Kraakers

The Kraakers or Krakersrellen were a Dutch autonomous and squatters movement active from 1968 to 1990.

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 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.

Activities

Some notably actions of the kraakers include:

• 1975: The Battle of Nieuwmarkt, as kraakers resist the demolition of homes
• 1980: The Battle of Vondelstraat, seeing the Dutch government bring in tanks to help evict squatters
• 1980: The 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
• 1986: The Battle of Borssele, as they tried to stop the construction of a nuclear power plant.

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.

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 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.”