, the police in Germany and other countries have in fact encouraged illegal actions within activist movements. In an open letter last year, Hunko appealed to the Icelandic authorities to investigate Kennedy’s operations in Iceland, wherein he mentioned that Kennedy did commit sabotage during protests in Germany and thereby broke the law. Though it has never been confirmed, it is possible that something similar happened in Iceland.

Such tactics are well known among agent provocateurs and are implemented so as to directly impact the development of protests, often to cause disturbances or to defame a particular cause. Agent provocateurs have increasingly become the topic of discussion within European and North American social movements, but such agents are rarely unveiled, as these are clear violations of the laws — something that most police authorities prefer not to be implicated with. However, Hunko points out that as Kennedy’s case has been confirmed and documented, studying it may help understanding the wider context. “It is, in fact, great that the Kennedy case merged to the surface, as now we have a confirmed example of the methods that are implemented. Nevertheless, I think we have a long way to go.”

“Travesty of Democracy”

“By planting agent provocateurs into social movements, where they directly influence the operations of these movements, the respective states have in fact started participating in the organization of political resistance. That way, they can affect the groups’ actions and defame them by violating the law, as happened in Kennedy’s case. Then we are witnessing a travesty of democracy, which in my opinion is a huge problem,” Hunko states, but he was already concerned about this development before Kennedy’s case entered public discussion last year. However, not until that particular case was exposed did international media start talking about police spying in a broader context.

Hunko explains how he had tried to bring the attention of German media to Kennedy’s case, but nothing happened until British newspaper The Guardian started reporting it. “So we needed the British media in order to reach the German media, which is a bit strange,” Hunko says and points out that in the beginning, the Kennedy case got people to seriously think about police spying within democratic societies. But today people have become indolent again. In the wake of the Kennedy scandal it was revealed that the police department that he worked for in the UK has now been disbanded. This is an example of how the wool is pulled over the eyes of the public, Hunko says, as another police department was simply established to take care of the same task.

Lack of Information

“Despite the high profile of Kennedy’ case, it is by no means the sole instance of such police espionage,” Hunko says and adds that similar examples have already surfaced in Germany. Kennedy himself has also admitted his knowledge of other spies operating in Europe. Hunko says that in the German parliament, clear rules regarding freedom of information have made it easy for him and his fellow party-members to obtain information about the case. Thus it was possible to expose the fact that the German police were fully aware of Mark Kennedy‘s presence in Germany.

“The problem, however, is that it is way more complicated to obtain such information in the European Parliament,“ Hunko says and adds that new regulations are now being created, regarding the co-operation of European police espionage departments. “I consider it one of my tasks to bring this information to the public.“

Hunko believes that the Icelandic police — just as the German police — were aware of Kennedy’s presence and intelligence-gathering in Iceland. The Icelandic police authorities have not denied this and in a report by the National Commissioner, published in May last year, it is stated that judging from “the available data”, it is not possible to make clear if Kennedy, when in Iceland, was or was not “in collaboration or with the will and knowledge of the Icelandic police.”

The report also emphasised that the police is, in fact, allowed to use spies and agent provocateurs during the investigations of criminal activities. But the report failed to fulfil its simple objective, that is to bring forward answers to questions by Iceland’s Minister of the Interior. “There is nothing in it, it is just some foam,” Birgitta Jónsdóttir, MP for Hreyfingin, said about the report. She openly asked for clear information about the Icelandic police’s possible knowledge of Kennedy’s presence in Iceland. But so far, no clear answers have appeared.

Ögmundur Wants Increased Investigation Powers

Following the report, Iceland’s Minister of the Interior, Ögmundur Jónasson, stated that law amendments were needed regarding these issues — that it was necessary to change the law in a way that it does not allow the planting of spies into groups of political dissidents. By admitting the importance of law amendments, he admitted that up until then, the police had been allowed to spy on and infiltrate political groups, due to loopholes in the body of laws. On 22 March this year, he emphasised this point in parliament, during a discussion on so-called increased police investigation powers.

It has been confirmed that when environmentalists protested against the construction of the Kárahnjúkar dams, a foreign infiltrator was planted into the group. It has been stated that this policeman violated laws and rules by his operations here and along Europe […] The infiltrator was able to operate at Kárahnjúkar because of how unclear the regulations were regarding the police’s investigation methods. The legislation was far from being strong enough and in addition to that, there were a few regulations in force that were never made available to the public. This has now been changed. About a year ago, new regulations were passed regarding the police’s special investigation methods and actions. These regulations prohibit any kind of proactive police investigations of grass-roots groups or political organizations. Thus it can be mentioned that today, an infiltrator would not be permitted to operate at Kárahnjúkar.

According to the above-stated, the minister believes that the new laws on pre-emptive investigation powers will prevent espionage of such kind. On the contrary, Hunko claims that as long as movements, located on the left-wing of politics, are still systematically labelled as “left-wing extremists and terrorist organizations”, the increased investigation powers will be used to spy on such groups, just as other “terrorist groups”. Thus it is only a matter of definition.

Well Known Methodology

When I mention how unbelievable this case has been, bringing to mind James Bond films from the 1970’s or something that took place in the Soviet Union, Hunko replies calmly: “There is nothing particularly Soviet about this. Western police authorities used spies and agent provocateurs throughout the whole 20th century, in order to infiltrate political movements that were believed to pose a threat to certain interests. What comes to mind at first is the Gladio Project, which was organized by NATO after the Second World War, with the aim of stopping the upswing of communism in Italy.”

The Gladio Project, which has been the subject of various books, was a secret army run by the CIA, the British secret service, the Pentagon and NATO. From the end of the Second World War and up until 1990, the army operated in Italy and its primary goal was to fight against the upswing of communism in West Europe by any means necessary. To that end, American and British soldiers collaborated closely with right-wing terrorists, as explained in a book by Daniele Ganser, ‘NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe’.

“The best kept, and most damaging, political-military secret since World War II,” was one of the ways The Observer used to describe the Gladio project after its exposure in 1990, while The Times stated: “The story seems straight from the pages of a political thriller.” In the wake of the exposure of the Gladio project in Italy in 1990, it became clear that such armies had been active in most Western European countries during the Cold War.

“Perhaps this is no longer common knowledge, but it still is a documented fact that the police authorities in the Western world operated in such a way throughout the whole of the 20th century,” Hunko says before he takes leave of me to continue preparations of questions that he plans to bring forward in parliament.

Eight women have filed legal action against the Metropolitan Police. Five officers have been named that have infiltrated leftist movements since the 1980’s, and used deceit to create sexual relationships with these women. Among them is the former undercover officer Mark Kennedy, who worked for the German police in the states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern und Baden-Wuerttemberg. The open statement of these women contradicts the claims of Kennedy, that he only had sexual relationships with two women.

Andrej Hunko further stated:

“The courageous step of these eight women must also have consequences in Germany.

According to media reports, Kennedy was operating in 22 countries. It follows then, that Kennedy likely also used such illegal tactics in these countries. In my opinion, the Kennedy operations went against the European Convention on Human Rights, Article 8, which protects the rights for private and family life, including the right to form relationships without unjustified interference by the state.

According to Mark Kennedy, it is unlikely that his commanding officers did not know about his sexual relationships. The women involved speak about an ‘institutionalised sexism within the police’.

Although the British Interior Minister announced a restructuring of the undercover operations earlier this year, it appears that only cosmetic changes have taken place. Further investigations have been delayed. The demands for an independent investigation commission has already been denied.

The German policing agencies responsible for the operations of Mark Kennedy must now release all information about his scandalous operation. The German National Criminal Police (BKA) must immediately open up the workings of this network: the police acted as a central point for these cross -border undercover exchanges, and took part in secret international working groups. A recently begun German-British initiative has attempted, at the EU level, to keep such undercover operations a large secret.

The British government must accept that in many countries, there is a need for strong investigations into this affair. Only then can there be the creation of a proper international, and especially independent investigation commission. Then the practices of these undercover officers could be exposed, whether they are in Iceland, Italy, France, Ireland, USA, Germany, or anywhere else”.

During a recent meeting of chairmen from all the member unions of the Icelandic Confederation of Labour (ASÍ), Hörður Arnarson, the director of the national energy company, Landsvirkjun, said that due to the current situation on international markets it would be enormously difficult for Norðurál to finance the 250 billion ISK smelter project. According to Vilhjálmur Birgisson, who attended the meeting, chairman of the Labor Union of Akranes (near to Grundartangi, where Century’s currently operating smelter is located),  Hörður spoke of the Helguvík project’s likelihood as very negligible. Another representative at the meeting, Kristján Gunnarsson, chairman of the Labour and Fishermen Union of Keflavík, stated that when asked about the possibility of Landsvirkjun selling energy to Norðurál, Hörður answered saying that no energy is really available for the project.

While it certainly is true that Landsvirkjun has, especially in the nearest past, had problems with financing, due to the international financial crisis as well as the Icelandic economy’s instability, the latter point – that no energy is actually available for Helguvík – is of more importance here. Environmentalists have, from the beginning of the Helguvík project, stated that the plans to harness energy for the smelter in geothermal areas on the Reykjanes peninsula, are not sufficient, for two reasons. Firstly, as the alleged size of the energy extraction is not sustainable and is more than likely to drain these unique natural areas for good. Secondly, because even if fully exploited, the geothermal areas would not produce enough energy for the smelter. Another energy source will be essential in order for the smelter to operate and even though Reykjavík Energy (OR) has promised Century some energy from a planned enlargement of their power plant in Hellisheiði, the aluminium producer still faces a serious lack of electricity for Helguvík.

It is here that Lower Þjórsá enters the picture. In November 2007 Landsvirkjun announced that the company would not supply any further energy to aluminium smelting in the South-West of Iceland, meaning Rio Tinto Alcan’s smelter Straumsvík, Century’s smelter in Grundartangi and the one planned in Helguvík. But many have doubted the truth behind this statement. In early June of 2008, when Saving Iceland activists gate-crashed Century Aluminum’s lack-of-permission-party in Helguvík, Saving Iceland highlighted the obvious lack of energy and asked if the planned damming of the river was meant for the smelter. Though Landsvirkjun has always denied those suggestions, several different signs have suggested the opposite.

Geologist Sigmundur Einarsson has  for the last couple of years repeatedly called attention to the inaccuracy concerning geothermal energy’s alleged sustainability and efficiency. In a new article about Reykjanes’ energy resources, Sigmundur once again points out the real energy figures and reveals that even if H.S. Orka is able to go ahead with its energy plans for Reykjanes – as mentioned above currently on hold due to an arbitration conflict between H.S. Orka and Century regarding energy prices – the Helguvík smelter will still lack between 310 and 390 MW. Sigmundur theorises that Century has from the beginning been aware of its slack energy situation, but used the cheap trick to simply start construction and thereby create expectations among the inhabitants of the Reykjanes peninsula. “Shallow-minded Icelandic politicians,” says Sigmundur, “were then supposed to bite the bait and sort out the energy by ordering Landsvirkjun to dam Lower Þjórsá (c.a. 200 MW) and sell it to Norðurál [Century] for a price accepted by the aluminium company.”

Not only does this theory full confirm Saving Iceland’s and other environmentalists’ repeated warnings not to let Century start construction of the Helguvík smelter, but now it also seems that at least a few high ranking officials have come to the same conclusion. Following Alcoa’s recent announcement about the company’s withdrawal from its years long planned Húsavík smelter, both Katrín Júlíusdóttir, minister of industry, and Hörður Arnarson, Landsvirkjun’s director, stated that Alcoa and other interested parties had created unrealistic expectations way ahead the establishing of the project’s key foundations. Thus it should not take them long to put two and two together, realizing that the same story applies to Helguvík – something that neither of them has been willing to seriously address until now.

To officially state the dead end of Century’s Helguvík dreams, Landsvirkjun would have to confirm that the planned Þjórsá dams are not meant for the smelter but for quite a while the company has been unwilling to openly discuss the Þjórsá project. The Þjórsá conflict actually splits the sitting government: While favored by the social-democrats of Samfylking, of which the minister of industry is a member, it is opposed by the Left Greens (VG). When asked about Þjórsá, Landsvirkjun now cites the Master Plan for the exploitation and protection of Iceland’s natural resources, currently in making, of which conclusions the company will wait for before any further comments. In a draft for a parliamentary solution regarding the Master Plan, the three planned Þjórsá dams are given a green light for construction. But this might change due to strong local opposition to the dams as well as the comments of a considerable number of people who protested against the project during a three months long open reviewing process, which was a part of the Master Plan’s making.

Albeit not necessary being the project’s one and only fundamental foundation, the protection of Lower Þjórsá would almost certainly mark the end of Century’s fantasies of a smelter in Helguvík. Until then the myth might live a bit longer.
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For more information about Century Aluminum, its operations in Iceland and the Helguvík crisis, see:

Century Aluminum Energy Questions

From Siberia to Iceland: Century Aluminum, Glencore and the Incestuous World of Mining

Believes Aluminium Plant Is Poisoning Sheep

National Energy Authority Fears Overexploitation of Geothermal Areas in Reykjanes

One of Iceland’s proudest assets is its energy grid. Geothermal energy, by 2010 figures, accounts for just over 26% of the country’s electricity, as well as 86% of its heating and hot water. Iceland’s geothermal energy technology has been shared with countries around the world, and has attracted the interests of foreign investors.

However, as comparatively cleaner for the environment geothermal power is not without its problems. One of these is the main elephant in the room: geothermal energy is not a renewable energy source. Boreholes that tap into the massive steam vents below the surface do not last forever. When Ross Beaty, CEO of Magma Energy (now a part of Alterra Power Corp.) made the specious claim that geothermal energy lasts for centuries, scientists such as Stefán Arnórsson and Sigmundur Einarsson were quick to point out that geothermal power in the Reykjanes area — where Magma sought to drill — only had enough power to last about 60 years at best. Although this point was seldom, if ever, brought up in any previous discussion about geothermal power in Iceland, more recent events have shown that geothermal energy is not just non-renewable; it can even pollute.

DON’T DRINK THE WATER

First of all, the steam that geothermal energy taps does release a number of harmful emissions. The International Geothermal Association released a report in 2002 showing that these emissions can include carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, methane and ammonia. These emissions are linked to global warming, and can do extensive environmental damage. Even the water itself can be poisonous — the scientific journal Environmental Contamination Toxicology published a study in 1997 which showed that waste water can contain chemicals such as mercury, arsenic and boron.

In order to reduce the amount of pollutants that geothermal power produces, it is necessary to take a number of precautions, such as recycling the steam through a series of compressors and pumps. The waste water needs to be channelled deep back into the ground, to prevent it from poisoning drinking water tables. Both of these precautions were outlined in the 2007 scholarly article ‘Strategic GHG reduction through the use of ground source heat pump technology’. This last point has been the centrepiece of the controversy surrounding one such plant in Iceland, Hellisheiðarvirkjun.

The largest power plant in Iceland — and slated to be the largest in the world once it reaches its full capacity — it is located in the geologically active Hengill area of southwest Iceland, comprised primarily of a chain of three volcanoes. The up-side of this is that a tremendous amount of power can be generated here: the plant estimates 400 megawatts will be reached once the two additional turbines added earlier this month as in full swing. The down-side is: geological activity means earthquakes.

The sheer amount of geological activity in the area cannot be underemphasised. Hundreds of tremors were reported in the Hengill area on a single day last September, and concerns were immediately raised that these tremors — some of them measuring 3 or higher on the Richter scale — could do damage to the pipeline that pumps waste water back into the ground, below drinking water tables. Steinunn Jakobsdóttir of the National Weather Service told Stöð 2 news at the time that larger quakes could not be ruled out.

The plant itself had already been targeted by environmentalists as damaging to the environment, from a developmental standpoint, with Saving Iceland trying to bring attention to the plant’s overall effects on the landscape. The notion that poisonous waste water could be broken free from pipes, and spilled into drinking water, turned the dial up on the anxiety.

NOTHING CAN POSSIBLY GO WRONG!

These concerns were immediately addressed by Bjarni Bjarnason, director of Orkuveita Reykjavíkur (Reykjavík Energy), the power company that oversees the plant. He told RÚV earlier this month that he did not believe waste water pipes were in any danger of being damaged by earthquakes, and added: “We see no danger [of waste water poisoning ground water] so long as we pump it at least 800 metres into the earth.”

But research done on the drilling does not necessarily support Bjarni’s claim. An environmental assessment conducted on the plant in 2006 by the South Iceland Health Supervisory Authority arrived at the conclusion that they “put a great deal of emphasis on closing the construction of the waste water disposal system and the area used to dispose of the water,” meaning that the area itself for pumping waste water back into the ground was far from ideal. Research conducted by the nearby municipality of Ölfus in March of this year concluded that there were not enough controls in place to even be able to handle the regular amount of waste water being produced under normal circumstances.

Despite these warnings, construction steamed ahead, and any criticism of waste water polluting drinking water was dismissed as alarmist. That is, until it was discovered that that’s exactly what happened.

STRANGE BREW

Only weeks ago, it was discovered that Hellisheiðarvirkjun had been pumping waste water containing hydrogen sulphide into drinking water tables, on and off, for two years. The reason? Before a new waste water borehole was completed last September, another one at the Gráuhnjúkar area had been used instead. This borehole did not have the capacity to deal with the amount of waste water it had to contend with, and so it released it, through a valve intended only for emergencies, into the drinking water tables.

Residents of nearby Hveragerði were less than pleased with this news, and called a town meeting demanding an explanation. They have been assured by Orkuveita Reykjavíkur that with the new waste water borehole in place, this practice will not continue. They also emphasised that their scientists do not believe the pumping of waste water into the ground will increase the risk of earthquakes. No mentions were made, however, on how well these pipes could hold up in the event of a strong enough quake — and strong earthquakes are not exactly uncommon to the area.

WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE US?

If geothermal power — Iceland’s crown jewel of green energy — is neither sustainable nor non-polluting, does this mean we need to turn exclusively to hydropower, which comprises the remainder of the country’s power source? What about oil, which is believed to lie beneath the seabed in Drekasvæði, the northern corner of Icelandic fishing waters?

There might not actually be a dichotomy at all — other green resources may exist. While Iceland is far from ideal when it comes to solar energy, and wave power is still proving to be both expensive to build and maintain, anyone who has ever visited the country can attest that if there is one thing Iceland has plenty of, it’s wind.

A research group assembled by Landsvirkjun in 2010, working in conjunction with Icewind — a pan-Scandinavian team looking to develop wind power in the Nordic countries — has concluded that wind power is a very realistic option for Iceland. They believe that building wind turbines in the southwest would be the best option.

Úlfar Linnet, an energy expert at Landsvirkjun, told Fréttablaðið that the matter should be explored seriously. “The goal is to have Iceland in step with the other Nordic countries,” he said in part. “We’re starting at zero, as a windmill has never been raised in Iceland. But we’re making progress.”

In fact, just last July Icelander Haraldur Magnússon successfully raised a 30 KW windmill on top of Hafnarfjall mountain, which immediately went into operation. MP Mörður Árnason — who is also the chairperson of the National Energy Authority Research Fund — believes that while figures do not seem to indicate that wind power is a competitive option at the moment, that it would be hasty to dismiss the option altogether. Indeed, there are many vast, uninhabited and perpetually windy areas in Iceland, particularly in the Highlands, which would make ideal grounds for a wind farm.

Whether the Icelandic government devotes more time and energy into exploring wind power remains to be seen. In the meantime, Hellisheiðarvirkjun is inadvertently repeating the point that geothermal power is not as green as it seems, and that it may be time for Iceland to put its pride and joy to rest.
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For further information and analysis see:

Saving Iceland’s Increased Sulphur Pollution in Reykjavík Due to Geothermal Expansion in Hellisheiði.

Miriam Rose’s and Jaap Krater’s Development of Iceland’s Geothermal Energy for Aluminium Production – Download as PDF.

Anna Andersen’s Reykjavík Energy in Deep Water: The Untold Story of Geothermal Energy in Iceland.

It is funny how things can turn around. For decades, Iceland languished in neoliberal hell, with signs of opposition few and far between. Meanwhile the opposition to the neoliberal order of things grew all over the world—with massive protests in Seattle, Genoa and elsewhere—and the beginnings of a world-wide anti-globalisation movement represented by the World Social Forum, first held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001. Almost nobody in Iceland did or said anything to support these powerful movements against the neoliberal order, with the exception of the brave Saving Iceland organisation. Even the considerable activism surrounding the anti-imperialist campaigns against American military presence in Iceland seemed to die completely down in around 1990. Neoliberalism reigned, Iceland supported the Iraq invasion in 2003 and nobody said or did anything.

Everything changes

In 2008, everything suddenly changed. The Icelandic banks collapsed, and out of nothing there grew an immensely powerful protest movement, leading to the collapse of the ideological hegemony of neoliberal order in Iceland. It was symbolised by the January events of 2009, when saucepans and pots were taken into use by protesters, who drummed the right wing neoliberal government out of office in the last week of January.

Suddenly everyone and her brother was involved in organising some sort of protest, with many thousands turning up at rallies in the centre of town on a regular basis, and hundreds or thousands of people involved in organising alternatives to the prevailing neoliberal order.

Even the president of the country, who had been one of the cheerleaders of neoliberalism, suddenly turned into an invaluable ally of the protest movement against the financial system, enabling two national referendums on the Icesave issue. Under the leadership of Eva Joly a criminal investigation into the whole neoliberal financial scam of the nineties and noughties was organised, and a very thorough investigation on the causes of the collapse was initiated by the Icelandic parliament. There was even a Constitutional Assembly, which was meant to write a new constitution for the country.

Right wing, left wing: both neoliberals

To be sure, instead of the rightwing neoliberal government a leftwing neoliberal government ascended to power after parliamentary elections in April 2009. That was surely not the intention of the saucepan revolutionary movement, and the situation in Iceland has been tense since. An important part of the original protest movement has been paralysed, as it has seen it as its duty to defend the “left” government against what it sees as attacks organised by the right. So the most radical part of the original saucepan protesters, those who are of the opinion that the “left” government is just another neoliberal government, has found tactical allies among the right wing parties, and this alliance has had some victories, like the rejection of the Icesave treaties.

But the Icelandic protest movement against neoliberalism has been powerful enough to inspire people outside Iceland. Yes, indeed, people abroad have really been inspired by Iceland! This was first evident around the Icesave referendum on March 6, 2010. The international anti-globalisation movement followed it closely, for example the Jubilee movement, the international Attac movement and the Tax Justice Network.

Congratulations rained on Icelandic activists after the Icesave treaty was rejected, the so-called Icesave II treaty, wherein Icelandic taxpayers were supposed to pay large sums of money to the citizens of the Netherlands and the UK because of the collapse of the Icelandic bank Landsbankinn. Icelandic taxpayers refused to take responsibility for the wheelings and dealings of the international financial oligarchs, and this was widely admired by anti-neoliberal activists everywhere.

Rumours

But there was more to come. In 2010, rumours started to circulate on the Internet among activists, especially in those former provinces of the Roman Empire comprising the present day lands of Spain, Portugal and France, that there had been some sort of a quiet revolution in Iceland. This revolution was supposed to have been almost systematically shut out of the world media, in order not to present a possible model for revolution in other countries. These rumours appeared on French and Spanish websites, and at last they acquired some sort of critical mass. In December 2010 and January 2011, Attac Iceland started to receive a lot of questions about the quiet revolution in Iceland from members of Attac France and Attac Spain. Activists even started to visit Iceland to find out about the quiet revolution.

When Attac Iceland was slow to respond—and when it did it would not be ready to agree that there had been any sort of revolution in Iceland—it was pointed out by the international activists that the Icelandic banks had been nationalised, that the government had been forced from power, that the governors of the Central Bank of Iceland had been replaced, that Iceland had shown true grit by the rejection of the Icesave treaty. All of which was true, but Attac Iceland has not interpreted this as a revolution, even if it certainly can be viewed as a very powerful and successful protest movement, one of the most powerful popular responses to the collapse of the neoliberal order, and up until 2011 certainly the most powerful. And quiet it was not, as those activists who have come from Spain, Portugal and France to Iceland to investigate have found out.

Iceland as a model of revolt

Then in December 2010, Tunisia erupted in revolt. Egypt followed, and the world watched in amazement as country after country in the Arab world arose in revolution against the established order of American imperialist rule and the rule of US supported despots. There were certainly some references to the Icelandic revolt in these movements. And in May 2011 Spain erupted, with the M-15 movement and the Indignados movement forming as a powerful protest wave against the neoliberal order. Here the references to the Icelandic movement were numerous and quite visible, with public squares in Palma, Mallorca, renamed after Iceland in honour of the quiet revolution, the Icelandic flag being waved on numerous occasions and Facebook groups organised in honour of the Icelandic movement.

This was certainly a rather dramatic turnaround in the position of Iceland in relation to the neoliberal world order. Suddenly Iceland had turned from a model of the quiet, obedient neoliberal outpost, to become a model of protest movements around the world against this same neoliberalism.

The revolution that nobody wants to talk about

Then in the summer of 2011 the indignados started coming to Iceland themselves, organising TV-crews in order to document the Icelandic revolution. And, indeed, they did not find a quiet revolution: In the words of Portuguese document film maker Miguel Marques, who was here in August and extensively documented the activities of the Icelandic movement, the Icelandic revolution was anything but quiet. Another crew came from Spain and interviewed the Icelandic activists, and in October there will be a Venezuelan crew documenting Icelandic activism for the big South American TV network teleSUR.

So, for the Icelandic activists and anti-neoliberalist, the situation is a bit awkward. When finally Iceland produces something worthy of admiration of the international activist community, the activist groups in Iceland have been reluctant to admit to it being what the foreigners perceive it to be. Why is this? Why is the powerful protest movement in Iceland not lauded or presented in a positive light by the Icelandic activists? This is mostly because of the political situation in Iceland.

On one hand, the media, mostly right wing, the academics, mostly right wing or centre left neoliberals, and others of the talking and writing classes have very limited interest in promoting the Icelandic saucepan revolution. On the other hand many in the protest movement now support a neoliberal “left” government in the vain hope that it will eventually, in the distant future, maybe deliver on something of value, and this supports hinders any positive evaluation of the protest movement after the ascend of the “left” government. The radical parts of the protest movement do not have a positive evaluation of the results of the movement, exactly because the results of the parliamentary elections in April 2009 were that the neoliberal dominance in politics continued. So nobody seems interested in taking credit for the very real and positive results of the Icelandic protest movement 2008–2011.

Originally published in the Reykjavík Grapevine.

On Friday September 2, two men appeared in court in downtown Reykjavík. It wasn’t their first time—and it probably won’t be their last. If found guilty, the defendants, Haukur Hilmarsson and Jason Thomas Slade, face up to six years in prison, due to a peculiar action on their behalves that marks a turning point in Icelandic asylum-seeker affairs.

On the morning of July 3, 2008, Haukur and Jason darted onto the runway of Leifur Eiríksson International Airport in Keflavík, hoping to prevent a flight from departing, and deporting. Inside the plane, which was headed to Italy, sat one Paul Ramses, a Kenyan refugee. The two activists ran alongside the plane, and placed themselves in front of it—halting its takeoff.

It would be wrong to assume that anything has changed since 2008. Iceland may have seen an infamous economic collapse followed by a popular uprising and a new government, but for the two activists it must feel like time is standing still. Since their arrest at the airport, they have been stuck in a seemingly endless legal limbo, first charged for housebreaking and reckless endangerment and later thrown between all levels of the juridical system. Last Friday, the case’s principal proceedings took place for the second time in Reykjavík’s District Court, after the courts original sentences were ruled null and void by Iceland’s Supreme Court.

THE ICELANDIC STATE VS. PAUL RAMSES

Paul Ramses originally arrived in Iceland in January of 2008. The year prior, he had unsuccessfully participated in Kenya’s general elections on behalf of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM). Many Kenyan and trans-African associations claimed the electoral victory of ODM’s main opponents, the Party of National Unity, to have been rigged behind the scenes. The ensuing wave of fatal protests and riots had brought down 800 people by late January, and as ODM members faced mass persecution, Paul and his wife Rosemary fled Kenya and escaped to Iceland via Italy.

Paul Ramses and his wife Rosemary fled Kenya in 2008, afraid of their lives due to mass persecution against members of a political party that Paul was involved with. Shortly after their arrival, Rosemary gave birth to a son they named Fidel, thereby establishing her right to stay along with the newborn. Paul, on the other hand, needed to apply for asylum. The Directorate of Immigration (UTL for short) refused to take up his case and ruled for him to be deported to Italy. Although their ruling was made in April, Paul however wasn’t notified until three months later, the night before he was to be deported, when he was arrested by Icelandic police and separated from his family—an act that violated both his rights to appeal UTL’s decision and his son’s internationally protected right to stay with his parents.

WHAT IS THE DUBLIN REGULATION?

UTL’s decision to refuse Paul asylum was argued for by citing the Dublin Regulation, an agreement on asylum affairs implemented by the member-states of the Schengen Area. The Dublin Regulation permits authorities to deport asylum seekers to the first Schengen state they entered, but it does not oblige the state to deport the asylum seeker in any way—and, as a matter of fact, specially bids authorities to apply it in harmony with human rights conventions. However, UTL’s official policy has been to start every asylum application process by checking if it can be outsourced to another Schengen state.

That sort of policy is certainly not to lighten the burden of states—such as Italy, Spain and Greece—that are located at Schengen’s south and east borders (in 2008, 31.200 asylum application were filed in Italy, compared to 72 in Iceland). The South-European asylum seekers’ dilemma has been the subject of a multitude of damning studies and these three countries’ refugee policies have been heavily criticised by the likes of UN Refugee Agency, Amnesty International and European Parliament.

According to Jórunn Edda Helgadóttir, MA student of international and comparative law, The Dublin Regulation brings forward grossly defective rules that have allowed the Icelandic state to deport asylum seekers en masse by stating that “because everybody does it, we can too.” This was indeed how Björn Bjarnason, then Minister of Justice, replied upon being heavily criticised for the deportation of Paul Ramses: “Of course there is nothing unlawful or wrong with employing this treaty, any more than other international treaties.”

Such a statement is wrong, according to Jórunn as Iceland has validated the European Convention of Human Rights, in which it says that “no one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” and that “everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life”—two of many law paragraphs that were not considered in the case of Paul Ramses. “The focal issue at stake is will”, she says, as the “problem would never grow to be so huge if most governments weren’t so willing to pass their duties and commitments on to other states.”

“WE INTENDED TO SAVE HIS LIFE…”

Back at the airport, Haukur and Jason were arrested and air traffic continued after a short delay. Interviewed by online news outlet Vísir shortly after his release, Haukur cut the crap when asked about his and Jason’s motives. “We intended to save Paul Ramses life,” he said, expressing worries that they had failed. Surprisingly, the next day, hundreds of people assembled by the Ministry of Justice and demanded Paul’s return to his family in Iceland.

The pressure increased with daily demonstrations, petitions and parliamentary debates, as well national and international media attention—all of it to be diagnosed as “sentimentality” by Minister of Justice Björn Bjarnason. But eventually Björn himself succumbed to “sentimentality” and overturned UTL’s decision. Parallel to the aforementioned pressure, Paul’s lawyer Katrín Theodórsdóttir issued a complaint to the Ministry, demanding material handling of Paul’s asylum application from a humanitarian standpoint. Following the Ministry’s ruling, UTL finally granted Paul asylum.

“…AND WE DID”

Today Haukur believes that although the impact of a single act of direct action is hard to measure, he and Jason actually saved Paul’s life. And their action, he says, paved the way for what followed, as standing in front of a ministry or signing a petition requires much less effort than running in front of an aeroplane. In the aftermath, they claim, people were less afraid to protest. Using the same logic, he insists that the good number of direct action such the ones of environmental movement Saving Iceland, which both him and Jason have also been involved in, paved the way for the so-called ‘pots and pans revolt’ of 2008-9.

At the same time he believes that The State’s response to such actions, for instance by instigating serious court cases, is likely to keep newcomers from getting involved. “It is sad that people have to make such enormous sacrifices for such tiny changes,” says Haukur and mentions Þorgeir Þorgeirsson, an author who in 1994, after a ten years long fight, won a historical victory at the European Council of Human Rights. Þorgeir had been sentenced in Iceland for his articles decrying and depicting police brutality in Reykjavík. Even if proven right, public innuendos regarding state or city officials was illegal at the time—something that wasn’t altered until the European Council ruled in Þorgeir’s favour.

THE ICELANDIC STATE VS. HAUKUR AND JASON

Haukur and Jason were originally charged with housebreaking and reckless endangerment. But once in court, the prosecutor brought forward two additional penalty clauses not included in the original charges, which he encouraged the judge to take into consideration. Such a move is not only illegal, but also in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, which states that everyone charged with a criminal offence should be given adequate time and facilities in preparing their defence.

Despite protest from their defence lawyer, Ragnar Aðalsteinsson, who had to defend his clients unprepared for these new clauses, the District Court found the two guilty. Haukur was sentenced to two months in prison while Jason was given a 45 days probationary prison term, a ruling that the two appealed to Iceland’s Supreme Court. And while the Supreme Court judges did agree with Ragnar regarding the illegitimacy of the District Court’s ruling, they didn’t rule for the case’s discontinuation. Instead of acquitting the two, the Supreme Court’s judges made the unusual decision to send the case back to District Court, to start from scratch again.

According to Hrefna Dögg Gunnarsdóttir, law student and employee at law firm Réttur, the Supreme Court’s ruling surely manifests that Iceland’s uppermost court of law recognised the prosecution’s illegal move. Yet the decision to grant the prosecution another chance crystallises the fundamentally different position of the prosecutor and the defence. “This could be compared to a basketball game, in which one of the two competing teams always gets the ball after a failed throw,” says Hrefna.

Does this mean that they should have been acquitted? Not necessarily, if looked at by the book of law. But when viewed in context with the fact that by granting Paul asylum, UTL—and thus the Icelandic state—recognised the threat he faced if deported to Kenya, one has to wonder why the courts still questions Haukur and Jason’s actions.

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE?

“The purpose of the charge is obviously to suppress resistance,” says Haukur. “I stopped hoping for an acquittal. Instead I use this case to learn how to analyse State Power, and to educate myself about this system and how it operates.”

During the procedure last Friday, one could witness the findings of Haukur’s studies as he delivered his 8.000 word’s long disputation—his own theory on the constant clashes between The Individual and The State’s innumerable tentacles. One of the more interesting points he made regards the humiliation entailed in having to discuss important issues on The State’s terms. While having ideologically argued for his actions, he claims he has constantly been met with idiotic and irrelevant questions; while wanting to discuss an important topic as refugee policies surely is, he has been met with a debate about fences and police regulations.

The prosecutor indeed questioned Haukur and Jason extensively about their entrance onto the airport driveway, about alleged signage that was supposed to forbid their entrance and why they didn’t obey orders from airport staff. The prosecutor, however, showed little or no interest in discussing the motives behind their actions, which usually is considered an important factor in criminal cases. Instead of entering an ideological dialogue with the defendants—a discourse that could eventually force him to face the overall legitimacy of their action—his obvious aim was to get them jailed for a mindless and dangerous criminal act.

Haukur has given up hope for an acquittal, but will admit that a victory in court would serve as an exemplary beacon for future cases against political dissidents, not to mention the legal and bureaucratic amendments it could lead to. But these are not these fundamental changes he hopes for. “The impact of these kind of cases on the behaviour of State Power can certainly lead to minor reforms, but the knowledge we can gleam from it can give rise to revolutionaries.”
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A shorter version of this article was published in the Reykjavík Grapevine magazine (p. 26).

In a very short time the discourse following last week’s right-wing terrorist attacks in Norway reached both absurd and scary heights, with one of the best examples being American TV and radio host Glenn Beck’s attempt to justify the mass murderer by comparing the social democratic youth camp on Utøya with the Hitler Youth. In Iceland it was the writings of Björn Bjarnason, a right-wing conservative and Iceland’s Minister of Justice from 2003 to 2009.

Only a day after the attacks, Björn, who systematically voiced what he called “the need” for the establishment of an army-like police force when he was Minister of Justice, wrote on his website – one of Iceland’s oldest blog-sites, frequently quoted by journalists – that the Norwegian state, with its powerful secret police force, should have all the necessary tools to fight the threat of terrorism. According to Björn, this police force keeps a strict eye on potential terrorist cells – groups that operate “in service of political ideals” or “under the banner of environmentalism or nature conservation.”

Following this came a paragraph about the current Minister of Interior Ögmundur Jónasson who has talked about granting the police proactive investigation permits to fight against organized crime, political activists and environmentalists supposedly excluded. But as the murderer in Oslo and Utøya had a political agenda, Björn argues that environmentalists are likely to act the same. Therefore he concludes that the en masse slaughter of teenagers should teach the Icelandic authorities a lesson and encourage them to establish a secret police to fight environmentalists.

Anyone who reads through the Oslo-Utøya-murderer manifesto knows that he sees himself as a warrior in a fight for the creation of a conservative, Christian, discipline, fascist, masculine, homo-phobic, militaristic, nationalistic West. Surely he takes a step further than most fascists by using Dark Ages imagery, explicit language and an extremely violent strategy to market his ideas, but his written manifest is only an extreme versions of the same ideas preached by the more sophisticated everyday right-wing conservatives, the Icelandic ones not excluded. Thus it makes sense, if wanting to prevent further mass murders á la Anders Breivik, that one should look deeply into the growing fascist rhetoric surrounding Western political discourse today.

Shooting an islandful of teenagers has never been the tactic of radical environmentalists who usually undertake their actions without threatening life, but in the eyes of Björn Bjarnason and his-minded people, a special secret police force should be formed to step on them and their rights. While some people might want to dismiss what the former justice minister’s writes it should in fact be taken extremely seriously that he finds it reasonable to use the Norwegian mass murder to re-examine his old fight against environmentalists – a fight in which he is far away from being alone. Now it is our responsibility to stop him and his comrades in arms – wherever they are standing politically – from being able to capitalise on last week’s events and thereby realising their fantasies.

In July 2007 Reverend Billy and Savitri D joined Saving Iceland’s international conference, titled Global Consequences of Heavy Industry and Large Dams, which Billy presided. A few days later Billy, Savitri and Saving Iceland exorcised heavy industry in Iceland during a ceremony in shopping mall Kringlan, Reykjavík. A year later Billy sent Saving Iceland a letter, inspired by his participation in 2007, which can be read here.

In a press release from University of Michigan Press, the new book’s publisher, says:

Reverend Billy, the revivalist preacher created by performance artist Bill Talen, has attracted an international following as he has railed in white suit and clerical collar against the evils of excessive consumerism and corporate irresponsibility. In his early solo performances in Times Square he delivered sermons by megaphone against Starbucks and the Disney Store; as his message and popularity spread, he’s been joined by a 35-member choir (the Life After Shopping Gospel Choir) and a 7-piece band. The group’s acclaimed stage show and media appearances (including a major motion picture, What Would Jesus Buy?) have reached millions.

The Reverend Billy Project presents backstage accounts of recent performance actions by Reverend Billy and the troupe’s director, Savitri D, recounting their exploits on three continents in vivid narratives that are engaging, shrewdly analytical, and at times side-splittingly funny. We watch as the group plans invisible theater interventions in Starbucks, designs a mermaid hunger strike to thwart gentrification plans for Coney Island, and makes an extended effort to preserve the public nature of New York’s Union Square. We follow them to an action camp in Iceland and a flop of a show redeemed by a successful impromptu demonstration in a Berlin shopping mall. As thoughtful as they are funny and inventive, Reverend Billy and Savitri D’s story-essays bring to life a playful yet sincere new form of political theater.

Like said before, the book release party will take place on June 13th at 7:00 PM, in Housing Works Bookstore & Café, 126 Crosby Street, New York City, NY.

Read more about Reverend Billy and the Church of Earthalujah! here.

The videos below are from Billy and Savitri’s visit in Iceland; the first one is a TV news-clip from the ceremony in Kringlan, the second and the third are from the above mentioned conference in July 2007.

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