(Note: this is my original text. It was translated into Hebrew, and my dear translator undertook some shortening, restructuring and simplifying of the material (the latter to make it more accessible for the Israeli readers). The people at Maariv also gave it the slightly stupid title 'Aim at the Anarchists - fire!' ... which didn't really have anything to do with the contents. Slight misunderstandings were not absent among the Israeli readers, either: one person saw the Swedish police's usage of sharp bullets against demonstrators as a justification of the same method against Palestinian demonstrators.)

The Gothenburg Protests

When the summit meeting of the European Union was on in Gothenburg June 14th to 16th, no Swede with the slightest interest in politics was going to miss it. This was the major opportunity to get attention to views on the EU, and show that alternative ways were possible.

On Thursday, June 14th, I took a tram from the suburb of Hjällbo, an excellent example of the deepening segregation in Swedish society, where I had received quarters from my kind aunt Tarja. Only two or three native Swedes I know of live there, while the rest of the population are immigrants mainly from the Balkan, Iran, Finland, Somalia and Palestine. Traveling towards the city centre, I enjoyed the sight of my former home town, and rejoiced in the appearance of new graffiti paintings on the factory walls along the tram line. Many of these paintings were, as expected, inspired by the summit meeting, with slogans like 'smash EU' or 'class war!'.

I got out at the square in front of the central station, and the high fences along the canal that separated the square from, among other things, a garden pavillion, where the EU people were supposed to enjoy an exquisite dinner later on, and the hotel where George W. Bush was going to stay during his visit, at once caught my attention. Police officers were strolling along inside the fences, making an effort to display as much of a macho attitude as is possible when you're just a Swede. And I couldn't help but smile wickedly at how afraid the politicians were of normal people.

I made my way towards the festival area on Pustervik quay - not far from the spiritual centre of Gothenburg, the Avenue, through streets filled with happy, enthusiastic people distributing leaflets, holding spontaneous speeches, collecting signatures for various causes, selling progressive magazines, or just checking out if there was anything interesting going on.

Pustervik quay was the site of the 'Forum 2001 - festival of the free word'. Debate, culture, dance, art and seminaries were going to counter the closed EU summit, from which even journalists were shut out. Represented were a wide range of organisations, who had one thing in common: they had realised that there were things about the European Union that ought to be changed.

And there is plenty of things needing change.

Behind the democratic facade, pretty much of the structure of the EU is built to suit the oligarchs of market economy. The governments and corporation bosses have set up the European Monetary Union (EMU) to help each other generate profits for the European monopolies at the expense of wages and social welfare. Despite recent economic growth, EU governments continue cutting public spending, while the European labour market is moving towards the US labour market: you are hired one day and fired the next. Leaving today's workers very unprotected.

The only way for non-EU-parliamentarians to express their suggestions and maybe make someone hear and understand, is by attempting to attract media attention in, for instance, popular demonstrations. Besides that, the only thing normal people can do is vote for representatives to their national government, which in turn votes for representatives to the EU parliament. There, a few people try to decide what is best for all EU citizens. Hence, the whole structure of the Union's 'democracy' is, in fact, rather undemocratic.

Not necessarily unexpectedly, most of the parliamentarians are generally more interested in the possibilities of making fast money that the EU gives, rather than trying to build a better society. And those who indeed want to do something they believe is constructive, have mainly found salvation in the Holy Market. Their greatest task seems to be to convince everyone that the only possible way is the way of the free market. Yet it isn't. The mechanisms of the market itself will bring everything to fall, if they aren't regulated. Attac is one of the major organisations focusing on market regulations, with, for instance, the Tobin tax on currency transactions.

As for the enlargement of the EU - a major issue at the summit - there is also here a contradiction between the pretty picture and the original motive. Contrary to the hopes of many Eastern Europeans that the EU membership will raise living standards, enlargement is very likely to be used by the rulers of the current EU countries to rob and plunder Central and Eastern Europe. They also see this as a means of strengthening the position of the EU vis-à-vis the US and Russia.

The EU has lately displayed a growing militarisation. The launching of a European army of 250.000 troops, armed to the teeth with combat aircraft, submarines and warships, marks a twist in the history of the EU as it prepares to take military action. The EU is trying to close the gap with the US as far as military technology and intelligence are concerned. The intention is to make a more independent and agressive foreign policy possible, since in these times 'crisis handling' and 'peace keeping' are the most important tasks of foreign politics.

One of the most important goals in the current development of the EU is, in fact, to both politically and economically become the 'United States of Europe', copying the US in as much as possible.

With the Schengen treaty, the EU is building a fortress Europe. While borders are opened for goods, services and capital, new borders are built against immigrants and refugees.

Since the EU is so widely under the influence of big corporations, the ecologic aspirations of its politics aren't as forceful as they could be. Strong elements in the EU are among those who ignore the prospect of a global ecologic catastrophe. After all, why bother about something that will probably, at the most, only hit our grandchildren hard enough to notice, when you can make lots of money today without caring about it?

All these things are just a few examples of the variety of reasons that had caused all these people to gather here. There was a wide range of approaches to the EU, from those advocating wary reforms from within, to some wanteing to raze the whole structure of capitalist power, to 'Stalinist' groupings, who just wanted Sweden to get out of the EU and instead build 'socialism in one country', as the popular slogan of Josif Vissarionovych went. Some organisations were taking advantage of the media attention, like a large group defending the Palestinian cause. There were even people protesting against the protests.

Though certainly most groups were somewhat left-wing and progressive, not all of them were. And most people present weren't 'properly' organised and structured. It was just a large part of the normal population partly wanting to express their opinion, and mostly just wanting to have some fun.

The yellow and white tents, shining in the rare Swedish sunlight, that had been rigged up on Pustervik quay, housed representatives of, among others, NGO Forum (a network of non-globalisation-organisations), Amnesty, the Swedish Association for Wildlife Protection, the broad left-wing magazine, organisation and publishing house Ordfront, a number of practisers of the in China suppressed Falun Gong, political parties, an organisation called 'Anti-Fascist Action' (AFA) and the large syndicalist union SAC. These were just a few examples of the huge variety of organisations and political parties. All of them were collected under two main groupings: Network Gothenburg 2001 and Gothenburg Action 2001 (where the former could be stereotyped as 'old-fashioned EU resistance', while the latter was more oriented towards the new international social movements). The most prominent organisations, like Attac and the larger political parties, were all over the place.

After almost making a group accident with a middle-aged, good-looking woman in red leather pants, whom an older man with a Finnish accent pretended to almost run over with his bike (just so he could try striking up a conversation about her trousers, though she patiently ignored him), I went inside one of the larger tents to listen to a seminary called 'Power to make a change - a conversation about influence'. Among the participants were the old protest singer Mikael Wiehe, Cecilia Verdinelli Peralta, a young member of Attac's team, and Iman Shakarchi, chairwoman of the association of the next of kin to the victims of the huge fire in a Gothenburg disco a few years ago, where 62 young people died. (Most of them had immigrant background and many of them went to my high school.)

Before starting the seminary, Cecilia, a normal (if somewhat politically active) middle class high school student with short, dark hair, spectacles and lively gestures, seized the word and told us about the confusing things that had been happening at her school, Hvitfeldt high school, during the morning.

All of a sudden, police had surrounded the school and sealed it off, without explaining why. Two other girls from the school borrowed Mikael Wiehe's microphone and encouraged us in the audience to go to the school and just hang around for a while and ask the police why they were doing it.

Farther away, a police helicopter was hovering above the trees.

I kept busy on the festival grounds, and left later on to join the demonstrations against George W. Bush, quite unaware of what I would see on the TV news the following evening.

On the square in front of the central station, many hundreds of happy people had gathered to show what their initial reaction to W. was, and give an alternative to the awe displayed by the official welcoming committee at the airport. More than a hundred people had climbed up on the roofs of the tram stops directly in front of Bush's hotel, while the rest of us were crowding on the square. With a triumphant roar everyone let their trousers down and mooned against the hotel. Under enthusiastic cheers the people on the roofs took turns showing their bottoms, one roof at a time, to express their opinion about Bush's politics.

Trams had only been going very sporadically during the day, due to traffic barring 'ensuring the safety of president Bush' (who had brought along a virtual army of his own security personnel). Many laughing people were standing around waiting for their trams. A group of very small children on day care were captured by the atmosphere and shouted 'hate Bush, hate Bush!'

During the subsequent large demonstration, opinions were articulated more explicitly against various aspects of Bush's politics. There were voices against the Bush family's affiliation with the American prison industry, and especially W.'s murderous policy of executions: during his five years as Texas governor, 152 persons were executed (giving him the nickname 'Texecutor'). And together with his brother Jeb, George W. tops the list of democratically elected persons, who execute under-aged citizens. Two thirds of all children executed in the world during the 1990's met their fate in the world's biggest 'democracy'.

Other important aspects demonstrated against were his ignorance of ecology, his so obviously framed electoral victory, his misogynous opposing of the abortion right, the plans for a worldwide robot shield, and his general incompetence and lack of intellect.

During the demonstration, the upbeat mood was slightly troubled by rumours about violent riots at Hvitfeldt high school. The general reaction was, that it probably just were a few violence romantics who had stepped over the line and were taken care of by an indulging police force.

I arrived at my aunt's house timely for the evening news. To my astonishment, the news special from the summit meeting showed a reality far away from the one I had just experienced. It was dominated by pictures of riots in the surroundings of the school, where mounted police galloped straight into groups of demonstrators, police with dogs chased terrified people, and youngsters threw pavement stones at the police, vandalised police cars and tried to drag traffic signs out of the ground.

Despite the dialogue, which the organisers of the protests and the police had been maintaining for many months proceeding the summit, where thorough agreements on what they would mutually do and not do had been made, the police, without warning, had sealed off the school. They had broken off the dialogue! And they had ignored their agreement to use neither horses nor dogs. No wonder people felt provoked ...

In the school, demonstrators from other towns and from abroad had received accomodation, with the municipality's commission. Anders Ornskar, 19 years old, had been inside the school, and he later told me about it: 'Around ten o'clock in the morning, when everyone's having breakfast, riot police hit an iron ring around the school and no one was permitted to pass through it, neither in nor out. We didn't get any information from the police, until more than two hours later, and then they said that we were supposed to be held until Bush had passed through the city. When there was new information, at half past two, that the police was going to go in to identify and search everyone, we summoned a non-violence-group, who sat down at the barring and showed that we didn't have any violent intentions. After identifying and searching us in the group, the police let us go, promising new accomodation, which we actually didn't get from them. Many of those who stayed in the school felt insulted and refused to give up the sleeping quarters they had received from the municipality. There weren't any weapons before the riot police sieged the school, but when it happened, many people started making weapons from what they could find there, for example glass bottles filled with gravel, fillets, and molotov coctails made by pumping petrol from cars that were parked on the schoolyard.'

Eyewitness accounts describe how the people inside the school tried to communicate with the police and asked to be let out. When their demands - that they would be allowed to go out in a group, not individually, that they wouldn't be identified, and that their belongings wouldn't be confiscated - were refused by the police, they decided to try to escape. It was around five o'clock in the afternoon. The whole attempt was non-violent, and the idea was that Ya Basta! (a peaceful non-violence organisation, that uses white well-padded overalls to get through police barrings, by squeezing through their bodies, without violence) would go first in their white attire and use their bodies as shields, so that the unprotected rest of them could get out. After failing to open up a dialogue with the police, the group of demonstrators attempted a breakout. After a few tries the decision from the police came: 'there'll be no more negotiations - you're all arrested for violent rioting.' They then slowly backed up on the narrow, walled approach, but were attacked by mounted police officers. Directly after them followed riot police and dogs, despite the police's promises not to use animals.

Mounted police cut off many demonstrators, hitting them with nightsticks. About thirty people were arrested on the approach, while about 200 managed to escape back into the schoolyard. There, they started throwing rocks to defend themselves against the police, who were hitting them with their telescope nightsticks. The police pushed them into the school, where they barricaded themselves, watching the police walk into the schoolyard in firm lines, vandalising their cars and other possessions that were there. The people under siege felt very stressed, held meetings and didn't know what to do. Some of them started climbing out on fire ledges to voluntarily be arrested. Their cameras were smashed and films torn to pieces.

Meanwhile, about 5.000 demonstrators had gathered outside the barrings. Also against these the police used horses, dogs and nightsticks. The demonstrators responded with pavement stones, and vandalised the surroundings. A few police officers were hurt slightly.

When there were around eighty to ninety persons left inside the school, some of them managed to escape through an unguarded window on the first floor. Around 11 p.m. the police stormed the school without permitting the presence of civilian witnesses or media. The seven persons who were still inside the building were arrested. All others had either let themselves be arrested under relatively peaceful conditions, or managed to escape.

According to the police's statements to the press, they had received some information indicating that persons in the building were planning violent actions. They also proudly referred to considerable amounts of weapons found in the school: molotov coctails, pointed sticks, foam rubber and rocks piled beneath the windows. Yet, as Anders said, there were no weapons, until the violent actions of the police made some people want to defend themselves. They had come to demonstrate, not to fight the police.

The proceedings at Hvitfeldt high school revved up the atmosphere and perhaps set the frames for the coming days. The police were the ones who first ignored agreements and broke the dialogue, when they were ordered to seal off the school without informing the demonstrators. This is a very important thing to remember.

On Friday, the 15th, the Gothenburg non-violence network was committed to stick to their plans despite the proceedings the day before. Together with the police, they had planned a peaceful and non-violent 'storming' of the cage-like fences around the summit grounds. The idea was to climb over a fence, be carried out again by the police, and repeat this until the police would get tired and arrest them.

While the non-violence network carried out their plans peacefully, Gothenburg Action 2001 were assembling further down on the Avenue for their 'Protest meeting against the EU - for a different Europe'. They, too, intended to get as close to the EU delegates as possible, to challenge the closed nature of the meeting, but without police cooperation.

After a while the police suggested that the non-violence network go away before the Gothenburg Action's demonstration arrived.

The Gothenburg Action's demonstrators were stopped by the police, who had no intention of letting them approach the fences. Yet the demonstrators defied them, and soon the police tried to shatter the demonstrators with dogs. When mounted police arrived, some demonstrators started throwing pavement stones, while more non-violently minded demonstrators desperately shouted at them to stop. Soon the demonstration was split up in two parts - a violent, mainly masked one, and the majority of a non-violent one, who tried to help the police.

The non-violent part retreated, while the virtual street fight, that was to make the major headlines in media, filled the air with stones and smoke. After some fighting, a large number of demonstrators had been blocked on Victoria bridge, and mass arrests started. Soon the situation was more or less under control again. The Avenue was deserted, save a couple of curious citizens.

Meanwhile, at the festival on Pustervik quay, where most people were assembled - myself included - not much of the riots had been noticed. The atmosphere was as friendly and upbeat as ever, and several hundreds of people, both old and young, rich and poor, conservative and progressive, walked around on the grounds. On the quayside Falun Gong was practised.

The instant debate on whom to blame for the violence was divided. A majority of activists strongly condemned the violence, as it also ruined the reputation of the peaceful demonstrators, and stole attention from all the constructive things that were being done, whereas some other activists blamed the police for provoking the violence by not letting the demonstration approach the fences. The police's approach was perhaps best illustrated by chief constable Hakan Jaldung's statement: 'Very few demonstrators were hurt. But a number of hooligans have been hurt.'

And the day was by far not over yet.

Fearing riots, the EU delegates' exclusive dinner at the garden pavillion was canceled. While sporadic groups of neo-nazis attacked demonstrators, a large, peaceful anti-EU demonstration was held in a very good mood, with a thoroughly mixed crowd of men in slick suits, librarian ladies and little girls in flowery dresses and green hair mingling.

Meanwhile, the organisation Reclaim the City, whose tactic is dance against capitalism, were having a party further away. Riot police were watching. Among the demonstrators were people who just wanted to dance and have fun, but also masked persons carrying rocks. Suddenly the police attacked and surrounded the dancing people. At once the masked activists answered with hurling rocks. Immediately, the atmosphere turned chaotic. Several shots rang out.

Riots followed, where some demonstrators provoked the police by throwing things at them, while other demonstrators protected police officers who were being attacked. A naked man was arrested by four mounted policemen.

All along, most people were engaged in peaceful activities farther away, again hardly noticing the riots. After a while, things calmed down.

Three demonstrators had been hurt in the shooting. Two of them lightly, but the third had caught a bullet in his stomach, and was in critical condition. This nineteen-year-old young man, a resident of Gothenburg, of 'good', academic background, was rushed to the hospital, where doctors worked on him day and night, pumping more than 100 litres of blood into his veins, ready to do almost anything to avoid his death and its possible consequences. Writing this, his condition seems to slowly be getting stable.

Two of his friends later said, that they had never seen him throw stones or use any other kind of violence until now. But the day before, another police officer had pulled a gun at him, without apparent reason, and he was angry about this, and the fact that a good friend of his had been assaulted. The anger and frustration caused him to join the violent part of the demonstration.

According to eye witnesses, a group of policemen had, while trying to seal off a street, been separated from their colleagues in the chaotic crowding. Demonstrators had attacked them with stones, and one of the policemen was knocked down. Two or three officers had then panicked, and fired their guns at the demonstrators. According to eye witness Orjan Bergsten from Gothenburg Action, there had been no warning shots. The young man shot in the stomach had not been the one throwing the rock that knocked down the policeman, and this could indicate that the shots were fired rather uncontrolled into the crowd. Had the shots really been in self-defense, as the police said? Perhaps it was rather the climax of the police's successive loss of control, being faced with a situation they weren't prepared for.

The last day of the summit was Saturday. In the morning, the most important demonstration against EU policies was held. The police lay low this time, and the whole thing was very peaceful. Masked activists were permitted to participate in the demonstration, and apart from the rain, everything went fine.

Sadly, the police burst into action later, violently emptying another school, Schiller high school, where demonstrators had been accommodated, using automatic rifles and forcing the demonstrators (including a woman who was breast feeding) to lie face down on the muddy yard for hours.

Sweden is a country with a thorough tradition of avoiding conflict. The country hasn't been properly involved in any wars since the beginning of the 18th century. Everyone is supposed to be nice to each other and not stick out. When the riots of 1968 shook the western world, prime minister Goran Persson most likely wasn't organising students, but sitting at the kitchen table with his mum, drinking milk and munching cinnamon buns. (And I can't help but wonder what Marit Paulsen from Folkpartiet - the right/center party - was doing in her student days, since she only sees similarities between the Gothenburg riots and the NSDAP's rise to power in the 1930's Germany. Unfortunately, she thereby shows her ignorance of world history, as she fails to realise that Adolf Hitler actually was democratically elected.)

Ever since before WWII, open confrontations between demonstrators and the constabulary have been practically non-existent in Sweden. In fact, it has been exactly seventy years since the police shot at a demonstration the last time, in Adalen 1931, where eleven persons were killed.

Hence it is no wonder that the Swedes are shocked after the Gothenburg riots. All other aspects of the demonstrations, and even the summit meeting itself, are completely overshadowed by the fact that demonstrators had used violence. Interestingly, many persons who have been known to strongly condemn Israel's brutality against stone-throwing Palestinian demonstrators, are now calling out for tougher police action against stone-throwing anti-EU demonstrators.

Pernilla Johansson, from the organisation DemokratiAkademin, 'Academy of Democracy', is a cheerful woman with a considerably swollen lip - by herself called 'the Gothenburg lip' - incurred from trying to stop a minor fight on Saturday evening between representatives of unidentified groupings (who all looked just as 'normal'). She spent three days at the Free Forum on Pustervik quay, and many persons who had attended all summit meetings since Seattle, had enthusiastically told her that this was the best organised alternative meeting they had ever seen. 'On Thursday we were perhaps 1000 people mooning Bush', she says, 'and 10.000 to 15.000 demonstrated against his politics later in the evening. On Saturday between 15.000 and 25.000 are said to have demonstrated - not against the EU, but various aspects of the EU politics.' Like myself, she didn't see any riots at all herself, which isn't strange at all, because riots only happened at a few very delimited places in the city. But many of our friends were there, unmasked and in normal clothing, in the midst of the stone throwers, talking to them and asking them to drop the rocks. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. 'But on the news there is just stones stones stones stones', Pernilla complains. 'No wonder if all the citizens of Gothenburg (especially those who didn't dare go near the city centre) are shouting for harder actions against "demonstrators" ... If you live in Gothenburg and watch the news, there is nothing that shows that while there are 20.000 demonstrators from out of town, only about 500 to 1.000 of them are out fighting - instead, everything indicates that each and every one of another parish is armed and ready for action. Why should they believe that we've been sitting at seminaries for three days or tried to make people stop throwing rocks at police and shop windows? An unbelievable amount of false, and not to mention distorted, information is being spread about Gothenburg.'

Media has almost explicitly concentrated on the violence. But it often fails to see that wherever the police was absent, everything was peaceful, while wherever they were actively present, they invoked anxiety. I don't think what the violent demonstrators did was a good thing to do in any way - even if they attracted attention to the protests, they generated an impression of all demonstrators as 'stone-hurling hooligans', burying all the constructive alternative views we tried to make heard. 

As for the police, I feel sorry about all the men and women who found themselves in an impossible situation, which they obviously weren't properly prepared for. The police failed gravely in their mission - they didn't bring safety, but unrest. Their leadership's behaviour tempts to conclude that they intentionally provoked trouble, but maybe it really was a question of plain incompetence.

The solution is not increased police brutality, since violence only breeds more violence. Thus we all despair in the comment of Ulf Adelsohn, one of the two men who will conduct an investigation on police resources, to a newspaper headline saying that a 19-year-old was in a respirator after being shot by a policeman. Adelsohn commented, that it should have said that 'a hooligan was in a respirator after trying to kill a policeman'. So everything is pointing towards hard times for us who are working for dialogue.

At the World Economic Forum in Salzburg on 1st of July, the police have no intention of making the same mistake as their Gothenburg colleagues. Effective random border controls are supposed to fight the 'riot tourism'.

But we have to be there. Our voices against the political order will not be silenced by mere propaganda.

Text by Tinet Elmgren. Revised version published in the magazine Sofshavua 26th of June 2001. Images from the Swedish Independent Media Center

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