raabjerg

Respect

Former Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen alledgedly pays back about 0.5 million DKK of salary that he is entitled to from the Danish state as a kind of ‘late compensation’ after starting his new job as NATO General Secretary (read article at politiken.dk). Not taking any political stands for/against the man, I believe this generous gesture commands a great deal of respect.

Add comment august 15th, 2009

Not so much respect

For those who are not in the know, lately there has been an ongoing issue with Iraqi refugees taking shelter in a Danish church after having their request for asylum denied.

What you may need to know if you’re not from around here is that traditionally, churches in Denmark have been a refuge, as safe-place, for people such as these who have exhausted all other options, and it has traditionally been unthinkable to send police into a church to exercise force there.

In addition, large groups of people (see for instance kirkeasyl.dk) have gone into this case offering their voice and protest against the decision to send these people back to Iraq, on humanitarian grounds. And as politiken.dk’s editor in chief, Thøger Seidenfaden remarks, this would have been entirely possible within the laws of the land.

Nevertheless, Wednesday night, police broke into the church and arrested the Iraqis with the intent of sending them back to their home country.

I’m actually not sure on where I stand on the matter of these refugees. On the one hand, should I decide, they would be allowed to stay in Denmark, but on the other hand, we have a judicial system in Denmark that are supposed to deal with matters of the law. And when it so happens that the deciding sections of the government have deemed that according to Danish law these people should be sent home, it is problematic if precisely they are allowed to stay just because a lot of people have gotten emotionally involved. In Denmark, we have – mostly – a working legal system, where if you want to change the laws of the land, you do that by exercising your democratic voting rights, and influencing your elected representatives in ‘folketinget‘ (the legislative body of the Danish government). I can be just as sad as most left-wing activists of the rhetoric used against foreigners in our country and the laws laid down to ’shield us from the bad [insert whatever here’, but Denmark still remains a democracy, where, unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – we need to respect the majority opinion, even if it sucks (in our view). Well, unless we are so much moved that we feel an obligation to enter into civil disobedience.

Which on this night, a lot of Danish citizens felt called to do. I am not to judge if this was right or not. However, what upsets me the most (and I know the kirkeasyl.dk folks would probably disagree with me on this one, seeing as they are all in this for the refugees), is the way the police appear to have handled the situation against people peacefully protesting against the police carrying out this order. True, they were blocking the way of the police, but have a look for yourself on some of the shots taken by politiken.dk this night: video.

This reminded me of the conduct of the Italian police once I were in Rome when they were taking on huge groups of activists who appeared to be up to nothing else than thrash the neighbourhood while setting fire on containers and running around with home-made axes, shields, and all other sorts things.

However, this is not a case of such revolt. This was a case of people moved by their conscience to sit themselves peacefully down on the road so that the police could not take these refugees away.

When I saw this video it made me angry. The conduct of the police as displayed in these takes are simply unacceptable. You do not use the baton against people already lying on the ground having been beaten down. You do not strike more times than absolutely necessary to split the crowd; anything else than that is clear excessive force. You do not strike people in their back as they are running away. You do not slap people in the face with your fist simply because they bad-mouth you. Fair enough that the police needed to use appropriate force to remove the people blocking their way. But the impression this gives of the police is not appropriate, it is excessive. And this is a fundamental problem, for if the executive branch of power does not take every measure to ensure that it acts appropriately when exercising force, trust in the democratic system will break down. Especially the last sequence on the video where a young woman receives 8 blows with the baton some of them while she is getting up and running from the beatings are upsetting. For once, I agree with Anders Samuelsen in seeing this as ’sickening’ and something that should not take place in a properly functioning democracy.

And what is more, the conduct of the police in this case appears to be simply an extension of the overtones from the Danish government when addressing the issue of refugees and immigrants. As remarked before, it could have been well within the law to let these people stay. But there appears to be an immense pressure from the government to all its branches to take the strictest possible interpretation and apply it. One may wonder if legislative branch of the government has not gotten too busy sending other signals as well, than simply laying down the law. Or rather, if the legislative branch has ever been purely legislative.

2 comments august 15th, 2009