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Iceland:
2000 people protested downtown Reykjavik at 17:30 of the 20th. There had been leaflets and announcements on the internet for a few weeks that there would be a protest at the next 17:30 after the bombing started. There was also a smaller group at Akureyri, the biggest town in the north of Iceland.
To show the enormity of the protests 2000 people is slightly less than 1% of the nation :-)
A group of four people had thrown red paint at the House of Ministries around 45 minutes before the protests were scheduled. This was in protest of our Minister of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) and Prime Minister declaring that Iceland was part of the war. Most of the protesters applauded the action or at least looked at it with a big grin on their face. My mother-in-law, who wasn't at the protest, laughed out loud when watching the news. The people who did it have not been caught.
Around 5 minutes before the protest was scheduled, a group of twenty people staged a die-in in front of said building. There were no attempts to remove them by the police.
The protest was a wide coalition of groups. All the political parties not in government spoke out against it, and one of them spoke against the UN sanctions. That party has recently climbed from around 7% to 14%, mostly benefitting from their strong anti-war and pro-environment stance. There was also a priest who spoke against the war. After formal protest there was a young rapper who absolutely said everything there needed to be said, ending with firing the PM and the MoFA on our behalf :-) He got a great cheer.
The protests themselves were peaceful, no civil disobedience even.
The media coverage was very sympathetic, even the Head of the police, when interviewed, had the decency to not try to connect the paint job to either the protesters or the die-in.
Coverage
You have to select "fimmtudag" and "19:00" at the top most logo. It will be there until next thursday. The news item starts at 7 minutes 30 secs, with dramatic footage of the die-in.
Me and my friends started a chain letter on tuesday to spam the MoFA, dug up all the email addresses there, sent those and a 250K gif picture with the chain letter to use in the spam. According to people I've polled, the letter spread like wild fire. I personally didn't send the spam until wednesday, and got an out of office reply 14 hours later, so we deemed the action a success. No media coverage though, not surprisingly.
There have been emails all over the place to boycott US goods. Afforementioned mother-in-law is not gonna buy any US goods until the war stops and all her female friends are doing the same.
Aside
How Iceland got directly involved in the war:
The Icelandic people got the news from the American Embassy that we were part of the 30 countries that were supporting it on tuesday. The MoFA gave a press release to that effect an hour later. There have been theories that our PM or MoFA was phoned up when Bulgaria refused to be on the list, and he gave his consent. There was a 100 people protest at 9:30 on wednesday, blocking the MoFA from leaving the House of Ministries.
Link
excerpt:
However, Boucher later amended the list at his daily news briefing, removing Bulgaria and adding Iceland.
It was not clear why the change was made, particularly because Bulgaria supported the now-withdrawn US-British-Spanish proposed resolution in the UN Security Council resolution that would have authorized force against Iraq. |
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