Police violence at Rotterdam May Day demo

From a posting on Marxmail, an eyewitness account of police violence against this year’s May Day celebrations in Rotterdam:

Here’s some video I shot of the police attacking the Mayday demo in Rotterdam. I realize that police attack demos somewhere in the world every day, but this was rather significant because this demo has been held traditionally (for 30 years I understand) on mayday starting at the city hall in Rotterdam, but this time the police announced that we wouldn’t be allowed to march (supposedly because the sticks our flags were on could be “weapons”) and then told us we had to clear out of the area completely. After moving in and causing people to retreat and forcing us into smaller groups, they attacked the group still in front of the building with clubs, horses, and a dog, arresting 14. I only realized how close I got to being trampled by a horse after watching my own video!

http://www.xs4all.nl/~meisner/1meiRotterdam2010/CLIP0165.AVI
http://www.xs4all.nl/~meisner/1meiRotterdam2010/CLIP0175.AVI

Why the police attacked this time (again, for a traditional demo with a permit) isn’t clear, but might reflect a strategic shift against protest in context of the economic crisis. Or it might just be that they thought they could get away with it, partly since the demo was a lot smaller (about 500) than the usual 1-2000 (due to poorer organizing this year, I think). But this is held every year more or less without incident, so no one expected it. And I understand that the police also arrested people at the Mayday demo in Nijmegen, so this might signal a crackdown on the left and protesting in NL.

I’ve seen the excuse about sticks/flagpoles as “dangerous weapons” used before when police needed some reason to harass a demo, both here and in the UK. It’s absurd, but can be sold to the newspapers. The original poster overthinks the reasons for this police aggression; I doubt that the police has explicitely gotten orders to crack down on political protests. If I had to guess I’d think that it’s a side effect to the Rotterdam police overreacting to what happened at the Hoek van Holland beach party of August last year — where inept policing and rioting football hooligans led to the police accidently shooting and killing an innocent man. Since then the Rotterdam police has become a lot harsher in dealing with potentially dangerous situations and since leftist demonstrations of this kind have always been seen as worrisome by them, it’s no surprise that this happened. Wrong, but not surprising.