Pro-refugee anti-NATO action in Dutch The Hague

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Activists at the NATO building in The Hague, the Netherlands, photo Robert Bas

Translated from Dutch NOS TV today:

Activists demonstrate at NATO against ‘Fortress Europe‘, 17 arrested

Six activists were arrested this morning at the NATO and the TNO [military] research institute building in The Hague. Eleven others were arrested on the roof of the NATO building in the afternoon.

The bookkeeper in this The Hague NATO headquarters was from the 1950s till the 1970s Joop Glimmerveen. He had been a soldier in the Korean war. There, he met fellow soldiers, Dutch war criminal members of Hitler’s SS. They had lost their Dutch nationality after World War II. They could get that nationalty back by ‘fighting bolshevism’ in Korea, like they had ‘fought bolshevism’ in the Soviet Union in the 1940s. They convinced fellow soldier Glimmerveen of their fascist ideas.

Ever since the 1970s, Glimmerveen for decades was the Fuehrer of the Nederlandse Volks-Unie, the Dutch anti-immigrant and pro-Hitler party.

The activists are from the No Border Camp group, part of the left-wing, autonomous No Border Network. They oppose European and Dutch migration policy, which they believe is inhumane, and “militarizes borders and contributes to reasons why people must flee“. According to them, both NATO and TNO are involved in that.

The group had climbed the roof of the NATO building to hang a banner with the text “No person is illegal.”

A slogan, originally from Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.

One of the banners on the NATO roof in this video says, translated: Migrants die because of NATO.

These two banners say, translated: From the sea to Yemen, NATO kills.

There were about fifty to sixty activists in front of the fences of the building.

“TNO research institute is one of the largest recipients of EU grants for research into and development of new border security technologies“, the group writes in a press release. “The walls of Fortress Europe are getting higher, rescue operations from aid organizations are being thwarted and refugees are being locked up and deported.” …

On Thursday, protests took place at the Red Cross, Friday at employment agency Otto Work Force and Saturday at a detention center in Rotterdam, where asylum seekers who have exhausted all legal remedies are awaiting their deportation.

At the Red Cross, flyers were distributed to employees because the aid organization cooperates with Airbus, the sixth largest arms company in the world. According to the activists, the cooperation between the two is “primarily intended to polish up the image of an arms company“. The action at employment agency Otto was to draw attention to the “precarious” circumstances of mainly Polish workers in the Netherlands.