Brussels D14

national | miscellaneous | news report Tuesday December 18, 2001 21:29 by Amanda Moloney amanda_moloney at hotmail dot com

Report from Brussels on Friday evening.D14

We have just gotten word that apart from three people everyone who was
arrested has been released. The police say one of the three has been
positively identified as taking part in the attack on either a bank or cop
station.
Two cop stations were wrecked today. I was there at one of them, the place
was completely empty. It appears the cops had everything staged for the
media. Why would you leave a station on the middle of a protest route
completely unattended? The cops didnt even show up for about a half an hour
later. It seems they were trying to do damage control for Genoa. Like the
message they're trying to send is that protesters are completely capable of
violence even when we leave them alone.
Not true, the cops might have behaved when the cameras were around but not
the rest of the time. It was not on the same level as Genoa but there has
been a definite attempt at intimidation here. Places being raided, alot of
people were deported. Today there were some fairly badly injured people
that could be seen trapped in the convergence centre.
Earlier today the convergence centre was surrounded for 3-4 hours. People
were herded in from the street and no-one was allowed leave. There were a
few thousand people inside, including Venus. She escaped over the railway
tracks but was arrested when they got onto a bridge. She was driven around
by plain clothes cops for a few hours and eventually dropped off back where
she was picked up.
One indymedia journalist was arrested today. She was released after a few
hours and her equipement and tapes were returned.
Also many indymedia journalists were searched. Sometimes as part of overall
searches that were taking place in the areas they were in and sometimes thet
were specifically targeted. On all occasions tapes and films were taken.
Sometimes this was done by plain clothes cops who refused to show id or give
any information apart from to say they were police.
This evening a lot of rumours were going around that police would raid the
imc in order to get the rest of the footage and pictures. There is a radio
here which picks up police radio and something along those lines was said.
There was also talk that they would shut down all the squats and university
warehouse where groups are sleeping. This was backed up by those that had
been picked up by police and told to stay off the streets because tonight
would be bad.
So far things are fine, here and in the
streets and squats. We now believe the cops know about the radio and were
fucking with us. At the time we were hearing this stuff, some guy no one
had ever seen before came in and started filming us. When he was asked to
turn it off for a while he started arguing and kept filming until he was
told to fuck off. Could have been innocent but it didnt seem it.
To be on the safe side we took all films to safe houses and uploaded all
video as fast as was possible. Some people took one of the editing machines
to a private apartment aswell so some people are working from there.
Around this time someone came into the imc saying that the police were
surrounding us. Some people rang contacts in corporate press who came
racing to the building from all over the city. Turns out there was a
fire in a nearby building and people were seeing the fire engine lights.
Fire fighters were amazed to be so much in demand by media.