Tragicomical trials after COP15

The juridical aftermath of COP15 is step by step turning both the Danish state and Danish organizations into tragicomical organizers of a farce. It is time that we start to laugh about both the Danish police, courts, mass media, political parties, the left and environmental organizations that have done so much to support the paranoia of a whole nation gone mad. For every more days in the courts the true effects of this paranoia is now there to see for everyone.
918 people were detained in the main demonstration during COP15 and so far there is no report that anyone of the mass arrested have been accused of anything. The cosmetic trick to make the mass arrest understandable is to hide the order of the course of events on this day, a simple and effective trick by the mass media. Lets reverse it and begin with one policeman being hit by a stone. First violence against the police, then mass arrest. To add to the impression the same figures are presented many times, there were some 970 persons arrested on December 12 and out of them 4 were accused of something. Well a bit disproportionate maybe as the Danish demonstration organizers puts it, but at least some that are accused of something.

But more than 50 were arrested outside the demonstration. Many in a protest after the degrading treatment with people forced to pee in their pants during the four hour waiting handcuffed and forced down to the pavement to be brought to the climate prison. It is among those arrested outside the demonstration that we probably have all the four who were accused for something on this day December 12, not among those arrested in the demonstration who in that case all were innocent. It is after the mass arrest when one policemen gets slightly wounded by a stone far away from the demonstration. But in the eyes of a paranoid nation its sound better if this takes place before the police starts to treat people in a degrading way so why not tell the story the way it looks best.
After all the press were dressed up by the Danish security police in bullet proof vests and told that the threat of violence was comparable to what could happen under threat from Al Qaida. During the summit the courts closed down all other processes. The prosecutors and the courts had instead 24-hour emergency service allowing 1000 to 2000 climate criminals being processed within a few days. Now it was time to deliver the story that showed that the police and the courts were right in their prediction of a violent threat against the police and the nation so any measure to avoid this violence becomes understandable, yes even welcome.
The only problem are the trials. Instead of a thousand trials against those mass arrested in the demonstration December 12 or whatever the Danish authorities envisioned we have other cases. As the pepper sprayed man who is accused of spitting the water he got in his mouth to get rid of the bad taste after his treatment to get his eyes to burn and his head to go panicking. He was spitting this water in the face of a policemen. Obviously a case of violence against the police and not a spontaneous reflection due to the pepper spray all over his face and in his mouth. Some weeks in prison is an obvious sentence for such violence. The prosecutor wanted much more and added to this also being banned from Denmark for six years.
Or the Italian middle aged master mind behind the violent actions in Copenhagen, a professor from an university. Two policemen were sure about that he was guilty of throwing stones during the police action at Christiania. The only problem was that his clothes were of different colours at the same time if one should believe both police witnesses. Furthermore Danish consulates were occupied in Italy in protests against the trials and many others showed their support. The court came to the verdict that he was not guilty.
He was lucky. It is worse to have only one witness. A young women from Sweden had not the privilege to have two witnesses against her that could be compared to each other. She claims that she tried to get away when the police started to use tear gas Christiania on December 14. One policeman claims he has seen her throwing something not knowing what. A bottle or a stone not hitting anyone. He received only one month in prison which she already had served during her custody as she was young and not previously sentenced.
A Frenchman had two police witnesses that had seen him being arrested and identified him, but with complete different stories. He was anyway sentenced by bringing in a third police witness who was not there at the arrest but supports one of the competing police witnesses at an earlier stage in the court of the events. Someone else is accused in an unfinished trial to have dropped a stone close to his his own feet in the grass 15 meters away from the police who claim they heard when it fell to the ground. According to the prosecutors this means he should be sent to prison for violence against the police.
Two German journalist were both threatened with long term sentences. One was accused of hitting a policeman with her fist, the other one for rescue attempt. After some of the police witnesses had different versions of what happened was the women accused of boxing a policeman found not guilty and the other women got the most common verdict so far after COP15, the same amount of days in prison as they already have been held in custody and thus immediately released after the trial.
All in all, one minor incident after the other. Mainly when the police have been especially violent, at Christiania using tear gas, in the police van on the way to the climate prison having used pepper spray, during the march towards the harbour December 13 when almost all were arrested and the media treated violently by the police.
With other words nothing serious happened in Copenhagen. And if something minimal happened it was mostly provoked by the police. The threat equal to Al Qaida never existed. But the cages built for climate prisoners had to be filled as well as columns in the press and afterward the courts sense a bit of reward for having prepared themselves so well for non existing thousands of crimes.
The stage we now enter can be seen as more serious. The trials against the spokes persons of Climate Justice action is a new step in repression in Europe. Now we do not any more talk about people accused of actually have done something, at times with arbitrary proof or lack thereof, at times with disproportionate sentences. But now we have trials against people who are accused of being spokes persons for non-violent action and thus claimed to be accountable for violence against police.
This is what makes them historic. If the accused are found not guilty it will be a disaster not only for the Danish state but also for all Danish organization that have been supporting the view that the CJA and CJN action was automatically violent when having the goal to use non-violence in a civil disobedience action at a legitimate assembly as the UN. Acquittal would mean that it becomes obvious that the claim by the police of an enormous violent threat against COP15 is false. That claim will share its fate with the claims by all formal left wing and environmental organizations except for Attac that accused the Reclaim power action for causing violence if they fulfilled their plans. The opposite, any verdict against the accsued, means that in principle the whole climate justice movement is criminalised. And not only the climate justice movement but any movement that can use methods as picketing, sit down actions, occupations or other forms of civil disobedience that might get in conflict with the police.
This became obvious in the start of the trial against CJA spokes persons this week. The prosecutor claims the accused have been instigating and coordinating a whole range of violent demonstrations and actions during COP15. The only reason why this did not happen is due to "Police efficient investigation and surveillance." You better read this one more time. It is true. The prosecutor claims that the accused were organizing violent actions and must get high sentenced for this as the result of their instigation would have been violent if the police did not with their counter measures had stopped this violence.
It is this "would have been" and words as "could" or "should" which are at the centre of the trial. Forget about being sentenced for what you have done. We now live in a new age were the courts are supposed to considered paranoid prosecutors that are as idiotic as the formal Danish organizations, that the whole idea to initiate non-violent civil disobedience at the Bella canter is automatically the same thing as instigating violence. It is exactly this thinking of the Danish formal organizations which will now be tested in the Danish courts.
The prosecutor Lene Steffensen summarizes well how the kind of thinking emerge that lies behind the perspectives both of the Danish state and the Danish organizations:
- It might seem as if we've looked into a crystal ball and predicted a few criminal incidents. But it is a prerequisite for such cases now that the crimes are not consummated.
That Via Campesina and other mass movements from all over the world would come to Copenhagen to provoke violence in the hands of those on trial is a matter hard to understand for everyone that believes that the climate change issues are a social reality for many billions on this earth. But this is what both the prosecutor and the hundred left wing, ecological, trade unions and other Danish organization supporting mass activities in Copenhagen but not Reclaim power are seeing in their crystal ball.
The prosecutor added in the court "that the accused together with "unidentified perpetrators" would perform acts of vandalism to buildings owned by the Confederation of Danish Industries, Shell, Maersk, the Danish Energy Association and Forum and assaulting police with various types of objects to throw.
This caused one more of the problems for the prosecutor opting for maximizing the punishment. The trial has to be ajourned as the prosecutor and defense attorney do not agree on what paragraph should be used. It is the second time this day. The first time when the court room has space for 8 in the audience and two of them were reserved for the police. The trial had to move. The second time the judges and his lay assessors have to find out that Danish Industries office cannot not be defined as utility providing essential services which would be resulting in using paragraphs with possibly more stronger verdicts.
It is hard at all to begin the trial. For what are the Climate Justice activists accused? For what "would have been", "could" or "should"? For what the accused would do together with "unidentified perpetrators"? Which of the 60 actions or demonstrations during COP15 that the accused spokes persons are supposed to have planned or would have participated in is not made clear.
But the prosecutor makes an attempt. ­ Would you have been participating in the demonstration on December 14 and what would you have done if you ran into the police. The answer comes prompt: I cannot say as I was arrested. Looking into the crystal ball is left to the Danish state and its juridical creative way of leaving rule of law behind us. Why not replace facts with speculation in trials as it is so much easier to find room for paranoid imaginations this way which fits so well with the whole preparations by the Danish state for climate protests.
For every more day of the trials in Copenhagen the farse becomes more and more obvious. There is no way for the Danish state and its prosecutor to win the trial other than to leave the rule of law tradition behind and replace it with collective punishment for what could have happened according to the predictions made by the police. To punish spokes persons for what others are doing is already leaving the rule of law behind. With not one single violent incident related to CJA actions there is no other way than finding the violence in the crystal ball.
So what is happening in the farsical trials is that the Danish state is confronted with a Pyrrhus victory. And so are all the Danish social partnership organisation whether they call themselves ecological, left wing or whatever claiming that mass movements from the South were automatically bringing violence to Denmark when insisting on organizing the Reclaim power action at the Bella Center. The Danish state and the formal system critical organizations in Denmark were unified in their view on who would cause violence and how to stop it.
Now the trials puts this in the limelight. It's up to prove your claims. And whatever the result the formal organizations and the state will loose. The court must decide guilty or not guilty. If they decide guilty the inner coherence of the Danish juridical system and its roots in Western justice will fall apart. If the verdict is not guilty the overdimensioned paranoid preparations and preventive arrests will be exposed as such as well as the Danish attitude towards the non-violent civil disobedience action at Bella Center.
Put under scrutinity by the consciousness of the democratically most vital heart of Denmark and popular movements in the world this will expose likewise both the Danish state and the Danish formal organizations. The Danish state pretended to be a normal democratic country protecting democratic rights and not a country that together with mass media was prepared to abolish freedom of expression in the name of non-existing violence. The formal Danish organization pretended to be normal democratic actors independent from the state and not organizations that together with mass media were prepared to not defend the freedom of expression for the demonstrators that they invited in the name of non-existing violence.
Lets be clear about this. That the Danish state together with mass media have been using the occasion for abolishing democratic rights in the name of a nameless tremendous threat with the great support of a population that according to numerous investigations is the most happy on earth is not the biggest surprise. But that also the system critical left and ecological organization were part of the same thinking is more of a surprise.
The trials is an opening for the Danish state but mostly for the Danish system critical organizations. They are both revealed but it is the organizations that most easily can change and use the situation. Attac has already done so and the tendency was there already during COP15 that environmental organizations were willing to act together with others and question the repression.
What is the most tragic and key actor is the Red Green Alliance party. They were the first to support the police perspective in the evening of December 12 and their members in the demonstration committee did nothing to encourage organizations that wanted the demonstration organizers to collectively respond to the horrendous police act.
As an environmentalist aligned with peasants I can insure that I will not regard Red Green Alliance as green anymore. Before I regarded them as one of the best socialist allies to the environmental and peasant movement both in the cause for environmental concerns and for democratic rights at summits as after Amsterdam 1997 and during Copenhagen 2002. Their politics during COP15 have made them an outcast in the struggle for climate justice and an organization acting as a traitor of both the demonstrators they invited, peasants world wide and the environmental cause.
How their red socialist allies will treat them I do not know. So far the international left have chosen to treat what happen as a cosy game blaming the state for everything and seeing the left in Denmark or elsewhere being the only actor that seriously defend democratic rights. To do the work to find out if this is true and what actually happened has been of less interest. That the social liberal party acted better then the left wing parties is so far from the world view of left wing organizations that they do not take this reality in their mind nor that other non-left wing actors could be as interested in serious anti repression work as themselves. To the left it seems as if other left wing actors are sancrosant and if even the more radical left wing parties have been a force in adopting to the mass media rules by immediately supporting the police perspective on the mass arrest of the innocent more than 900 hundred in the December 12 demonstration so be it. What else can a marginal left wing party do with the representatives of the global peasant and other mass movements in the town do than to avoid acting in solidarity with the global majority?
This year the Red Green Alliance decided to support NATO's cracking down on pirates at the Somalian coast. What political parties i Denmark is supposed to do to get support from the claimed most happy people on earth is to demand more law and order and forceful acts against trouble makers. And what could be more appropriate than to support the idea that Danish ships passing the African horn on their way with arms to the Persian gulf needs protection? The only thing apart from defending the interest of the Danish shipping company Maersk alone emitting more green house gases than the whole of Denmark was the human touch. It sort of gets the Danish population in a better mood if every forceful state act is presented as the protection of weak victims of terrorism. So the Red Green Alliance offered an extra spin to their position. They claimed that they supported the crack down on the pirates in the interest of Danish seamen.
The only problem was that this was a lie. Danish seamen was against going the route along the coast and preferred staying out of the troublesome zone. What the Red Green Alliance was protecting was the profit of Maersk in their conflict with the sailors prefered choice. If the left wing party did this without knowing or if they did it on purpose is in politics of less importance. A party saying it is an expression of the interest of workers should know on which side the stand of the conflict between sailors and the biggest Danish corporation there is. If not they could as well be a PR Agency for TNCs.
The left wing party Die Linke in Germany reacted strongly together with others on the decision by the Red Green Alliance and the party chose to revert their decision. It is possible to influence Danish organizations by international pressure even if it is hard. The coming trials depend not only on the pressure against the Danish state but also against Danish organizations. As long as they keep quite about the trials and avoid to act collectively on what happened during COP15 the Danish state has more free hands to change the democratic rules of the game in Europe and move a hundred years back in history to the days when the courts also under normal circumstance sent spokes persons of popular movement to jail for what individual members possibly could do.
The happy Danish population, the state and the organizations live in a symbiosis tightly linked together by the mass media. To break out of this symbiosis is not easy. The Danish organizations had a chance already during COP15 when the global popular movements and activists networks organized a demonstration on December 18 against the repression They did not take this chance. Now they have a second chance to regain their important role in the struggle for climate justice which is indivisible with the struggle for democratic rights. They are most welcome in this collective struggle. And it will be fun now when the trials are getting into the stage were the prosecutor needs a crystal ball to know what to say to make us all believe that it was the demonstrators and not the police that were violent during COP15.
When the Danish state went so far that they made targeted arrests of spokes persons of popular movements they went to far. They could mass arrest more than 900 innocent demonstrators without that the Danish demonstration committee collectively reacted strongly. Instead the Danish organizers used the occasion for individual statements supporting a police perspective. After this the Danish authorities thought now was the time for doing whatever you want so lets go and kidnap the spokes persons for the Reclaim power action by looking into the crystal ball seeing how violent the non-violent action actually was going to be, a perspective shared by almost all the Danish left and ecological organizations.
Now the Danish state through its prosecutor have to take this police perspective seriously. The only problem is that for every proof that it is the spokes persons that are guilty of planning or committing violence the opposite will become more and more obvious. In the middle of the court room will not be a crystal ball but a mirror showing that the only violent actor in practice in Copenhagen with one single exception which caused no serious harm was the Danish state primarily in the name of preventing a non-existing violent threat from Climate Justice Action.
The way the prosecutor have started the trials is not because she is unclever. It is the only way to handle the impossible task after a Pyrrhus victory in courts that has to follow normal rules. What will follow is a farce that will put Denmark on the map not only as a people claiming they are the happiest on earth but also on the map of a country that showed itself to be prepared to go collectively into the asylum for paranoia with the diagnosis of psychological projection onto others of their own characteristics. The emperor is naked and the symbiosis between him and his loyal organizations for every trial revealed and replaced by a mirror showing who actually was violent at COP15.
Tord Björk