Clashes broke out during a protest against anti-Covid measures in Brussels in which about 35,000 people take part. According to reports, the protest began peacefully but, after a group of protesters threw objects against the police, officers used water cannons and tear gas to disperse them.
Five policemen injured and at least 40 people arrested in three provinces is the toll from the second night of clashes during the anti-lockdown protests in the Netherlands. The international media report it. The Dutch authorities used water cannons, dogs and mounted police to stop the rioting youth who set fires and threw stones at the officers: five of them were injured in The Hague where the highest number of arrests were recorded. Other riots occurred in two cities in the southern province of Limburg, in the city of Urk and in the northern province of Flevoland.
Friday another night of fighting
The violent anti-restriction protests resulted in 51 arrests and 7 injured. Early in the morning, not only the municipality but also the managers of bars and shops swept away the remains of the clashes in the night between police and demonstrators that left much of the country in shock. “It was an orgy of violence, I cannot describe what happened in any other way”, are the words of the mayor of Rotterdam, Ahmed Aboutaleb. The fact is that the demonstration was announced as peaceful and was part of a series of protests which, the next day, that is today, should have also involved Amsterdam and the southern town of Breda. But at the Coolsingel, the great thoroughfare that connects the train station to the center of Rotterdam, something has gone wrong. Shortly after 7pm, when bars and restaurants were preparing to close due to the new anti-Covid rules introduced a week ago by Prime Minister Mark Rutte, the protest turned into violence.
“Whose fault was it?” Asks one of the country’s leading newspapers, De Telegraaf. According to the authorities, among the demonstrators there were several infiltrators, guilty of having launched heavy fireworks, burned and damaged cars in the heart of the city. Very young people and right-wing groups from different parts of the country or linked to the ultras of Feyenoord, the team most loved by the inhabitants, born over a hundred years ago in the homonymous southern district of Rotterdam, one of the most difficult. Yes, because behind the image of a city projected to the future, to sustainable and electric mobility, what is one of the largest ports on the planet hides a soul in turmoil, made up of massive immigration, inequalities, illicit trafficking and ‘gabber’, the hardcore music that was born here in the nineties. But the police also ended up under accusation in the Coolsingel riots.
“They shot at eye level”, is the thesis circulating on the demonstrators’ chats. Two of the seven injured were transported to hospital overnight.
The police, on the two injured demonstrators, opened an investigation. But even in the police there are the injured, fortunately light. And the Rotterdam guerrilla has somehow frightened the anti-Covid Dutch citizens, in the trenches since the government has filtered that soon, in the country, the ‘2G’ rule will apply, which excludes those who have taken the test from various public places but he is not vaccinated (or cured). In Amsterdam, the great demonstration announced in recent days has been canceled. But hundreds marched the same in the Rokin, in the center, in a peaceful way, as also happened in Breda. “These are protests, those of Rotterdam were a group of idiots”, explains a Dutchman, however, opposed to the new squeeze.
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