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

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

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

Sex, Secrecy And Dead Children’s Identities

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

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

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

Saving Hell’s Angels

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

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

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

Lost In Information

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

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

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

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

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

Watch the above-mentioned Dispatches show here below:

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

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

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

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

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

Can You Stand in the Way of Progress?

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

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

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

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

I Sense, Therefore I Think

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

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

Enemies of Progress?

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

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

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

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

Violence Intrinsic to Social Contracts

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

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

A Leap Into the Future

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

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

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

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

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See also:

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

Jón Proppé: Standing in the way of progress

Þóroddur Bjarnason: Jafnvægislist (Icelandic only)

Angeli Novi’s webiste

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.

Criminal court cases, waged by The State against political dissidents for acts of protest and civil disobedience, can be understood in two ways. Firstly, the juridical system can be seen as a wholly legitimate platform for solving social conflicts. Such a process then results with a verdict delivered by Lady Justice’s independent agents—a ruling located somewhere on the scale between full punishment and absolute acquittal. According to this view, it is at this point only that a punishment possibly enters the picture. And only if deserved.

Secondly—and herein lies a fundamental difference—the original decision to press charges can be seen as a punishment in itself, regardless of the final verdict. With these two points of understanding in mind, two recent verdicts, which have not received much attention, are worth observing.

You Shall Not Run

Number one is the case against Haukur Hilmarsson and Jason Slade who in June 2008, while attempting to stop an airplane from departing, and thereby deporting Kenyan asylum seeker Paul Ramses to Italy, ran onto a closed-off area at the Leifur Eiríksson International Airport in Keflavík. To shorten a long and complicated story (covered in-length here) their political sprint snowballed into protests of all kinds, eventually bringing the asylum seeker back to Iceland, where he and his family were granted an asylum.

During the case’s most recent court proceedings—the third one, indeed, after already rolling through Reykjavík’s District Court and Iceland’s Supreme Court—the two accused attempted a moral defence, speaking solely about the act for which they were charged and which they justified with a reference to the asylum seeker’s desperate need and the large-scale impacts of their actions. But neither prosecutor nor judge were willing to speak of these things, focusing instead on fences and the possibility of destroying an airplane’s engine by being sucked into one such. Eventually the two were found guilty of violating air-safety regulations and air-traffic laws, and ruled to pay a fine, lower than what the State pays for executing the trial.

You Shall Not Stand

Number two is the case against Lárus Páll Birgisson who recently was sentenced for disobeying police orders and this is in fact his second sentencing in a year, due to exactly the same scenario: Lárus stands on a sidewalk in front of the U.S. embassy in Reykjavík, holding a sign bearing a message against war. Police arrives after a complaint from the embassy and order him to leave the sidewalk. Lárus rejects, citing his legally and constitutionally protected right to protest, and official data regarding the sidewalk’s public status. He is then arrested, charged and finally sentenced.

And what is it, so heavy and hazardous, that undermines his right to protest in public? “It is well-known,” says in the judge’s verdict, “that embassies worldwide have in recent years and decades been targets of perpetrators and hence it is not strange that their staff is on alert regarding traffic in the most nearest surroundings.” And not a single additional word. The justification starts and ends in one and the same sentence, referring to something “well-known”—a concept as blurry, insignificant and out-of-context as “public opinion” and “common sense”.

You Shall be Punished

On the surface, these sentences per se are of no heavy-weight importance for The State (actually minor enough, according to recent rules, not to be published officially, which might—possibly—explain the little-as-no attention). And while the sentenced ones would obviously have preferred different results, the relatively low fines are certainly not equivalent to physical imprisonment.

So, what is the use then? In fact, both cases perfectly embody the second above-mentioned way of understanding—that the punishment lies in the charges themselves but not the final verdict. Not only does it consume money, time and energy from those directly involved, but its social impacts are also dead serious.

To begin with, such verdicts give the police a further green light for giving illegal orders and arresting those who disobey in the name of their rights. Probably more importantly, they clearly determine the precedent that it is worth forcing political dissidents into long and costly court cases—in these two cases keeping people inside the court system for years and repeatedly charging the same man for the same completely harmless act—even when the final results amount to be mere small-talk. An ongoing and ever-hanging threat of sentences, fines and jail-time, is more than likely to keep people away from resisting oppression, meaning that the threat is a form of silencing, a form of oppression, itself.

For Mine is the State, the Power and the Justice

Regarding the first-mentioned way of understanding, it might be worth wondering if these court cases possibly manifest a resolution of social conflicts. In order to be so, the discussion in court would have had to be free from anything like “well-known” or “public-good” and instead deal with the tough tug between status-quo—such as airport rules and fences, or the police’s right to order and be obeyed—and people’s legal, ethical and natural rights to directly and spontaneously interfere with their up-front reality.

But as Haukur Hilmarsson said during his procedure, one of the most humiliating factors of being dragged through the courts is to have a dialogue based on The State’s premises. No matter how willing the defendant is to speak about his action and debate its over-all legitimacy, in such context Lady Justice just does not seem to weigh a challenging argument. The weighing-scale might be broken… or is this—punishing via prosecuting—maybe, after all, what solving social conflicts and doing justice is essentially about?

Those who are yet to give up on Icelandic media cannot have avoided noticing one Kristján Már Unnarsson, a news director and journalist at TV station Stöð 2. Kristján, who in 2007 received the Icelandic Press Awards for his coverage of “everyday countryside life”, is a peculiar fan of manful and mighty constructions and loves to tell good news to and about all the “good heavy industry guys” that Iceland has to offer.

To be more precise, Kristján has, for at least a decade (and I say “at least” just because my memory and research doesn’t take me further back), gone on a rampage each and every time he gets the chance to tell his audience about the newest of news in Iceland’s heavy industry and energy affairs. He talks about gold-mills when referring to dams built to power aluminium production; and when preparing an evening news item on, say, plans regarding energy and aluminium production, he usually doesn’t see a reason for talking to more than one person – a person who, almost without exception, is in favour of whatever project is being discussed.

After witnessing Kristján’s latest contribution to the ongoing development of heavy industry and large-scale energy production, i.e. his coverage of Alcoa’s recently announced decision not to continue with its plan of building a new aluminium smelter in Húsavík, wherein he managed to blame just anything but Alcoa itself for the company’s decisions, I couldn’t resist asking (and, really, not for the first time): What can really explain this way too obvious one-sidedness, manifest not only in this one journalist’s work but seemingly the majority of news coverage concerning heavy industry?

“Lack of professionalism,” someone might say. Professionalism would thus imply allowing more than one single voice to be heard, letting one argument meet another, allowing conflicts to take place and thereby giving the audience a chance to critically make up its mind. This lack of professionalism actually applies to such a huge quantity of all news material produced. Indeed, the constant recycling of content – of interviews, press-releases, photos etc. – and the manufacture of single-perspective news content often seems to be the mainstream media’s predominant modus operandi.

“Co-dependency,” could be another suggestion. And a good one, as it often seems that the bulk of journalists are seriously co-dependant with the ruling political and economical order. Take, for instance, the mantra of the never-questioned importance of non-stop economic growth, or the commonly heard phrase that during a protest “the police needed to use teargas” – as the decision to spray isn’t fuelled by a precise political will, but rather of a simple need.

These two are good answers, but definitely not good enough when standing on their own. To get the full picture, lets look into the relationship between mainstream journalism on the one hand, and public relations on the other. How, for instance, are the tops of the aluminium and energy companies’ PR departments staffed?

At Reykjavík Energy we have Eiríkur Hjálmarsson, former journalist and program maker at state TV station RÚV, whereas at Landsvirkjun we find one Ragna Sara Jónsdóttir, former journalist at RÚV and newspaper Morgunblaðið. Alcoa prides itself of Erna Indriðadóttir, long-time journalist at RÚV, while Rio Tinto Alcan sports Ólafur Teitur Guðnason, former journalist at RÚV, DV and business paper Viðskiptablaðið (it is worth noting that Ólafur is also known for his aonce-annual books analysing and criticising the mdia, not from the usual Chomsky-alike left-wing but rather a right-wing perspective). At last but not least, the only employee of Samál (or The Icelandic Association of Aluminium Producers), is Þorsteinn Víglundsson who, along with a few jobs in the financial sector, used to write news for Morgunblaðið.

Quite an impressive list, isn’t? And where does it bring us? Possibly to the assumption that the first-mentioned Kristján Már Unnarsson must be doing his entrance examination, or even an on-the-job-training. But that would be a bit too simplistic because practically, Kristján Már might well be preparing for a better paid PR job, whereas theoretically it really doesn’t mater if that is the case or not.

What matters is the ever impenetrable handshake between those two industries: Public Relations and The Media. What, in fact, is one medium’s coverage of a company but a conversation between the two parties? A pre-designed and post-edited conversation, for sure, but a conversation nevertheless. And the conversation element is crucial as a journalist’s co-dependency and lack of professionalism (deliberate or not) are of no use if the Holy Trinity’s most important link is missing. And vice versa: Without beneficial journalists, a PR stunt is likely to end up dead in the water.

The stunt’s key moment, as Spice Girls realised and told us, is “when two become one.”

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.

A little more than a year ago, several Icelandic bankers were arrested and kept in custody in relation to the Special Prosecutor’s investigation into the 2008 economic collapse, its antecedents and causes. Appearing in political TV talk show Silfur Egils shortly afterwards, French-Norwegian magistrate Eva Joly, who at that time served as the Prosecutor’s special assistant, talked about how society does not expect—and has problems to deal with—politically and economically powerful people being arrested, interrogated and possibly sentenced.

Eva Joly was right. And the reason? Habit. Whether a journalist, police officer, lawyer, judge or a powerless citizen, in a civilised society based on dualistic ideas of good and evil, one is most likely unable to recognise well-dressed and eloquent people—with possessions and power in their pockets—as anything other than good. During the interview, Eva compared those people with drug users and dealers that are brought to court, who generally are immediately seen by society as criminals deserving to face “justice”. Another rightful comparison would be political dissidents.

JURIDICAL MILESTONE OR POLITICAL WITCH-HUNT?

In September of last year, the majority of Alþingi (Icelandic parliament) decided to charge former Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde for negligence and mismanagement during the prelude to the 2008 economic collapse. After heavy parliamentary debate on the options to charge either four former ministers, a couple of them or none, the decision, based on the renowned Special Investigation Commission report, was to charge Haarde alone. Crying “political witch-hunt!”, was his and his comrades’ first reaction, particularly ironic as he himself was one of the main advocates for the investigation leading to this decision.

On June 6, the case was filed in front of Landsdómur, the national high court that now assembles for the first time in Iceland’s history. While some consider it a juridical milestone, Geir and his supporters stated that the filing marked the beginning of “Iceland’s first political trial”. Regardless of one’s opinion about the legitimacy of this particular case, it is impossible to overlook the concentrated attempt, embraced in such a statement, to openly deny not only the juridical system’s political nature but also the fact of how controversial state policies in Iceland—concerning economic, energy and refugee issues, to name a few—have evoked such fierce opposition that the state’s only answer has been to arrest and accuse, threatening people with up to a lifetime in prison.

MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

It is remarkably interesting to look at the rhetoric surrounding Geir Haarde’s case in comparison with other court cases. On one hand Geir is a “criminal”, on the other a victim of “political persecution”. The latter definition comes from a team of supporters who up until now have not seen a great deal of reasons to criticise the status quo’s greatest watchmen, the courts. But now, as their teammate has got caught in the unimaginable, they have shown a completely different side in their criticism towards the system.

Let’s be clear from the start: there is a slight difference as Geir’s case takes place in front of a particularly rare set of judges whereas all other defendants face their fortune in front of the standard courts. At the same time, Landsdómur is the only platform where the authorities can be brought in front of the court of law, counterbalancing the aforementioned difference. Additionally, the rhetoric around Geir’s case is not limited to it alone but was also predominant during the above-mentioned bankers’ arrests one year ago. At that point lawyers, judges, politicians and media editors raised their voices, highlighting what in theory is considered to be the maxim of the constitutional state: that everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

And now, when Haarde’s case has commenced, we get to hear the same clichés all over again. How his reputation has been damaged and his family and friends been affected by the publicity surrounding his trial. That Iceland’s parliament has been misused for a political assault. That the accusations are built on sand, which still does not allow us to underestimate the seriousness of being accused in the first place, regardless of the case’s final outcome. That the law articles concerning Landsdómur are outdated. How hard and expensive it is for a defendant to defend himself against the prosecution—an institution with a bunch of paid workers, and now even an entire website!

Yeah, yeah—this might all be true. But when compared with the discourse surrounding the majority of court cases, where the charges come from above and head hierarchically down the social staircase, the fuss around Geir’s case reveals itself as a simple tragicomedy. If one believes that some sort of a universal concept of justice exists, and that a particular institution of politically hired judges is able to reasonably execute this justice, the above-listed arguments must apply to all defendants.

But they don’t.

This we know e.g. from recent cases against political dissidents where charges have been in complete contravention of the cases’ evidence, investigations, the laws and Iceland’s constitution. During one of these cases, against the so-called ‘Reykjavík Nine’—who were accused and finally acquitted of “attacking parliament” in December of 2008—media editors, lawyers, police officers, former and current ministers and members of parliament amongst others, did their best to get the defendants sentenced before the actual court proceedings took place. Another case would be the one against anti-war campaigner Lárus Páll Birgisson, whose civil and constitutional rights have repeatedly been violated by the police by the demand of the U.S. embassy in Reykjavík. Lárus has already once been sentenced for refusing to obey the police who illegally ordered him to leave a public pavement in front of the embassy. Another case is going on right now, based on the exact same nonsense.

Neither of these cases nor most other court procedures in this country have been of any concern to the recently uprisen human rights guards of Geir H. Haarde. In the comparison crystallises George Orwell’s ominous saying that all animals are indeed equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

THE BITTER TASTE OF THEIR OWN MEDICINE

In his recent book, titled ‘Bankastræti Núll’, author Einar Már Guðmundsson, one of Iceland’s most critical present time authors, actually compares these two cases—the one against Geir and the one against the Reykjavík Nine—and accuses Geir’s supporters, which he calls the upper class elite, of lacking all unity. “Of course all the other ministers from the collapse-government and the bureaucrats around them should demand to undergo the same trial”, he says and refers to a petition in support of the Reykjavík Nine where hundreds of people said: “Charge all or none! We all attacked the parliament!”.

The argument in that case was that no one had literally attacked parliament, and if those who were charged for it actually attacked then everyone who took part in toppling a government during the winter of 2008-9, would be guilty of that same attack. Haarde and his supporters say the same, that he is not alone responsible for the economic collapse and crisis and should therefore not be on trial. And they are right. Geir H. Haarde is not alone responsible for the sufferings of people living under the über-power of the ruling capitalist civilization. It is the system itself—its structure, values and its definition of “justice”—that bears the responsibility.

But like all other systems, there are people behind this one and Haarde is one of them, not more or less responsible than any other authority figure. Sustaining and maintaining the system’s mechanism requires repressive methods, including political persecutions in the form of court procedures. Geir Haarde’s case demonstrates an incident that happens extremely rarely—but luckily once in a while—when those people are forced to sample the bitter taste of their own medicine. There is not much to say except: Bon appétit!

There are countless reasons for Magma Energy not being allowed to purchase HS Orka. Those who have no idea why should quit reading this and get their hands on books like Naomi Klein’s ‘The Shock Doctrine’ and documentaries like ‘The Big Sellout’ by Florian Opitz. They show how the privatisation of natural resources brings about increased class division and poor people’s diminished access to essentials—without exception.

People could also study the history of Ross Beaty, the man that wants to build Magma Energy to being ‘the biggest and best geothermal energy enterprise in the world.’ Ross is the founder and chairman of Pan American Silver Corporation, which operates metal mines in Bolivia, Mexico and Peru, where mining is done by the book: environmental disasters, human rights violations, low paid labour and union restrictions, to mention but a few of the industry standards.

Even though such facts are evident to all, the acceptance of this kind of critique is rare in Iceland. Those who criticise privatisation and marketisation from a radical perspective, analysing the global economic and power structures we live within (as well as institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank), are often dismissed and their words dismissed as only “one more argument against global capitalism”. Their pleading is thus supposedly belittled. The phenomenae ‘capitalism’ and ‘representative democracy’ have been normalised and recognised as ‘the only right way’ of social organisation; daring to criticise today’s ruling ideologies is seen as banal, uncool, even hysterical. After the collapse of Iceland’s bank casino and the nationalisation of private debts, it took months until the word “capitalism” appeared and was accepted in the critical debate of that winter’s resistance.

The fundamental questions that are never asked

In this discourse about the use of natural resources, the Earth and man, some people must wonder why the fundamental questions are never asked: Is man ‘supposed’ to ‘exploit’ nature just because he can? Is he ‘allowed’ to exploit nature like he does today? Does he ‘own’ nature or does he live with it? Is he not a part of it, does he not depend on it for his existence? These questions were asked at a public meeting on the Magma affair, recently hosted by Attac in Iceland. To begin with they were written off as theological reflections. After few objections the moderator changed his mind and called them philosophical, but did not want the panel to turn into a forum for philosophical reflection on man and his role on Earth. But objections rose again, both by guests and panellists, the latter trying to answer the questions, with uneven success.

God and the rational man

Considering these questions, theological and philosophical isn’t necessarily wrong. In the book of Genesis, God provides instructions for humanity: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Those words, like others in the Bible, have often been used as arguments of those in favour of man’s domination of the planet. Hannes Hólmsteinn Gissurarson, Iceland’s most famous spokesman for free market policies and neo-liberalism, used them to criticize James Cameron’s Avatar, saying God’s message is clear: Man is ‘obligated’ to “[…] conquer drought and floods with irrigation and dams and bridging or damming big rivers; to keep whales, elephants and lions at bay with reasonable harvesting, and to exterminate vermin.”

A similar attitude is found widely within Western philosophy. Starting with the ancient philosophers of Greece, man has been placed higher than other living beings on this planet. For instance, French philosopher René Descartes, often referred to as ‘the father of modern philosophy’, claimed our species’ rationality and intellect is what makes us men and separates us from animals. ?These and similar ideas have been debated back and forth. Freethinking philosophy students ponder man’s purpose and existence in this world, tearing through schools of philosophy and re-entering society all erudite. But philosophy has smoothly been separated from reality. It is allowed to wallow in the whole world’s philosophy, asking complicated, challenging questions. But seeing it as a part of reality and as real element in the discussion—e.g. now when Magma’s purchase is being discussed—is not an option. Philosophers can simply dawdle between library shelves while pragmatists argue over the tiny difference between private and state ‘ownership’ of the Earth.

The ‘pragmatist premises’ that surface when philosophy and our alleged reality are separated prevent some of the discussion’s factors to be considered. “Aluminium has to be produced somewhere! Without genetically modified food, humanity will starve! ” With these premises, we jump over few of the debate’s steps so it starts in the middle of the stairway, instead of the beginning. This is called manipulating a debate.

Extremes? Or the real facts?

At the above-mentioned public meeting, the “green socialist” Mörður Árnason stated that independent from his favour of privatising ‘utilization rights’, he could not agree that the man ‘owns’ the Earth. Rather that he is its guardian—from God’s hands or another’s—and one that hasn’t done the job well enough so far. It is easy to agree with him that man has not protected the Earth during the last centuries. But on the other hand, there is a reason to doubt that the opposite is actually possible when the ideas of the man as the planet’s owner or guardian are in the foreground.

In his book ‘Violence’, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek asks if it is not time to stop ignoring the fact that organised religion is one of the main sources of murderous violence in the world today, by always defining the violence and murders as the work of violent extremists who abuse the noble spiritual message of their creed. The same question can be transferred to humanity’s destructive behaviour, since it is clearly not some extreme fundamental-heavy-industry-moguls who alone bear responsibility for the state of the planet. We are dealing with an entire culture, a whole system of destructive power structures and behaviour patterns that build on the premises of man’s domination over nature.

When Björk says that we should think in terms of the 21st century—which she says is free from heavy industry but full of nano- and biotechnologies—she assumes that lately, man has been on a wrong road but should now head somewhere else on full speed. “To a new place,” like her friend Ólöf Arnalds sang at Björk’s ‘Náttúra’ concert in 2008.

This is a misunderstanding. First of all, there is no new place. There is only one Earth, and it has to be liberated and protected. Secondly, the 21st century way of Björk, Mörður and other progressivists, is in full harmony with the dangerous ways in which humanity has been leading, since the beginning of the industrial revolution, at least. The innovation and high-technology that are offered as real solutions—the new green deal!—do not replace heavy industry and old-school polluting production. They are only additions to what is already there, forming a global, industrial, unsustainable economical system that constantly is built upon. But removing from the bottom is impossible. The system stands and falls with its foundations.

Solutions! But only those who produce money

So often the opponents of environmentalists try to bury the dispute by accusing the latter of not offering any solutions ‘instead’ of the industry they oppose. This is of course nonsense. Anybody who opposes one thing has another to offer. This is self-evident, though the solutions can differ. For instance, the solution to Iceland’s constitutional violence towards refugees could span everything from ‘more just laws’ to a world without borders. The solution to an abusive or violent family father could be him receiving assistance to reform, or him being exiled from his community.

The biggest flaw of the discourse is how it only assumes solutions that fit into the ruling system’s frame. There is no space for other solutions, even though are very obvious, e.g. a healthy culture thriving on a healthy planet.

Instead, opposing parties fight about where the money should go. It is not discussed whether unsustainable capital ‘should’ be produced, the debate is rather based on the premises that ‘capital production’ is fundamental. Money can be produced from whatever is at hand—Earth itself or the beings living on it. Within this culture—where jobs like entrepreneurial investment, treasury and human resources management have become as natural as a newborn’s breath—money is people’s biggest goal and the central point of all existence and discourse. No matter if there is no real value behind it. The market and industries might have found their ways to put a price ticket on every square centimetre of this planet and every second that passes. But when one comes to think of it, how can human lives be measured with money? And what about mountains, rivers and forests?

The myth about ‘green’ economy and industry

In connection with above-mentioned Coca-Cola-sponsored ‘Náttúra’ “nature concert” and the parallel opening of the Náttúra.info website, Björk stated that she and her comrades were not one more group of “angry environmental guerrillas”. These happy environmental entertainers’ project seemed to be about not challenging the status quo at all, rather to keep on the old track of industry and production—this time under the banner of institutionalised green flags and environmental certifications.

They went all over the country to find solutions in employment affairs, something that could replace heavy industry but still make money. The list became long, all the way from treatment-tourism and exported children’s food, to biotechnology, identification software for law enforcement and the production of solar panels.

In the magazine ‘Dealing with Distractions’, which was published in December of last year, parallel to the resistance to the UN’s climate change conference in Copenhagen, Mikko Virtanen writes about so-called ‘alternative industrialism’ and points at the self-evident facts that environmentalists seem to avoid recognising and discussing: “To build a new green infrastructure of such a massive scale would require a lot of energy and materials, which can only be provided through the use of already existing fossil fuel based infrastructure. […] The production of this new infrastructure will require a vast amount of raw materials, much of which are not renewable themselves, and are environmentally destructive to obtain. […] It has yet to be proven if we even have the raw materials available to make enough wind turbines and solar panels to keep up current levels of energy consumption or any significant level of industrial production at all.”

His result is that we “need to put wind energy, solar energy and other alternative industrial solutions on the list of false solutions along with agrofuels, nuclear energy, and clean coal technology. As soon as possible, we need to start doing the only thing that can halt the destruction of our life supporting systems: reducing our industrial production and consumption to the absolute minimum.”

What about bringing these ideas into the discourse on energy production and nature conservation here in Iceland?

Xenophobia or not xenophobia?

Magma’s opponents have been accused of xenophobia and refused it. But wait a minute… In his writing about Magma, former Morgunblaðið editor Styrmir Gunnarsson says that the Icelandic nation ‘has’ the right to reap profit from ‘its property’. His words mirror almost whatever party that opposes Magma’s purchase. Guðfríður Lilja Grétarsdóttir, group chairman of the Left Green party, says that “the resources should be used for the good of the community.” Though she notes that it does not matter if private pockets are Icelandic or foreign—they should not be filled with money that ‘should’ go into public pockets—she still assumes that nature within political borders belongs to the human beings inside it (or rather those who are accepted by the authorities).

At a recent press meeting, Björk and her comrades who started a petition against Magma’s purchase asked if ‘Icelanders’ should not level the country off and pay ‘their’ debts by keeping full dominance over resources and profit from them. In Reykjavík Grapevine’s last issue, Björk was interviewed and asked about the xenophobia accusations, which she says are an “attempt to sidetrack the discourse.” But she immediately criss-crosses and says: “The real question is whether it is a good idea to privatise and sell of our energy resources at this point. We as a nation are badly burnt after the collapse.” People might argue that the recognition of the political phenomenon ‘nation’ has nothing to do with xenophobia.

But when the discourse is about issues like ownership over the Earth, the actual sidetracking is recognising a nation that has right above others to decide the arrangement of nature. Here, Slavoj Žižek’s question applies again: Should we not stop ignoring the violence that consists in the separation of people into nations, by always focusing on those considered extreme nationalists and racists; Nazi skinheads and racist politicians like Sarkozy, Geert Wilders and Pia Kjærsgaard? While we only see the alleged extremes of political issues, but do not dig after their roots, those who on the surface keep themselves outside the extremes, get a change to build up their prejudiced and often hateful agenda without it being noticed.

The root is left untouched. Because of how extremely Bush Jr.’s stupidity and hatred was displayed, it was enough for Obama to be black to gain some sort of a respect from opponents of U.S. foreign affairs policies. Similarly, he only had to slip the word ‘green’ into his vocabulary, to gain similar recognition from environmentalists.

The Earth without borders

Björk says she cannot separate the protection of Iceland’s nature and her role as an Icelandic artist because of how connected they are. Then she says: “Iceland has given me so much, I feel as if Iceland’s nature was bestowed upon me and all the rest of us as a gift, and I feel a great need to defend it.” This enormous emphasis on this being ‘Iceland’s’ nature and that as ‘Icelanders’, people should protect it—an idea not at all limited to Björk and her partners—makes it impossible to dismiss accusations about xenophobia as sidetracking.

Certainly it is likely that libertarians, who in the same sentence talk about xenophobia and hostility towards foreign investment, are simply not capable of having a discussion about the ownership of the planet. Therefore they follow the footsteps of those who inserted accusations of anti-hedonism into their objection to the opponents of Kárahnjúkar dam. But that does not give Magma’s opponents permission to dismiss all criticism about the integration of environmentalism and nationalist chauvinism. Sigur Rós have especially stated that they are not a political band, but just cannot sit by and watch such heavy industry constructions in ‘their own backyard’. During Saving Iceland’s international conference in 2007, Ómar Ragnarsson—one of Iceland’s best-known environmentalists—said that compared to other nature, the “Icelandic one” is the equal to a Christmas meal in comparison to other meals of the year. And nobody would skip that dinner for another one! Do we really have to argue about if chauvinism and xenophobia are included in such pleadings?

In his 1922 book ‘At The Cafe: Conversations On Anarchism’, Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta simply but sharply explains his objection to nationalism: Why should a worker rather stand with a factory-owner within the same political borders, rather than another worker outside of them? Though the meaning is communistic and primarily regards social defects of borders, these words can simply be implemented with nature at front. Why should the struggle for the protection and liberation of the Earth, which constantly comes under persecutions by the culture of the ‘civilised’ man, be subjected to man-made borders?

It is time for the discussion about borders, states and nations, to be removed from internal debates amongst philosophers and anarchists—it needs to come to the surface as a real discourse.

We cannot eat money

Undoubtedly, some people will oppose internal arguments within the environmental movement, asking those who at least agree that Magma should not own HS Orka—that nature should never be owned by private party, independent from whatever premises that opinion is based on—to drop the debate on ideology, tactics and emphasis, now when the purchase has to be stopped. But that is not necessarily right. If we drop critical discourse, internally and externally, the environmental ideal is bound to stagnate and become one-sided.

Then again, we may ask if these really are internal fights.

The opponents of Magma are obviously not on the same side. On the one hand we have people who ask the public and authorities to do what they demand, so that they can start making music again. Instead of aluminium production they suggest all kinds of production requiring huge amounts of water, the design and production of identification software for law enforcement, nanotechnology solutions and long-term biotechnology researches.

On the other hand we have people who fight for a completely different culture. Free from overproduction. Free from overuse of water and other goods. Free from identification repression and law enforcement. Free from nano- and biotechnologies, which focus on making man even more of a sovereign than he already is. And between these two directions, there are endless views, opinions and facts. Sharing an enemy does not necessarily make us comrades in arms. Though anarchists and right-wingers share their objection to state communism, it is highly unlikely that they will ever stand together in a struggle. The same logic applies here.

In the discourse about Magma Energy, nature conservation, energy production and ownership, there is a need for much wider range of views and opinions. So far, hardly no-one has given convincing arguments, proving that nature is better set in state hands than private ones. So far, none of those who oppose the privatisation of nature have reasoned for the man’s ownership of the Earth to begin with.

An old American Indian proverb says that not until the last tree has fallen, the last river polluted, and the last fish caught, will people realise that they cannot eat money. These foreboding words are something we need to take seriously. We cannot dismiss them as philosophical reflections, important to keep in mind but never supposed to be brought into real discourse and actions regarding the Earth, its protection and liberation.

Now the plan is to push through an aluminium smelter in Helguvík with all its appropriate energy construction. Svandís Svavarsdóttir, the minister of environment, recently said that there is not enough energy on the Reykjanes penisula to fulfill the smelter’s energy needs. Others have pointed out that harnessing the geothermal areas there will be such a massive attack that the areas will most likely dry up in a short time. Katrín Júlíusdóttir, the minister of industry, has stated her positive opinion about Landsvirkjun producing energy for Helguvík – and the Þjórsá river comes immadeatly up to one’s mind. She also seems to be willing to renew the memorandum of understanding between the government and Alcoa, which according to the latter’s plans means that the whole geothermal areas in north-east Iceland have to be harnessed and dams built in one or more glacial rivers.

Recent studies about the economical impacts of heavy industry and the beneftits of energy realization to aluminium smelters, give the ideas that all the propaganda about the benefits of the Kárahnjúkar Dam were built on nothing. In a report about the economical impacts of heavy industry, economist Indriði H. Þorláksson says: “The country’s primary benefits of the operations of heavy industry plants owned by foreign parties, are the taxes they pay. It is supposed that the tax payments of an avarage aluminium smelter is around 1,2 billion ISK per year. That is only about 0,1% of the national production.” And a new report made by four economists by the request of the minister of finance, says that the selling of energy to heavy industry is simply not economically beneficial.

Other results – e.g. if the energy selling actually was beneficial – would most likely not impact most environmentalist’s opinions. But these results actuate the pleading of those who have claimed that the government and corporations connected to the heavy industrialization of Iceland are simply lying to people about the economical benefits of the constructions. It really should not have surprised anybody; the title of the Minsitry of Industry’s sale brochure, Lowest Energy Prices, says everything that has to be said about the realization of energy to heavy industry here in Iceland.

Further aluminium smelter construction in Iceland is an experiment to maintain life in an unsustainable economic system, which is based on the idea of constant production. Production that insists that raw materials like bauxite – aluminium’s main material – is constantly mined, transported from one continent to another, processed in many energy consuming steps until in the end, it becomes a product, ready for consumption.

Many of the aluminium adherents in Iceland have restorted to the theory of demand and supply, as an argument for continued and increased aluminium production: while people still buy aluminium, it has to be produced. The theory fits completely to the consumer society we live in, but its premise is that the demand is real and natural, but not made up. The consumer society is built on made-up “needs”, which people are taught to ask for. Capitalism’s constant production and the paralell aggressiveness towards the earth, would not add up if it would not be for these false needs. Therefor, it is absoloutly inevitable that environmentalists’ idealolgy bases on opposition to capitalism’s over-production and over-consumption.

The critique on aluminium production here in Iceland has unforunately often been built on a very shallow ideology. Instead of looking at the aluminium industry as only one part of the extra-ordinary complicated web of global capitalism – and one of its bases – it has been seen as a single phenomenon, which has to be replaced by something else. Words like “green industry” have therefor become leading in the mainstream environmenatlist discussion. But there exists a different critical way of looking at heavy industry and ecological destruction in general.

A critique on heavy industry, based on deep ecological thought, does not need to include any ideas about what comes instead of aluminium if this “instead” means a different kind of industry or other destructive operations. Instead there simply is unspoiled nature, which is enormously necessary for the planet we live on – not from a beauty perspective, but because of the fact that the nature is the premise of life. Deep ecology bases on the idea that the man is not more superior than the ecosystem’s other forms of life, but is rather only a part of the ecosystem and has therefor no rights to deplete it, expect in a completely sustainable way. Sustainability is a difficult consept, which governments and corporations have managed to steal and put into their rhetoric, and therefor been able to sustain lies and hoaxes about the real meaning of it. The fundamental idea of sustainability is that we return to the natural world as much as we take from it.

Protecting the nature, for nature’s sake has thus nothing to do with the economical situation. Claiming that radical ecological ideologies only fit in when enough money exists is a complete absurdity. It is not like the last years of “prosperity” here in Iceland were marked by very ecologically friendly ideas.

In his article, “Is There Enough Aluminium in the World?” Jakob Björnsson, former director of energy affairs points out that “by far the biggest part of alulminium usage in the world today is in the industrial countries, where 25% of the people of the world live.” He also mentions that when China and India will have gone through proper indutrialization, 62% of humanity will live in industrial countries and the other 38% are also on their way there; that they want to enjoy the indstrialized countries’ living standards, even dream of cars and beer cans. These are very important facts.

Two things make Jakob’s article very interesting. Firstly, he says that it is a realistic oppurtunity that all human beings on the planet can reach the “qualities of life” and lifestyle that Occidentals now live with. Secondly, he states that human equalitiy is possible inside the system we live in.

Western society has been associaded with prosperity, which is said to be for the good. It is said to be a sign of success and progress. But what is the prosperity based on? What is sacrifized for the so-called life qualities?

20% of humanity consumes 80% of earth harnessed resources. The western ecological footprint is way to big for this planet. Considering the fact that unindustrialized countries are getting near to us when it comes to industrialization, production and consumption, it is clear that radical changes are needed.

And these changes can not include new “techno-fixes” that are supposed to solve the problems of the natural environment. They can not be fake sollutions, pretending that the western way of living can ever be positive for the earth, that we can really have positive impacts without radical changes of the consumer culture. The fact is this: We need to go back!

This lifestyle is not sustainable and will never be. That as easy as it gets. The word sustainability does not fit our society in any context. Capitalism does not assume sustainability, because it spins around constant economic growth and contantly increasing parallel aggressiveness. Therfor, capitalist society will never be environmentally friendly.

Corporations and authorities introduce to the public several actions, said to be real sollutions, but none of them assume real, radical changes. They are all centred upon continued production; selling and buying. When e.g. “green” cars are mentioned, the production process is never dealt with. Mining, transport, enormous usage of water and under-paid workforce in the third world – all of these fundamental parts of the production are kept away.

The goal is of course to keep the consumption pattern unchanged without attcking the roots of the problems. Peole are not encouraged to drive less, not to mention even stop driving. People are still supposed to buy new, nice looking cars every few years; and the society is still being organized with the benefits of car owners in mind. New highways are constantly being built and old ones enlarged.

This lifestyle, this culture, can not be taken up by the whole of humanity. The earth is not cabable of it. It means that we have to go back if the whole humanity is ever supposed to be able to be on the same line. We can neiter continue the so-called progress nor stand still.

And than we come to Jakob’s second point; that by time, equality can possibly be reached inside the system we live in. I hardly doubt that he believes this himself – and to be honest, I doubt that he, the primary spokesperson for the aluminium industry here in Iceland, really wants equality. Capitalism does not assume equality, but rather the complete opposite: Capitalism thrives on inequality. Just as big food producers and other big corporations, the aluminium companies thrive on inequality. The situation of the indigenous tribes of Orissa in India is a great example.

Jakob states that the tribes are on their way to industrialization like all other Indian people. The Orissa inhabitants that I have talked about in my prior articles here in Morgunblaðið, live on bauxite resources and fight heavily against bauxite mining, the destruction of ecosystems and their own extermination. The only thing the bauxite mining does to them is to dismantle their lands and livelihoods, as well as their lifestyle, language and culture. Their poverty will not be exterminated, but they will rather be fundamentally pushed into poverty. People will be banished from their sustainable communities, into the cities where nothing waits for them expect boring factory jobs and poverty. And more likely, they will fight for their lives to the last drop of blood. That is how capitalism works.

Coca Cola and a range of other companie have destroyed and polluted water, e.g. in India, and had to do with the murders of worker’s union leaders, e.g. in Columbia. The basic needs of Alcoa’s workers in Honduras and Mexico have been ignored, workers have been fired for organizing unions and their wages are only high enough to live up to one third of what they need to sustain their families and homes. Clothes companies run operate their factories in countries where they can pay their workers as lowe wages as possible; huge fields of land, forests and lakes are destroyed for the production of luxury items for the western countries. Is this maybe the equality that Jakob is talking about?

Capitalism on the one hand and equality and sustainability on the other, do not have anything in common. Neither one assumes the other and they simply do not work together. Reforms inside the system will have no good impacts, since they are not even made to have any good impacts. The only real sollution to the world’s problems is the extermination of capitalism.

“Do you know that your wheelchair is made out of aluminium?” said a police officer to one of those who stopped work in Helguvík this summer. Thereby he swamped all the arguments of the opposition to aluminium for good, didn’t he? Shortly after the publication of Jakob Björnsson’s (former director of energy affairs) article about the singer Björk Guðmundsdóttir and her usage of aluminium, the editors of Morgunblaðið got ready and wrote an editorial where it says that the opposers of aluminium are probably not self-consistent most of the time. Most of them use aluminium everyday and even Saving Iceland cooks in aluminium pots and uses aluminium polse to hold up their tents. “Hypocrisy” said Morgunblaðið.

This critique is far from being new. It has systematically been used against those who object to the further build-up of heavy industry here in Iceland, the destruction of Iceland’s nature for energy production, the destruction of ecosystems worldwide because of bauxite mining, and energy realization to a company that prides itself of its collaboration with the U.S. millitary. In addition to when aluminium opposers are all said to be wanting to move the Icelandic society back to the turf huts and build the country’s economy on picking mountain grass, this has been the main criticism.

No matter how many times it has been pointed out that at least 30% of all produced aluminium is used for the arms industry; no matter how many times it has been pointed out how much aluminium ends as a land-filling after having functions as single use drinking facilities; no matter that the context between low energy prices and the fact how easy it is for us to produce aluminium, use it once, throw it away and produce more – still we are being told that we are not self-consistent.

Then it is hammered in, most recently in the editorial of DV (one of Iceland’s biggest newspapers), that it is our ethical duty to drown the highlands and annihilate geothermal areas for energy consuming aluminium production; that is our environmental input. If the aluminium companies are not permitted to build smelters here in Iceland, they will just do it somewhere else in the world where the smelting will be powered in a less environmentally way. What a rubbish! Alcan wants to increase its production in Straumsvík (Iceland), preferably enlarge the smelter and build more smelter here. At the same time Alcan plans to build a smelter on a tax-free industrial zone in South-Africa, which suprisingly is going to be powered by coal and nuclear energy. The only thing that matters to them is the energy price, not the natural environment. Aluminium production will never become environmentally friendly or humane.

In Orissa, India, live indigenous tribes who have always lived in harmony with their natural environment. Their ecological footprint is hardly visible, at the same time as the lifestyle of the “developed” people in the western world are so destructive that we would not few extra planets if all humans on earth should be allowed to enjoy these “qualities of life”. The above-mentioned tribes live by and in the mountains and are so “unlucky” to literally live on the aluminium industry’s raw material paradise. Their struggle against the destruction of their lands for bauxite mining has lasted for quite a while and has most of the time been peaceful, even inside the framework of laws. However, the reaction of the authorities and other interested parties have been extremely violent, e.g. lead to deaths. Recently the highest court of India judged with the benefits of the British mining company Vedanta. Cultural genocides are one their way.

Author Andri Snær Magnason (e.g. The Dreamland) answered the above-mentioned articles of Jakob Björnsson and the editors of Morgunblaðið, where he asked: “When is there enough?” And Björnsson answered quickly: “When the majority of voters in Iceland has with its votes in parliamentary elections, decided that there is enough. Not until that happens.”

But the fact is different. The global process and impacts of aluminium production extend far away from Iceland. It is not the private business of Icelanders to decide if aluminium should be produces, bauxite mined, societys wiped out and ecosystems dismantled. And even if it would be so we can just remind ourselves about what happened right before and after the parliamentary elections in the spring of 2007. Samfylkingin (the Social Democratic Alliance) showed up with an environmental policy titled “Beautiful Iceland” and announced a heavy industry stop for at least five years. Now, c.a. one and a half year later, the party’s ministers have officially announced their support of two new smelters and the parallel harnessing of geothermal zones and glacial rivers; broken the ground for new smelters and signed contracts behind closed doors. All on the offer of democracy!

It is time to say that there is enough! More aluminium does not have to be produced! Bauxite does not have to be mined and more indidgenous societies do not have to be exterminated. More “green” bombs do not have to be produced, not more light millitary equipment that still kills as well as the heavy one, not more “eco-friendly” cars, not more recyclable beer cans. It is not needed to dam more rivers, drown more waterfalls, reindeer’s habitats and protected areas. There is no need print and send out more “Lowest Energy Prices” brochures, write more reports about the creation of the image of Iceland, or organize more “Pure Energy” tourist and business promotion festivals outside of Iceland. The only thing that has to be done is to push stop!

This article was written in a computer. Hypocrisy? Shold I maybe rather than writing articles about the harmfulness of aluminium production, move to the mountains of Orissa and fight against corporations and state armies with sticks and stones?Then be murdered for the guilt of wanting a healthy society; for wanting to protect the planet and its inhabitants?

]]> http://www.savingiceland.org/2008/09/hypocrisy/feed/ 0 http://www.savingiceland.org/2008/09/solidarity-actions-in-copenhagen-no-more-dams-no-more-smelters/ http://www.savingiceland.org/2008/09/solidarity-actions-in-copenhagen-no-more-dams-no-more-smelters/#comments Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:41:23 +0000 http://www.savingiceland.org/?p=3226 Today we received a letter from Denmark:

This morning, big banners were hanged on a building in Copenhagen saying: ,,Aluminium Industry is destroying all major Icelandic rivers!” A big advertisment from Icelandair Airline Company, showing Icelandic rivers, was hanging on this same wall last week.

The construction of the planned new Century aluminium smelter in Helguvík and Alcoa’s smelter in Húsavík, will lead to damming of more glacial rivers and geothermal areas. Today it looks like dams will be built in Þjórsá River, Tungnaá, Skjálfandafljót and Jökulsá á Fjöllum; only for further heavy industry projects.

To supply energy for Alcoa’s 346 thousand tons smelter in Húsavík, a reservoir bigger than the infamous Hálslón in Kárahnjúkar will be needed; 72 km2 (1).

There is no reason for feeding companies like Alcoa with more cheap energy. Alcoa is a arms producer, directly working with the American army, the weapon producer Lockheed Martin and other mean companies (2).

Alcoa is also well known for it’s human right crimes in the company’s factories in Honduras and Guatemala. In Honduras workers often have to urinate and defecate in their clothes because they are not allowed to go to the toilet more than two times a day; women have to take down their pants to prove they are having period; and workers who plan to form unions get fired. These are just few examples (3).

Icelandic nature and society are in danger!

No more Dams! No more Smelters!

Resources:

(1) Jaap Krater, Morgunblaðið, Bakki Impact Assessment Should Include Dams, 22. Ágúst 2008.

(2) Snorri Páll Jónsson Úlfhildarson, Morgunblaðið, Lygar og Útúrsnúningar, 24. Júní 2008.

(3) National Labor Committee with Community Comunication Honduras (2007). The Walmart-ization of Alcoa. http://www.nlcnet.org/article.php?id=447.

Árni speaks about aluminium – ”the green metal” – as some kind of a magic solution to solve all the environmental problems we are and will be facing in upcoming years. He points rightly out that most aluminium products can be recycled but adds that only about one third of produced aluminium ends up being recycled. To produce one ton of aluminium, 4 – 6 tons of bauxite is needed, which means that 2.6 – 4 tons are mined only to end up as a landfill. How many tons are that per year?

This is how we are deceived. Every single product which includes aluminium is said to be recyclable, because yes, it can be recycled. The a lot of the time, the cost is simply way too high and the more complicated the product becomes, with several layers of different material, the harder and more expensive it becomes to recycle it. Still, we are made believe that the product is eco-friendly and harmless to the environment, because of the possibility of recycling.

HAFNARFJORDUR, ICELAND – Activists from Saving Iceland have today begun stopping traffic to and from Rio Tinto-Alcan’s aluminium smelter in Straumsvík, Hafnarfjordur, by chaining themselves to the gates of the plant. Saving Iceland is protesting against Rio Tinto-Alcan’s plans to increase their aluminium production capacity on the island, the consequences of which would would be that significant parts of Iceland’s unique environment would have to be destroyed for energy generation. The activists are also protesting against the worlds largest aluminium producer’s involvement with the arms industry.
Rio Tinto-Alcan wants to increase its production in Straumsvík by 40 thousand tons per year without enlarging the smelter building itself. At the same time the company is planning to build a second aluminium smelter in the towns of Keilisnes or Þorlákshöfn (1).

*Update* Traffic to the smelter was stopped for several hours so trucks were told to leave and come back next week. Nobody was arrested.

Reykjavík Energy (Orkuveita Reykjavíkur) pulled out from an energy deal with Rio Tinto-Alcan because of strong public opposition to their expansion, resulting in the geothermally active Bitra mountain being saved.(2)

At the same time, Landsvirkjun (the national energy company) is planning to go ahead with the construction of three dams in the Thjórsá river, south Iceland, as well as one in the adjoining Tungnaá river. They have already signed an energy expansion contract with Rio Tinto-Alcan (4). In December 2006, the two companies signed a contract which stated that Rio Tinto-Alcan would share the cost of the three dams in Thjórsá (5).

Corruption in Hafnarfjörður
In the end of March 2007, a public referendum took place in Hafnarfjördur, where a majority in the city voted against the enlargement of their Rio Tinto-Alcan’s smelter. Lúdvík Geirsson, mayor of Hafnarfjördur, said that the referendum was a “victory for democracy” and added that he would follow the conclusion (6). Rio Tinto-Alcan announced that they were then considering to move their production facility to to Thorlákshöfn.

Only three months later, Lúdvík sat at a meeting with Rannveig Rist, director of Alcan in Iceland, and Michael Jacques, director of Alcan Primary Metal Group, where they discussed the future of Alcan in Iceland. One idea discussed was to increase the Straumsvik smelter’s capacity into the sea, on top of a landfill mound, rather than onto a lava rock area cleared by Alcan in anticipation of a positive result from the referendum (7). Many see this as a betrayal of the referendum spirit, which was not in regards to the specificities of Alcan’s expansion but their expansion altogether.

“Is this really what Geirsson calls the ‘victory of democracy’? Broken promises?” says Snorri Páll Jónsson Úlfhildarson, from Saving Iceland. “His behaviour show clearly how much power the aluminium corporations have here in Iceland. The authorities seem to not dare to speak or act against these corporations will.”

Alcan’s links with the arms industry
August 30th, 2006, Alcan signed a long-term contract for their involvement with the production of the F-35 Jointer Strike Fighter, in collaboration with the arms producers Lockheed Martin, Nothrop-Grumman and BAE Systems (8).

“This is not a respectable company” says Sofie Larsen from Saving Iceland. “Until now, Alcoa has got the most attention here in Iceland when it comes to the links between aluminium production and the arms industry. Yet, Alcan is no better at all, since the company is contracted to several different weapon producers.”

Alcan produces aluminum for EADS (European Aerospace and Defense and Space) (9), whose line of military helicopters and fighter jets includes the Eurofighter Tycoon, Mirage F1 and EF18 Hornet. EADS is also a lead in the production of missiles (10).

“On it’s website, EADS claims that the company’s product is only sold to countries who ´guarantee a responsible approach to high-tech military air systems´” says Sofie, ”but on the same site, one can find videos which glorify Nazi Germany’s airforce (11). What kind of ethics is that?”

The damming of Thjórsá river
Despite strong local resistance from farmers unwilling to give up their land for Rio Tinto-Alcan’s expansion, Landsvirkjun have been working full time to push through the four dam project. Landsvirkjun has again and again gone up to the river, trying to get farmers to agree with the construction. When they received a letter signed by nine of the ten farmers affected by the Urridafoss waterfall Thjórsá dam, stating that they refused to participate in any further discussions with the energy agency, Landsvirkjun threatened to forcefully expropriate their land.

Recently the district council of Flóahreppur made an agreement with Landsvirkjun to include the Urridafoss dam into their district plan. Jón Árni Vignisson, a farmer who lives by Thjórsá, said that they had done so after Landsvirkjun had promised to pump funds into a variety of their minor infrastructure projects: road, water supply and mobile phone reception improvements (12). Essentially, the local government had been bribed.

The enlargement of Rio Tinto-Alcan’s capacities in Iceland and the damming of the Thjórsá river are highly corrupt projects which Saving Iceland demands the immediate halting of.

References:

(1) Mbl.is, Álframleiðsla hjá Alcan aukin um 22 prósent, http://www.mbl.is/mm/frettir/innlent/200…
(2) Mbl.is, Fyrirhugaðar framkvæmdir og orkusala haldast í hendur, http://www.mbl.is/mm/frettir/innlent/200…
(3) Mbl.is, 200 mw orkusala úr sögunni, http://www.mbl.is/mm/frettir/innlent/200…
(4) Vísir.is, Alcan keppir áfram um orku Þjórsár, http://visir.is/article/20070909/FRETTIR…
(5) Heimasíða Rio Tinto-Alcan á Íslandi, http://www.riotintoalcan.is/?PageID=12&a…
(6 )Mbl.is, Sigur fyrir lýðræðið, http://www.mbl.is/mm/frettir/innlent/200…
(7) Mbl.is, Álver á landfyllingu, http://mbl.is/mm/frettir/innlent/2007/06…
(8) Vefsíða Alcan, http://www.alcan.com/web/publishing.nsf/…(JSF
(9) Vefsíða ABC Money, http://www.abcmoney.co.uk/news/132007869…
(10) Vefsíða EADS, http://www.eads.com/1024/en/businet/defe…
(11) Myndband sem segir sögu EADS, http://www.eads.com/xml/content/OF000000…
(12) Sunnlenska Fréttablaðið, 30. tölublað, Eigum marga aðra valkosti, bls. 8-9, 24. Júlí 2008

In a brochure named “Norðurál and the Community” [Norðurál is Century Aluminum], published by the company, one can e.g. read about the global process of aluminium production. Century Aluminium has its bauxite mines in Jamaica and now plans to open up one in West Congo, in cooperation with one of the world’s corrupt regimé.

It immediately catch one’s eyes that in Norðurál’s brochure, the word bauxite is not menitoned once and according to an explination picture, which is supposed to show the aluminium process from beginning to end, the production starts when alumina is unshipped in to a huge harbour silo.

How can it be? Is Norðurál such an environmentally friendly company that it does not even have to mine bauxite to be able to smelt aluminium? Does Norðurál have any different methods than other aluminium producers? No, this is what we call greenwashing!

It is absolutely the author of this brochure – Norðurál’s principals – could have got the idea to try to fool its readers in such a cheap way. While Alcoa proudly prides itself of its bauxite mining in the text “It all starts with mud”, it seems like Norðurál is trying to hide the fact that the company is involved with the destruction of rainforests, drinking water and the health of humans and animals on Jamaica. One can simply not find the word bauxite, neither in the above-mentioned brochure, nor on Norðurál’s website. Still bauxite, is the premise for aluminium production! Instead it is said that aluminium can be found extensively in the nature, e.g. in clay and rocks in Iceland.

What now? Is the company claiming that aluminium production is Icelandic; that Norðurál’s aluminium is a “pure Icelandic product”? What an illution! Aluminium production is global and its impacts as well.

What has untill now been missing in the discussino about aluminium production here in Iceland is the global context; global impacts of heavy industry. It is impossible to talk about aluminium production as an Icelandic phenomenon though smelters are being built here in Iceland and driven on by the destruction of Iceland’s nature. An aluminium product travels areound the whole globe untill it ends up where it is consumed. The raw material for a bomb is found in Jamaica or in India, processed in Iceland, the bomb finished in the U.S. and in the end thrown on a village in Iraq. Icelandic what?

In a interview in Morgunblaðið last Saturday, Bubbi Morthens [a famous pop-singer] said that there are more important issues in Iceland than aluminium production, e.g. poverty and unemployment, and crticized Björk and Sigur Rós for not hosting a big concert against poverty [In June 2008, Björk and Sigur Rós had a big outdoor concert against more aluminium smelters]. This is probably a common attitude here in Iceland.

But the issue is not so simple, that we can either choose between poverty or aluminium smelters, unemployment or smelters. The aluminium companies are parts of a capitalist economical system, which sustains on one’s profit while others loose. A job in a smelter can possibly sustain a family here in Iceland but at the same time lead to a catastrophe elsewhere in the world. To refuse these impacts and look completely away from them, is being selfish. Does it really not matter at all where the money comes from? Who benefits on whom? If so, could we than just as well build a weapon factory and children-powered sweatshop here?

In Norðurál’s brochure, it also says that the only possible way to reduce greenhousegases emissions and other pollution is “if people themselves minimize their use of tools and materials that lead to the pollution, e.g. plastic, steel and aluminium. While the demand for aluminium continues to increase, aluminium smelters have to be built somewhere in the world.”

It is easy for an industry that is responsible for as much destruction as the aluminium industry does, to try to get to people’s personal consumption and blame it for the environmental disasters that result from global capitalism. It is true that individuals can very easily minimize their consumption but this statement from Norðurál is still a complete quibble. The company puts itself in the steps of some kind of a charity organization, which simply answers the puclic call: “While you still ask for aluminium… we will produce it!”

Aluminium is now complimented as some kind of a magic sollution to the environmental catastrophe. The aluminium companies preach no real sollutions, no radical consumer stop, but simply the same consumption… only everything out aluminium this time. Jakob Björnsson, former director of energy affairs, recently wrote an article in Morgunblaðið where he spoke on behalf of the whole Icelandic nation and said that it was not ready to lower the “qualities of life” that we live with. Apart from the obvious fact that he has no permission to speak on behalf of 300,000 people, it is clear that if our “qualities of life” lead to poverty and ecological destruction elsewhere in the world, it is not our private decission if we minimize or increase these so-called “qualities”.

We need to take move our eyes away from Icelandic consumers, and to those that the aluminium productions hurts. Norðurál should talk to the people of Jamaica who have lost their lands, health and drinking water because of bauxite mining; the indigenous people of Orissa in India, where cultural genocides take place; the victims of wars who are largely driven by aluminium production. Norðurál should aske these people it they care – if they give their permission for “green and clean” aluminium production in Iceland.

UPDATE: The blockade went on for three hours. Nobody was arrested.

Videos 
• Century & Elkem / Icelandic Alloys blockade July 21st 2008.
• Century Helguvík smelter construction site occupation July 19th 2008
  

Century in West-Congo: opencast bauxite mining
In 2007 Century Aluminum Company signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Republic of the Congo (ROC) for the exclusive right to develop an aluminium smelter, alumina refinery and a bauxite mine (2). It specifies a minimum commitment of 500 megawatts of gas-generated electrical energy. Century is surveying where to mine the bauxite and will start building the smelter as soon as possible (3).

“We believe that the Republic of the Congo has all of the ingredients necessary to sustain a profitable aluminum industry,” said Century CEO Logan W. Kruger (2).

“Kruger is right,” says Snorri Páll Jónsson Úlfhildarson of Saving Iceland. “Transparency International rated the ROC as one of the most corrupt regimes in the world. Exactly the kind of regimes aluminium corporations like to deal with…” (4)

“It’s very unlikely the poor will have any benefit from this development but they will pay the price of the environmental impact. Oil revenue in the country has never reached them, why would it be different for bauxite?” Úlfhildarson continues.

“Considering the bauxite reserves in West Congo, it is clear that Century is planning large scale open cast mining there, in the same way other corporations are attempting in Orissa and what has also happened in Jamaica, Guyana and Guinea,” says Indian aluminium expert and author Samarendra Das who will be talking on this topic at Reykjavik Academia on Wednesday (see note a.).

“All over the world, where bauxite is mined the environment is being destroyed and people’s livelihoods and health taken away from them. People in Iceland need to know where the bauxite that is refined and then smelted into aluminium comes from,” says Das.

Century in Jamaica: environmental and health hazards
Century-owned St Ann Bauxite, it’s predecessor Kaiser as well as the ALCOA, RioTinto-Alcan and Rusal (which owns 1/3 of Century), are also active in Jamaica, have been held responsible for rainforest being destroyed and toxic pollution of drinking water (5,6,7). Century want to open up a second mine and refinery in a joint venture with Chinese Minmetals. That company is associated with prison labour factories and gross human rights abuses in China and elsewhere (see note b.).

Elkem – Icelandic Alloys: pollution accidents every week
Elkem – Icelandic Alloys wants to expand its facility at Grundartangi on Hvalfjordur for producing ferrosilicon for the steel industry. It is already one of Iceland’s largest contributors to greenhouse gases and other pollutants; expansion of the smelter would lead to a significant increase in Iceland’s carbon emissions (1).

In July 2007 it was reported (8) that Elkem ‘accidentally’ released a huge cloud of pollution from their plant. Apparently the accident was due to human error. Thordur Magnusson, an Elkem spokesman, then said that this human error “recurs several times a week.” Sigurbjorn Hjaltason, chairman of Kjosarhreppur parish, said that Elkem usually produced the emissions at night throughout the year.

About Saving Iceland
Last Friday, Saving Iceland stopped work at the construction site of Century Aluminum’s planned new smelter in Helguvík. This is part of their fourth summer of direct action against heavy industry in Iceland. In July 2007 activists also blockaded the smelter and steel factory.

Saving Iceland was started by Icelandic environmentalists asking for help to protest the Icelandic wilderness, the largest remaining in Europe, from heavy industry. As well as Century, other aluminium corporations ALCOA and Rio Tinto-Alcan want to construct new smelters. This would require exploitation of all the geothermal areas in the country, as well as damming all major glacial rivers (see note c.).

This year, the fourth action camp to protect Icelandic nature has been set up near the Hellisheidi geothermal plant east of Reykjavik, which is currently being expanded to produce electricity for Century Aluminum.

More information
 http://www.savingiceland.org
 savingiceland at riseup.net

Miriam Rose (+354 869 3782)
Snorri Páll Jónsson Úlfhildarson (+354 857 3521)
Jaap Krater (+354 867 1493)

Notes
A.) On Wednesday July 23, 19.30 h. Saving Iceland and Futureland will hold a conference with the Indian writer, scientist and aluminium expert Samarendra Das and ‘Dreamland’ author Andri Snær Magnusson, on the influence of the aluminium industry in the third world. Also, the concept of aluminium as a ‘green’ product will be examined. It will take place at Reykjavik Academia, Hringbraut 121. Mr Das is available for interviews; please contact one of the Saving Iceland contacts above.

B.) In 2004 Minmetals attempted a takeover of Canadian mining company Noranda but were declined in 2005 due to serious concerns over human rights abuses by the Chinese company. This report details Minmetal’s association to forced labour:

Dhir, Aaron A. (2006). ’Of Takeovers, Foreign Investment and Human Rights: Unpacking the Noranda-Minmetals Conundrum’, Banking and Finance Law Review, 22, 77-104.

C.) For more details and an overview of projects in Iceland, see: http://www.savingiceland.org/sos

References
(1) Icelandic Ministry of the Environment (2006). Iceland’s fourth national communication on climate change, report to the UNFCCC. http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/natc/isl… [Accessed 20-6-08]
(2) AZ Materials News (2007). Century Aluminium to Build Aluminium Smelter in Republic of Congo. http://www.azom.com/News.asp?NewsID=7734 [Accessed 20-6-08]
(3) Afrique en Ligne (2008). Congo to build aluminium smelter in Pointe-Noire. http://www.afriquenligne.fr/news/africa-… [Accessed 20-6-08]
(4) Transparency International (2006). Corruption Perceptions Index 2006. Transparency International, Berlin.
(5) Zadie Neufville, April 6, 2001, ’Bauxite Mining Blamed for Deforestation’. See http://forests.org/archive/samerica/baux…. [Accessed 20-6-08]

(6) Mines and Communities report,’Bauxite Mine Fight Looms in Jamaica’s Cockpit Country’, 24th October 2006. http://www.minesandcommunities.org/artic…. [Accessed 20-6-08]

(7) Al Jazeera (2008). Environmental damage from mining in Jamaica, June 11, 2008 News. Available through http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJa2ftQwf…. [Accessed 20-6-08]
(8) MBL.is (2007). Reykur frá járnblendiverksmiðjunni Grundartanga. http://mbl.is/mm/frettir/innlent/2007/07… [Accessed 20-6-08]

As well as Century, other aluminium corporations ALCOA and Rio Tinto-Alcan want to construct new smelters. This would require exploitation of all the geothermal areas in the country, as well as damming all major glacial rivers (1).

Impact assessment: ’pollution will just blow away’
The construction of Century’s Helguvík plant depends on the expansion of geothermal power plants east of Reykjavik (Hellisheiði) and on the Reykjanes peninsula southwest of Reykjavik (2). Construction of the smelter began in June, without a valid environmental impact assessment. There is also no guarantee of sufficient energy (435 MW) for the smelter (3).
The environmental impact assessment for the Helguvik smelter was produced by the construction engineers HRV, who have designed smelters for ALCOA and Century (4).

Video of the action

’Just as with the Alcoa smelter that has just been built in the East, the government shows no interest in following the the legal process for these huge projects. Instead, they act as if the smelter and power projects are inevitable, creating mass apathy. At the same time, Century’s human rights abuse record have largely gone unnoticed,’ says Ulfhildarson.

Environmental and human rights issues
Century Aluminum is a public corporation based in the US but who’s main owner is the recently formed Swiss-Russian conglomerate Glencore-RUSAL. It is involved in a number of projects in Africa and the Caribbean which are contended by environmental and human rights campaigners.

In Jamaica, Century jointly owns a 4.8 million tonne bauxite mine. The mining has resulted large-scale destruction of rainforest in the area (5,6,7,8) (also see a number of videos on this issue). Century are also involved in a joint venture to open up a second mine and alumina refinery with Chinese Minmetals, who are associated with prison labour factories and gross human rights abuses in China and elsewhere (9).

In February 2007, Century Aluminum signed a memorandum of understanding with the Republic of the Congo for the exclusive right to develop a smelter, an alumina refinery and a bauxite mine with a minimum commitment of 500 megawatts of gas-generated electrical energy in Pointe Noire.(10)

’It’s very unlikely the poor will have any benefit from this development but they will pay the price of the environmental impact. Oil revenue in the country has never reached them, why would it be different for bauxite? Transparency International rated the ROC as one of the most corrupt regimes in the world. Exactly the kind of regimes aluminium corporations like to deal with…’, says Ulfhildarson. (11)

Protest Camp
Saving Iceland was started by Icelandic environmentalists asking for help to protest the Icelandic wilderness, the largest remaining in Europe, from heavy industry. This year, the fourth action camp to protect Icelandic nature has been set up near the Hellisheidi geothermal plant.

Last year, people from Brazil, Trinidad and South Africa came to Iceland to share their experiences with heavy industry in their countries, and this year the Indian aluminium expert and writer Samarendra Das will be joining the campaign.

’The financial scams orchestrated by aluminium companies have created economic and environmental ruin in many countries, dramatically affecting the lives of thousands of their citizens. In each case, a sustained and costly PR campaign promising a new age of prosperity preceded this construction.’ Indian scientist, Das explains (12). Das will be giving a number of talks in Iceland in July, including a conference with Icelandic author Andi Snær Magnusson on the 23rd at Reykjavik Acamemia (13).

More information

 http://www.savingiceland.org
 savingiceland at riseup.net

• Jaap Krater
• Snorri Páll Jónsson Úlfhildarson
• Miriam Rose

References and notes

• 1) For more details and an overview of projects in Iceland, see: http://www.savingiceland.org/?page_id=23.
  For recent developments, see: http://www.savingiceland.org/?p=1923
• (2) Landvernd report, Nóvember 2007, ’Athugasemdir vegna umhverfisáhrifa orkuöflunar fyrir álver í Helguvík, sbr. frummatsskýrslur Orkuveitu Reykjavíkur fyrir Bitruvirkjun og virkjun við Hverahlíð.’
• (3) In the table below, the planning agency details that the 435 MW required for the smelter will come from a number of geothermal sites in Reykjanes and Hellisheiði. However, one of the planned plants, Bitravirkjun, has been put on hold because the environmental impact was deemed unacceptable. The energy-generating potential of the Reykjanes projects is uncertain and the environmental impacts have not been tested. In 2007, 60% of required energy had been found (see note 1). This was before Bitravirkjun was suspended.
  
  For more information on the lack of proper Environmental Impact Assessment see: The Ecologist, October 2007,’ Aluminium Tyrants’ by Jaap Krater, Miriam Rose and Mark Anslow.
• (4) HRV, Environmental Impact Asessment for Century Helguvík.
• (5) Century Aluminum website. http://www.centuryca.com/st_ann.html
• (6) Zadie Neufville, April 6, 2001, ’Bauxite Mining Blamed for Deforestation’. See http://forests.org/archive/samerica/bauxmini.htm.
• (7) Mines and Communities report,’Bauxite Mine Fight Looms in Jamaica’s Cockpit Country’, 24th October 2006 at http://www.minesandcommunities.org/article.php?a=6513.
• (8) ’Century Aluminum in Jamaica mining deal’, Monday, May 15, 2006, Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal.
• (9) In 2004 Minmetals attempted a takeover of Canadian mining company Noranda but were declined in 2005 due to serious concerns over human rights abuses by the Chinese company. This report details Minmetal’s association to forced labour.
  Source: Aaron A. Dhir, ’Of Takeovers, Foreign Investment and Human Rights: Unpacking the Noranda-Minmetals Conundrum’, Banking & Finance Law Review, Vol. 22, pp. 77-104, 2006.
• (10) http://sec.edgar-online.com/2007/03/01/ … tion11.asp
• and http://www.afriquenligne.fr/news/africa … 83302.html
• (11) Transparency International (2006). Corruption Perceptions Index 2006. Transparency International, Berlin.
• (12) Samarendra Das, ’Mining sacred mountains to fuel the war on terror’. June 2008. See http://www.savingiceland.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/2008voicesofthewilderness2lowres.pdf
• (13) On Wednesday July 23, 19.30 h. Saving Iceland will hold a conference with the Indian writer, scientist and aluminium expert Samarendra Das and ‘Dreamland’ author Andri Snær Magnusson, on the influence of the aluminium industry in the third world. Also, the concept of aluminium as a ‘green’ product will be examined. The evening is organised jointly with Futureland. It will take place at the Reykjavikurakademian house on Hringbraut 121.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using the same words as Indriðadóttir, this has been said before. This same quibble has always been used when Alcoa has been accused of links with the war industry and weapon production. The company’s principals here in Iceland repeatedly try to make it look like Alcoa only produces aluminium and sells it, but does not have anything to say about the future life of is produce. This myth should have been destroyed long time ago.

December 14th 2005, a news article appeared on Alocas website, saying that the company had signed a 12,5 million dollars contract with the U.S. millitary, about researching, designing and producing light weight weapons for millitary on land. In August 2004, the news website Allbusiness.com reported about contracts between Alcoa and Howmet Castings (Alcoa’s subsidiary) on the one hand and the U.S. government Department of Defence. Alcoa’s job was to develop new materials and alloys, which would minimize the cost of producing the next generation of millitary equipment in the air.

On the website of Washington Post, a news article was published the 12th of October 2007, saying that Alcoa and the weapon producer Lockheed Martin had made a 360 million dollars contract, which included Alcoa’s design and production of several parts for the fighter jet F-35 Lightning II, but the U.S. millitary plans to stop using its older machines and go over to using this new murder-machine. About a month later, Alcoa itself stated on its website that a further collaboration would take place between the two companies, this time concerning the prodcution of a new generation of millitary jeeps, which are named Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV).The article says that Alcoa’s part in the projectconcerns material knowledge and design, and that the company’s plan is to make the jeeps ligther, faster and stronger – but “Ligther! Faster! Stronger!” is indeed the slogan of Alcoa Defense, Alcoa’s millitary and defense section.

In the same article, Alcoa prides itself of its participation in weapon production, which covers a wide range, all the way from the above mentioned fighter jets to the M77 howitzer, which is e.g. used by the U.S. millitary in Afghanistan. On Alcoa Defense’s site one can also read about the collaboration between Alcoa, the U.S. millitary and the weapon producer AM General about the production of aluminium for the Humvees war jeeps used in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is says that all Alcoas work hard to accomplish this task, to support the U.S. troops. A press release on the website from January 1st 2007 it says that Alcoa Defense is a proud collaborarator of AM General and provides the endurance, mobility and reliability that the U.S. millitary depends on.

These are only few of enormously many examples of Alcoa’s links with wars and are taken directly from the company’s website and respected foreign news agencies. The situation is not that easy that Alcoa simply produces aluminium and has nothing to do with its future and usage. Alcoa is a weapon producer! Acoording to the press releases, Alcoa’s principals in the United States are extremely proud of these links and therefor it is strange that the Icelandic principals constantly try to deny these facts when the links are mentioned here in Iceland. If their plan is really to try to hide this obvious fact, than it was doomed from the beginning, since it only need the smallest research on the company’s own webpage to recognize this disgusting side of the company.

We do not have to listen to these lies and quibbles. We can on our own, find the information we need about authorities and corporations and make up our minds and opinions according to what we find. The white- and greenwash of Endra Indriðadóttir and Alcoa Fjarðarál is a pathetic experiment with the goal of creating a wrong image of the company. Unfortunately for them, it only makes bad become worse.