No Hope in Hagen

It's been a long week.

After an arduous, uncomfortable bus journey on a coach with no toilet or any leg room to speak of, arriving in Copenhagen should have felt like freedom but instead I have returned home feeling like I was more trapped in the city than I was on the Bus.

It could have been so very wonderful. World leaders could have stood in the Scandinavian snow announcing a progressive climate change agenda, a fair deal for poor countries and a legally binding agreement. Protesters on the streets could have put their point across peacefully, built links with each other and come up with joint solutions to offer to those meeting at the Bella Centre. Thousands of activists, after a week of productive direct action, demonstrations and inspiring events could have spread back across the world carrying with them news of a new movement built in Copenhagen that has promised to follow these leaders wherever they go, pressing them every time they appear to be failing on their promises.

To understand the repression of protest that took place outside the Bella Centre is to catch a glimpse of the decision making process that world leaders take part in. From the start of the week of action the Danish Police made it quite clear that dissent, whether peaceful or otherwise, would not be tolerated. In just 5 days I personally witnessed the ferocious police raid on Christiana, the surrounding and arresting of the entirety of a peaceful demonstration, the beating and pepper spraying of protesters who were entirely non-violent and the creation of a permanent state of fear among activists.

The police, if they had been paid by the IMF and WTO, would have made them proud. Rather than focusing on fair solutions to counter the blatant neoliberal doctrine of the summit activists were forced to discuss tactics on how to avoid police harassment and arrest. Rather than promoting the interests of those most affected by climate change, protesters were locked in cages, had their sleeping spaces raided, and were violently stopped from making their voices heard.

The situation at the summit itself was, even more worryingly, just as bad. Delegates from NGO's, journalists, developing nations representatives and others were, in effect, locked out of the Bella Centre for much of the week. Some queued for 10 hours on Monday only to be told they wouldn't be allowed in. Some never made it in all week as the allocation for 'civil society' shrunk with each day, finally to only 90 people on the final day of the talk.

If they had let the NGO's in, it probably wouldn't have made a difference. As the rich nations met in private and made the decisions, the poorest were forced to accept what they presented them. The final deal is everything we didn't want. It is weak, not legally binding and does far too little to help developing nations with climate change adaption and clean development. To clarify, the 'accord' signed by Britain, France, The USA and others makes no specific commitments in terms of time or levels of CO2 emissions, it makes a passing reference to keeping temperatures from rising above 2 degrees but no commitment to stop this from happening and, though it commits $100 billion a year this is not until 2020 and it is not clear who will distribute the cash. The deal is nothing short of criminal.

We trusted government to get us out of this mess and they have ultimately failed, we thought that at least on the streets we could get our voices heard but we have failed in that. The future is looking bleak. Not for us in the Global North, we'll cope, but for the hundreds of millions of people who have just witnessed the land that they live off, the rivers they drink from and the food they eat signed away.

Photos Courtesy of Max Wakefield: maxwak@gmail.com