Goodbye, COP15.

Bolivians dancing in Copenhagen at front of largest climate justice march in history.

It has been a long week.  I am in the Indymedia Center at my laptop for the first time in days, and there is a very hectic and exciting atmosphere amongst media activists trying to catch up on the week’s insane pace.

There have been demonstrations nearly everyday in the streets.   Actions have been far too numerous to count.  Inside the Bella Center a horde of other activists, delegations and other NGO groups have been creating pandemonium, trying to democratize the process of the climate talks and oppose market based and hopeless climate solutions.

I don’t know how anyone could keep track of it all. The COP15 climate talks have all but completely fallen apart, the danish environment minister chairing them has resigned and as of yesterday all NGOs have been locked-out of the summit.  More than 1500 people both outside and inside of the Bella Center grounds have been arrested, and many more beaten, clubbed, attacked by dogs, teargassed and pepper-sprayed.

Convergence centers and workshop spaces have been raided,  stop-and-search checkpoints used, vehicles seized, as well as individual and mass arrests — the largest of which was 900 activists and bystanders during Saturday’s massive permitted demonstration, in which detainees sat for hours in rows on the pavement, many passing out, wetting themselves, becoming ill from the cold.  On Monday, during a party at Cristiania, a squatted free-town a mile from the city center, police teargassed a crowd during a party following an event with well known author Naomi Klein, using a minor nearby street disturbance as an excuse to make further mass arrests  and conduct door to door raids, detaining roughly 200 more activists.  Specific activists thought to be important one way or another have been individually targeted.

Following a march of roughly 100,000 people on Saturday, the climax of the week occurred wednesday, when a few thousand of us tried to gain access to the Bella Center grounds using nonviolent methods to hold a ‘horizontal’ and democratic People’s Assembly to address the climate crisis in a more fair and just manner.  The largest group approached the main entrance using human chains to push towards the security fence, as a second group attempting to approach from a different direction was corralled and arrested nearby.  A third composed of somewhere between 100 and 200 delegates, walked out of the summit to join us, but were corralled and beaten on the inside of the fence.  As the first images of batton swinging police began to appear on TV, the people’s assembly was held held as close to the fence as possible, surrounded by hundreds of people with linked arms holding the police at bay.  Later that day, the last remaining NGO, Friends of the Earth International, was arrested during a sit in inside of the UN center.

It has been personally frustrating, overwhelming, inspiring, and educational. I will be working on a more comprehensive summary of the weeks events, and trying to catch-up with what I missed.

-Logan