AnarWiki/markdown/Kraakers.md

From the 1960s into the 1990s, imaginative and playful countercultural
movements in Amsterdam and Copenhagen connected with each other in a
synchronous continuum of issues and tactics. Not burdened with the
weight of reacting to nationalistic militarism, activists in these two
cities shared a political culture ofimmediate actionism, and their
actions often had direct national effects. In the 1980s, Amsterdam was a
city being (post)modernized through a massive infusion of capital.
Billions of guilders were pumped into urban revitalization programs, and
as Holland became part of the homogenization process (widely perceived
as the scourge of Americanization) sweeping Europe, its movement un-
derwent a transition from a purely Dutch phenomenon, one replete with
provos, kabouters, and kraakers, to a wing of the international
Autonomen. In 1986, during a three-hour battle against police guarding
the nuclear power plant at Borssele, the first Dutch group formed that
referred to itself as Autonomen. At its high point in the early 1980s,
the kraakers of Amsterdam fired the imaginations of young people all
over Europe. Between 1968 and European Autonomous Movements 111 1981,
more than ten thousand houses and apartments were squatted in Amsterdam,
and an additional fifteen thousand were taken over in the rest of
Holland. Many of these squatters (or kraakers — pronounced “crackers”)
were organized into a network of resistance to the police and the
government. In squatted “People’s Kitchens,” bars, and cafes, food, and
drink were served at affordable prices. In occupied office buildings,
neighborhood block committees set up information centers to deal with
complaints against police and landlord brutality. A kraaker council
planned the movement’s direction, and a kraaker radio station kept
people posted on new developments and late-breaking stories. The single
most important event in the life and death of the kraak- ers (and the
most internationally publicized one) occurred on April 30, 1980, when
riots marred Queen Beatrice’s lavish coronation. “ Geen wan- ing — -geen
Kronung ” (“No place to live, no coronation”) was the slogan for the
demonstrations, but it was meant more as a mobilizing call than a
physical threat to the ceremony. The kraakers had originally hoped for a
peaceful party day, although, like any other day, they had also planned
to occupy a few more empty dwellings before beginning to party. They
were against a coronation so lavish that it cost 56 million guilder
(about $25 million). When mounted police attacked some of the street
parties, people fought back, unleashing a storm that the police were
unable to control. The police were so badly beaten that day that the
next week, the police commissioner complained that many of his men could
not continue to fulfilll their duties for psychological reasons. In
Amsterdam, a city with fewer than 800,000 inhabitants, more than 50,000
dwelling places were needed. When polled, a majority of the Dutch people
repeatedly expressed sympathy for the squatters because of the dearth of
reasonably priced places to live. Given the widespread sympathy enjoyed
by the squatters, local authorities attempted to divide the movement by
proclaiming only a few to be dangerous radicals who “led astray”
thousands of “honest” squatters. Intense police attacks were then
mounted on houses perceived to be the central leadership, but hastily
assembled throngs of squatters, about one thousand within the first half
hour, blocked the way to besieged houses in the Vondelstraat on March 3,
1980, and the Groote Keyser after the queen’s coronation. The kraakers
were able to control the streets in the early 1980s, but their victories
exacted a high cost: Dutch tolerance was tempered with a new edge of
legal reprimand and revengeful violence. Citizens’ com- mittees formed
to support the police, and football teams were recruited by landlords to
clear out occupied buildings. These groups often did their dirty work
dressed in American football gear (helmets and shoul- der pads) and
steel-tipped boots. In response to kraaker self-defense, the 112 The
Subversion of Politics Dutch parliament reconsidered laws governing the
vacant buildings. As previously liberal social security payments to
students and young people were curtailed, the police were granted more
money and more power. New laws were enforced to make it easier for
landlords to evict squatters. Property owners had needed the names of
specific individuals in order to obtain authorization to call in the
police, and because no self-respecting kraaker used his or her full
name, it was all but impossible to evict them. The new laws waived the
name requirement to obtain eviction papers and speeded up the time for
actions to be sanctioned by the courts to less than a month. Also
introduced were temporary rental contracts under which landlords did not
have to show grounds for annulling contracts. When compared with laws in
the United States and other European countries, Dutch law remained quite
liberal in terms of squatters’ rights. 14 Once a table, a chair, and a
bed have been moved into a vacant apartment, the occupant is legally
permitted to stay. Although there continued to be new squats (in
Amsterdam, a new squat per week was recorded), public opinion had turned
dramatically against the squatters, and the police had inflicted a
series of major defeats on them. One of the first battles lost by the
kraakers — for the Lucky Luiyk (the Lucky Luke) in 1982 — was fought
against the police and members of one of the small but increasingly
violent neo-fascist parties in Holland. The squatters repelled the
fascists who assaulted the house, but they could not hold out against
the police. When a streetcar was set on fire in this fight, schisms
began to appear in the ranks of the movement, since many people
questioned this extension of militant self-defense. In truth, some
kraakers were not interested in the radical transforma- tion of society
but merely needed individual solutions to their housing needs. To them,
fighting the police was unnecessary, especially when it was possible to
negotiate with the government and obtain a reason- able solution to
their housing problems. From their point of view, the simultaneous
existence of thousands of empty apartments and tens of thousands of
people in need of housing was a technical problem that could gradually
be solved by the existing system. Other kraakers — the radicals — saw
the housing crisis as another example of the system’s irra- tionality,
an irrationality also evident in the increasing starvation in the Third
World, the production of nuclear waste, and the transformation of cities
into concrete jungles. From their point of view, using crowbars to
occupy vacant buildings and barricades to defend them was part of the
same struggle being waged with stones and slingshots in occupied
Palestine and with AK-47s in Nicaragua. They felt that being afforded
the luxuries of Dutch citizens was part of their national privileges as
members of an affluent society in a corrupt world system. These kraakers
European Autonomous Movements 113 understood the atomization and
standardization of their lives as part of the price exacted by the world
system, and they hoped to contribute to its global transformation. By
1983, this division among the kraakers was no longer an internal matter.
After doing all they could to distance these two wings of the movement
from each other, Dutch authorities moved resolutely to eradicate the
radicals. At the battle for the Groote Watering, the police used armored
vehicles and construction cranes to evict the squatters. The cranes were
used to hoist metal containers filled with half a dozen police onto the
roofs of the building, where they could penetrate the elaborate
defenses. At first, the kraakers were able to repulse these rooftop
attacks, but the police used their imagination and loaded a police
officer dressed as Santa Claus into one of the containers. His emergence
so surprised the kraakers that the attack succeeded. The next police
target was a building on Weyers, a huge stronghold with art galleries,
coffee shops, and a concert hall. Despite five hundred defenders in the
building and thousands of people in the streets, the massive police
concentration and their use of overwhelming quantities of tear gas,
armor, and cranes won the day. Today the new Holiday Inn at Weyers is a
painful reminder of the police success, and February 1984 is remembered
as a time when the movement was split beyond repair. Despite these
setbacks, the kraakers were not yet defeated. When the pope visited
Amsterdam in May 1985, millions of guilders had to be spent on his
defense. Anonymous individuals offered a hefty reward to anyone who
reached the pontiff, and in the riots that ensued, severe damage was
inflicted on the city. The government reacted quickly. Us- ing a
specially trained unit, the police illegally evicted a woman and her
child from a squatted house in a working-class neighborhood known as a
kraaker stronghold. When hundreds of people attempted to resquat the
house, the police panicked, shooting one person in the arm. The house
was retaken by squatters. As riot police arrived to bolster the forces
of order, hundreds more kraakers reinforced the ranks of their
opponents. After the police took the house for the second time, they
badly beat all thirty-two people inside and put them in jail without
bedding, food, or medical care. The next day, Hans Koch, one of those
who had been beaten, was found dead in his jail cell. For the next three
nights, angry groups of kraakers attacked police stations, torched
police cars — some in front of police headquarters — and smashed city
offices. City authorities stonewalled any response to the death of Hans
Koch, and even a year later, the government still had not completed its
inquiry into his death. In December 1986, when the report was finally
released, it blamed the victim, claimingthat his drug addiction had
caused his death. Although 114 The Subversion of Politics the kraakers
swiftly responded by firebombing more police stations, the government
had chosen a violent solution in the struggle to reclaim Amsterdam. The
next month, when the new law governing housing went into effect, the
balance of forces shifted. With yuppies on the ascendancy, the movement
moved underground, and those committed to a vision of change developed
new forms of resistance. Alternative institutions, previously incidental
offsprings of a vibrant popular movement, were compelled to tie
themselves more intimately to their only remaining constituency: the
international Autonomen. Increasingly cut off from the younger
generation in Holland, the kraakers replenished their ranks with
activists from England, Germany, and as far away as Australia. The
internationalization of the movement only intensified the reaction of
the Dutch Right. Portraying the kraakers as foreigners, they recruited
Dutch football teams to join with neo-fascist groups and attack squatted
houses, often in full view of police. In one such confrontation, a team
known as the Rams arrived in full American football gear, and although
the oc- cupants tried to surrender peacefully, they were severely
beaten, to the point where one of them had to spend two weeks in the
hospital with multiple fractures of the legs and arms and severe facial
lacerations. With the intensification of the attacks against the
movement, a greater commitment to practical resistance seemed needed.
With a declining popular base, secretive small-group actions,
particularly by people us- ing the signature of RA RA (Anti-Racist
Action Group), became more common. RA RA grew out of the kraaker
movement, and like the squatters, it became part of a wider European
movement. By the late 1980s, RA RA was part of a militant
anti-imperialism movement on the rise in European circles. In 1985, RA
RA began its most successful campaign — to force MAKRO supermarkets, a
chain owned by one of the largest corporations in Holland, to divest its
investments in South Africa. After a series of firebombings caused over
100 million guilders in damages to these supermarkets, the corporation
withdrew its money from South Africa. Emboldened by success, RA RA then
attacked Shell, Holland’s largest corporation, one of the world’s
largest multinationals, and the Dutch queen’s main source ofincome. In
one night, thirty-seven Shell stations were torched in Amsterdam alone.
Despite more than a hundred such attacks on its gas stations, Shell
increased its investments in South Africa and simultaneously launched an
extensive public-relations campaign against the domestic “terrorists.”
The Dutch royal family is one of Shell’s largest stockholders, and the
police were eager to show their loyalty. On April 11, 1988, Dutch police
raided ten houses, seizing address books, diaries, and computers and
European Autonomous Movements 115 arresting eight people on suspicion of
belonging to RA RA. Although the press immediately declared that the
hard core of RA RA had finally been apprehended, five of the eight were
quickly released for lack of evi- dence, and the cases against the
remaining three were undeniably weak. Moreover, in response to the
arrests. Shell stations were sabotaged in Utrecht, Apeldoorn, Tilburg,
Baarn, Almere, and Haaksbergen, a clear sign that the infrastructure of
RA RA remained intact. At the same time, the popular movement declined.
We see here a stark subcycle within the better-known synergistic dynamic
of repression and resistance: secretive conspiratorial resistance helps
minimize the possibility and impact of open popular forms of resistance;
guerrilla actions replace massive mobiliza- tions; and the impetus to
increasing democracy is lost as the bitterness of confrontation becomes
primary. In such contexts, the forces of order thrive while popular
movements become weakened and vulnerable. In Holland, the police first
crushed the kraakers in Nijmegen, their second greatest redoubt. A large
vacant building owned by Shell — the Marienburcht- — had been resquatted
on April 24 by over a hundred people wearing masks, helmets, and gloves,
and armed with clubs. They quickly scared away the few policemen at the
scene and barricaded themselves inside the building. At 5 A.M. the next
day, hundreds of riot police retook the building, arresting 123 people.
Three weeks later, another building, originally squatted by a women’s
group in 1980, was also at- tacked by police enforcing the city
council’s declaration of the city as a “kraaker-f ree zone.” The
government’s success in Nijmegen encouraged the police to take action in
Amsterdam, where the squatters were strongest. On July 18, hundreds of
riot police launched a combined assault from the canals and the streets
on the last big kraaker bastion in Amsterdam on the Konradstraat.
Hundreds of people defended the building, an old textile mill used for
years as an alternative workplace for artisans and home for 140 people.
At one point in the battle, the building caught on fire, causing a giant
cloud of smoke to rise ominously over the city. In the aftermath of
their eviction, one of the kraakers expressed his frustration: “We were
disappointed not because we didn’t carry our own plan of defense, but
because the police came at us much harder than we anticipated.” At the
time, homelessness and unemployment were severeproblems in Holland, and
the Dutch state was throwing money at them. Few people expected the huge
attack on the Konradstraat, particularly because its occupants had put
forth a proposal to renovate the building at a low cost. The squatters’
plan would have provided double the number of apartments and jobs that
eventually were created, but the fate of that building revealed that the
Social Democrats governing Amsterdam had another priority: destroying
the kraakers. 116 The Subver sion of Politics By 1990, massive police
attacks and modification of the laws covering squatters succeeded in
displacing thousands of them from the center city, areas that were
reclaimed by yuppies and sanitized for tourists. In 1993, fewer than a
thousand apartments and houses were occupied in the entire country. What
had been a feeling of empowerment in 1980 had been transformed into
marginalization and paranoia. Whereas conflicts with the system had once
been paramount, as with all movements in decline, the most pressing
problems became internal ones. Such splits were so severe that a
“traitors” list was published, a booklet entitled “Pearls Be- fore
Swine” containing the names of about two hundred people found guilty of
informing to the police, negotiating with the government for their own
personal gain, or becoming yuppies. 15 The movement had cut itself off
from its own membership. One of the participants explained: “Once
paranoia sets in, every new person is suspect, and you’re left with 200
militants in your friendship circle. Then the rest of society has been
insulated from the movement, and the 200 gradually become 150, then 50.”