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| From the 1960s into the 1990s, imaginative and playful countercultural
| | The '''Kraakers''' (named for the sound a door makes when you crowbar it) or '''Krakersrellen''' is a [[Netherlands|Dutch]] [[Autonomism|autonomous]] and [[Squatting|squatters]] movement active from [[Timeline of Anarchism in Western Europe|1968 until the present]] although in recent years there has been a sharp decline especially since new laws were voted in the 2010 '''kraakverbod''' (squatting ban) which crimminalised the practice. |
| 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
| | == Rise of the Movement == |
| often had direct national effects. In the 1980s, Amsterdam was a city
| | From 1968, in the aftermath of the counter-culture, [[List of Squats|squatters took over 25,000 buildings]] across the Netherlands in 13 years, 10,000 of which were in Amsterdam. They organize a network of resistance to the government, creating kitchens, bars, cafes, information centers to deal with [[Landlord|landlords]] and [[police]] harassment, free radio stations and street parties. This was done in response to an [[Business Cycle|economic boom]] in Amsterdam, as money was pumped into construction companies to promote a construction boom. At their peak in the mid-1980s, there was a new squat opened every week.<ref>Georgy Katsiaficas, [[The Subversion of Politics]], pages 110 - 111 |
| being (post)modernized through a massive infusion of capital. Billions
| | </ref> |
| of guilders were pumped into urban revitalization programs, and as
| | |
| Holland became part of the homogenization process (widely perceived
| | == Activities == |
| as the scourge of Americanization) sweeping Europe, its movement un-
| | Some notably actions of the kraakers include: |
| derwent a transition from a purely Dutch phenomenon, one replete with
| | * 1975: The [[Battle of Nieuwmarkt]], kraakers resist the demolition of homes |
| provos, kabouters, and kraakers, to a wing of the international Autonomen.
| | * 1980: The [[Battle of Vondelstraat]], seeing the Dutch government bring in tanks to help evict squatters |
| In 1986, during a three-hour battle against police guarding the nuclear
| | * 1980: The [[Battle of Geen Kronung]], massive riots in response to the coronation of the Dutch queen |
| power plant at Borssele, the first Dutch group formed that referred to
| | * 1980: The [[Battle of the Lucky Luiyk]] occurs, squatters and fascists fight in the streets |
| itself as Autonomen.
| | * 1983: The [[Battle for Groote Watering]], squatters resist evictions by police |
| At its high point in the early 1980s, the kraakers of Amsterdam fired
| | * 1985: The [[Battle of Amsterdam (1985)|Battle of Amsterdam]], squatters resist evictions and police brutality |
| the imaginations of young people all over Europe. Between 1968 and | | * 1986: The [[Battle of Borssele]], as they tried to stop the construction of a nuclear power plant |
| European Autonomous Movements 111
| | * 1988: The [[Battle of Nijmegen]] |
| 1981, more than ten thousand houses and apartments were squatted
| | * 1988: The [[Battle of Marienburcht]] |
| in Amsterdam, and an additional fifteen thousand were taken over in | | * 1988: The [[Battle of Konradstraat]] |
| the rest of Holland. Many of these squatters (or kraakers — pronounced
| | |
| “crackers”) were organized into a network of resistance to the police and
| | == Decline and Collapse == |
| the government. In squatted “People’s Kitchens,” bars, and cafes, food, | | The movements decline began as landlords illegally recruit criminal enforcers to clear out occupied buildings, often dressed in American football gear and steel-tipped boots. Welfare to students and the unemployed was cut, and police were given greater power and funding. Neo-fascists also began to attack squats and police refused to hold them off. Public opinion also began to turn against the squatters in 1982 due to the amount of destruction caused by battles. The movement also split between radicals and non-radicals. |
| and drink were served at affordable prices. In occupied office buildings,
| | |
| neighborhood block committees set up information centers to deal with
| | The radicals saw the Dutch housing crisis as another example of capitalism's failures, and saw their own struggle as the one 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. The non-radicals simply saw squatting as a way to get free housing and protect themselves from homelessness, and supported the creation of a greater [[Social Democracy|social democracy]] to protect people. |
| complaints against police and landlord brutality. A kraaker council planned
| | |
| the movement’s direction, and a kraaker radio station kept people posted
| | The combination of increasing repression, unpopularity and internal splits led to increasing paranoia in the movement, stagnating its ability to grow and depend on community support. A breakdown in trust and mutual aid led to the movement losing 24,000 squats in less than 10 years without an ability to create new squats. Surviving squats were converted into low-rent housing for squatters to live in, forcing them to act like lawyers and [[Co-optation|reintegrating]] them into capitalist society. |
| on new developments and late-breaking stories.
| | |
| The single most important event in the life and death of the kraak-
| | == See Also == |
| ers (and the most internationally publicized one) occurred on April 30,
| | * [[Revolutionary Anti-Racist Action]] |
| 1980, when riots marred Queen Beatrice’s lavish coronation. “ Geen wan-
| | |
| ing — -geen Kronung ” (“No place to live, no coronation”) was the slogan
| | == References == |
| for the demonstrations, but it was meant more as a mobilizing call than
| | [[Category:AnarWiki]] |
| a physical threat to the ceremony. The kraakers had originally hoped for
| | [[Category:Social Movements]] |
| a peaceful party day, although, like any other day, they had also planned
| | [[Category:Squatting]] |
| to occupy a few more empty dwellings before beginning to party. They
| | [[Category:Autonomism]] |
| were against a coronation so lavish that it cost 56 million guilder (about
| | [[Category:Libertarian Socialism]] |
| $25 million). When mounted police attacked some of the street parties,
| | [[Category:Netherlands]] |
| people fought back, unleashing a storm that the police were unable to
| | [[Category:Western Europe]] |
| control. The police were so badly beaten that day that the next week,
| | [[Category:20th Century]] |
| the police commissioner complained that many of his men could not | | [[Category:1980s]] |
| continue to fulfilll their duties for psychological reasons.
| | [[Category:1990s]] |
| In Amsterdam, a city with fewer than 800,000 inhabitants, more than
| | [[Category:1960s]] |
| 50,000 dwelling places were needed. When polled, a majority of the
| | [[Category:1970s]] |
| Dutch people repeatedly expressed sympathy for the squatters because | | [[Category:1968]] |
| of the dearth of reasonably priced places to live. Given the widespread | | [[Category:Kraakers]] |
| sympathy enjoyed by the squatters, local authorities attempted to divide
| | [[Category:Anti-Fascism]] |
| 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
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| 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
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| 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
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| 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
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| from South Africa. Emboldened by success, RA RA then attacked Shell,
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| Holland’s largest corporation, one of the world’s largest multinationals,
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| and the Dutch queen’s main source ofincome. In one night, thirty-seven
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| Shell stations were torched in Amsterdam alone. Despite more than a
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| hundred such attacks on its gas stations, Shell increased its investments in
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| South Africa and simultaneously launched an extensive public-relations
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| campaign against the domestic “terrorists.”
| |
| The Dutch royal family is one of Shell’s largest stockholders, and the
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| police were eager to show their loyalty. On April 11, 1988, Dutch police
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| 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
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| 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-
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| dence, and the cases against the remaining three were undeniably weak.
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| Moreover, in response to the arrests. Shell stations were sabotaged in
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| 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
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| 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
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| retook the building, arresting 123 people. Three weeks later, another
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| building, originally squatted by a women’s group in 1980, was also at-
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| tacked by police enforcing the city council’s declaration of the city as a
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| “kraaker-f ree zone.”
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| The government’s success in Nijmegen encouraged the police to take
| |
| action in Amsterdam, where the squatters were strongest. On July 18,
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| hundreds of riot police launched a combined assault from the canals and
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| the streets on the last big kraaker bastion in Amsterdam on the Konradstraat.
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| Hundreds of people defended the building, an old textile mill used for years
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| as an alternative workplace for artisans and home for 140 people. At one
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| 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
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| because we didn’t carry our own plan of defense, but because the police
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| came at us much harder than we anticipated.” At the time, homelessness
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| and unemployment were severeproblems in Holland, and the Dutch state
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| was throwing money at them. Few people expected the huge attack on the
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| Konradstraat, particularly because its occupants had put forth a proposal
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| 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
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| 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,
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| 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
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| guilty of informing to the police, negotiating with the government for
| |
| their own personal gain, or becoming yuppies. 15 The movement had cut
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| 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.”
| |
