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The '''Kraakers''' or '''Krakersrellen''' were a Dutch [[Autonomism|autonomous]] and [[Squatting|squatters]] movement active from [[Timeline of Libertarian Socialism in Western Europe|1968 to 1990]].
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.
 
 


== Rise of the Movement ==
== Rise of the Movement ==
From 1968, in the aftermath of the counter-culture, 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 governnment, creating kitchens, bars, cafes, information centers to deal with 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.
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
</ref>


== Activities ==
== Activities ==
Some notably actions of the kraakers include:
Some notably actions of the kraakers include:
* 1975: The Battle of Nieuwmarkt, as kraakers resist the demolition of homes
* 1975: The [[Battle of Nieuwmarkt]], kraakers resist the demolition of homes
* 1980: The Battle of Vondelstraat, seeing the Dutch government bring in tanks to help evict squatters
* 1980: The [[Battle of Vondelstraat]], seeing the Dutch government bring in tanks to help evict squatters
* 1980: The Battle of Geen Kronung, massive riots in response to the coronation of the Dutch queen
* 1980: The [[Battle of Geen Kronung]], massive riots in response to the coronation of the Dutch queen
* 1982: The Battle of the Lucky Luiyk, squatters and fascists fight in the streets
* 1980: The [[Battle of the Lucky Luiyk]] occurs, squatters and fascists fight in the streets
* 1986: The Battle of Borssele, as they tried to stop the construction of a nuclear power plant.
* 1983: The [[Battle for Groote Watering]], squatters resist evictions by police
* 1985: The [[Battle of Amsterdam (1985)|Battle of Amsterdam]], squatters resist evictions and police brutality
* 1986: The [[Battle of Borssele]], as they tried to stop the construction of a nuclear power plant
* 1988: The [[Battle of Nijmegen]]
* 1988: The [[Battle of Marienburcht]]
* 1988: The [[Battle of Konradstraat]]


== Decline and Collapse ==
== Decline and Collapse ==
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.  
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.  


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 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.
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.  
 
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.  


These kraakers
== See Also ==
European Autonomous Movements 113
* [[Revolutionary Anti-Racist Action]]
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.”


== References ==
== References ==
<references />[[Category:Libertarian Socialist Wiki]]
[[Category:AnarWiki]]
[[Category:Social Movements]]
[[Category:Social Movements]]
[[Category:Squatting]]
[[Category:Squatting]]
Line 181: Line 44:
[[Category:1970s]]
[[Category:1970s]]
[[Category:1968]]
[[Category:1968]]
[[Category:Kraakers]]
[[Category:Anti-Fascism]]

Latest revision as of 17:50, 3 April 2024

The Kraakers (named for the sound a door makes when you crowbar it) or Krakersrellen is a Dutch autonomous and squatters movement active from 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.


Rise of the Movement

From 1968, in the aftermath of the counter-culture, 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 landlords and police harassment, free radio stations and street parties. This was done in response to an 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.[1]

Activities

Some notably actions of the kraakers include:

Decline and Collapse

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.

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 to protect people.

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 reintegrating them into capitalist society.

See Also

References

  1. ↑ Georgy Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics, pages 110 - 111
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