Copenhagen climate summit: 100,000 demonstrate

There was a strong anti-capitalist mood among the 100,000 people who demonstrated outside the Copenhagen climate summit on 12 December.

Police brutality against activists: "They put handcuffs on us and forced us to sit on the cold ground for six hours"

But almost 1,000 of the demonstrators were cornered off and forced to sit on the cold ground for six hours. Among them were 40 members of the CWI.

Officially, according to the Danish police, these were "preventative arrests". "We were innocent", says Mattias Bernhardsson, a CWI city councillor in Haninge, Sweden, who was one of the people arrested.

Despite winter temperatures climate activists walked from Copenhagen’s inner city to the ’Bella Centre’, six kilometres away, where the heads of governments from around the globe met.

Many demonstrators believed these politicians were not willing to take the scale of action needed to save the environment, as this would involve challenging the profit driven production of the car, oil, energy and other capitalist giants. According to media reports, the talks at the official conference were stagnating.

On Saturday demonstrations took place all around the world. In Australia 50,000 demonstrated. In Hong Kong, Manila and Berlin further protests were organised.

More demonstrations were planned for Sunday in Copenhagen.

Special financial appeal to all readers of socialistworld.net

Support building alternative socialist media

Socialistworld.net provides a unique analysis and perspective of world events. Socialistworld.net also plays a crucial role in building the struggle for socialism across all continents. Capitalism has failed! Assist us to build the fight-back and prepare for the stormy period of class struggles ahead.
Please make a donation to help us reach more readers and to widen our socialist campaigning work across the world.

Donate via Paypal

Liked this article? We need your support to improve our work. Please become a Patron! and support our work
Become a patron at Patreon!

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


*


December 2009
M T W T F S S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031