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NEWS June 23 2001
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| The EU meeting in Gothenburg – comment by a Swedish activist living in the UK For 3 days the EU summit in Gothenburg was the number one news item in the UK. But we have heard scarcely any analysis of the summit itself. What came out of the great event that would tackle EU enlargement and the oxymoron of ‘environmentally-friendly economic growth’? The end of 2002 was set as a deadline for talks with the aspiring new EU member states, with the goal that the new countries could participate in the 2004 EU election. On the other main point on their agenda, sustainable development, nothing was heard. Well, apart from EU leaders thumping their chests with pride over having a better climate change record than Bush. The big themes turned out to be the Irish NO in the referendum on the Nice treaty and the protests. European leaders openly discussed how to deal with the Irish NO and assured the Irish government that they would help them work around the problem, while the Irish Prime Minister assured it was in no way a vote against EU enlargement [who gave him the mandate to interpret it that way?]. In condemning the protests in Gothenburg the EU leaders found even more common ground. Leaders competed with each other in finding derogatory superlatives for what happened. Two days of events bringing together between 20 and 30 thousand demonstrators and a counter conference with 100 speakers (union activists, academics, environmentalists) from all over the world somehow got forgotten. The violence that culminated in the shootings of three protesters on Friday night should have created a serious debate. Instead the tragedy was used as nothing more than a photo opportunity by the mainstream media. The shots fired at a Reclaim the City party on Friday night left three people wounded, one of whom is still in a critical condition. Reports on what happened vary widely. No-one seems to deny that police tactics of trying to break up the party escalated the confrontations. Never before at a Western anti-globalisation demonstration, whether in Seattle, Nice, Prague or Quebec, have the police resorted to shooting with live ammunition at the demonstrators. Whatever happened in Gothenburg, the shootings must be seen as criminally negligent on the part of the police, while the media’s failure to comment on this appears to be part of a worrying trend to dehumanise protesters, blaming the victims and denying their human rights. |