At 8:00 in the morning, 13 August 2022, over a thousand climate activists marched out of the System Change Camp in Hamburg to carry out a direct action of mass civil disobedience against the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure and colonial supply chains in and around the Port of Hamburg.
The German government is planning to build a dozen new LNG terminals to import liquefied natural gas as an alternative to Russian gas, much of this infrastructure is being constructed in the greater Hamburg area. LNG is not the ecological, sustainable energy source that many European politicians claim it is - while being marketed as "cleaner than coal and oil," LNG is still a fossil fuel, (composed mainly of methane), still emits greenhouse gases, and is still extracted from the ground, mainly in the Global South, contributing to socio-economic devastation of local populations.
Quoting Charly Dietz, spokesperson for activist collective Ende Gelände: "The climate crisis is getting worse and worse. But instead of finally phasing out gas, the German coast is to be covered with LNG terminals. Of all things, the big companies that are killing the climate are receiving billions in subsidies, while rising prices and fossil fuel inflation are becoming a risk of poverty for many people. This shows clearly: we are not in an energy crisis, but a capitalist distribution crisis. With our blockades in the Port of Hamburg, we are successfully resisting corporate power and standing up for climate justice."
[source: https://www.ende-gelaende.org/en/press-release/press-release-on-13-august-2022-at-5-pm/]
[source: https://www.ende-gelaende.org/en/press-release/press-release-on-13-august-2022-at-5-pm/]
Three so-called fingers, or blocks, of activists - gold, purple, and pink - marched to the S-Bahn station in Altona where a police blockade halted the march for around an hour or so, before activists were allowed to board the trains. I was embedded with the pink finger.
After exiting the S-Bahn near the Port of Hamburg, each of the three fingers independently made their way to their targets.
Following a lengthy march without hindrance, the pink finger was suddenly kettled by police in a narrow residential street, trapped under the sharp sun and stuck in blistering heat.
Police kept the pink finger trapped in the kettle for at least one hour. Temperature was around 32 degrees Celsius that day, it was extremely hot and there was very little shade.
It did not take long for local residents to exit their homes and offer water, shelter, and the use of bathrooms to the activists of the pink finger. Garden hoses were used to refill depleted water bottles in the most crucial moment.
Whereas Hamburg police recklessly trapped hundreds of people in extreme heat, local residents displayed their humanity by offering their water and homes in a genuine act of solidarity. Following the conclusion of protracted negotiations with the police, the pink finger was allowed to march under tight police escort towards a new point where they would be allowed to hold a demonstration.
After marching down a long street from the residential area, the front of the finger suddenly veered onto a nearby field breaking through a stunned group of police officers.
Pink flags led a spectacular rush around police lines to the finger's target for blockade: a major railroad line leading from the Port of Hamburg, an important shipping point for oil and coal, as well as a European hub of neocolonial supply chains.
Police reacted with pepper spray, as well as aggressively shoving activists from the train tracks into adjacent ditches and tearing umbrellas away from peaceful activists. Volunteer protest medics needed to intervene and tend to the injured.
After several hours of marching and enduring the extreme heat, the pink finger finally began its afternoon blockade of the fossil fuel railroad line.
Police managed to split the finger into two parts. One part was able to successfully occupy the railroad line transporting oil and gas from the Port of Hamburg, while the other part of the finger was kettled on the adjacent field.
Once things settled down, activists were able to stabilize and hold their blockade, along with the purple and gold fingers, which also successfully reached their targets elsewhere around the Port of Hamburg.
After approximately 9 hours of blockade, Hamburg police moved in to evict the climate activists of the pink finger. In the agonizing hours that followed, I witnessed disturbing acts of police brutality towards the blockading activists.
Rather than attempting to pick up and move individual activists off of the train tracks and the field, as I have witnessed elsewhere in Europe, police used an alarming tactic that I had not encountered anywhere outside of Germany - pain points on the body. Police bent back hands and arms, grabbed activists in headlocks, twisted fingers, stepped on knees, jammed fingers into eye sockets and other pressure points on the body - many people were screaming in pain. I was in complete shock that this sort of tactic was apparently not considered a form of illegal physical torture by the German authorities. I also witnessed BIPOC activists being racially profiled by the police, searched much more thoroughly and more intensely manhandled than non-BIPOC activists.
At one point, police mounted on horseback were called in, while two water cannons were used on the purple finger on a bridge a few kilometers further away. In one of the other fingers police reportedly left an unconscious person in the heat for at least 20 minutes without access to volunteer medics. Several activists needed to go to the hospital. I cannot describe the brutality of the Hamburg police that day as anything other than outrageous.
The pink finger nevertheless held the blockade as long as they possibly could, until the very last activist was forced off of the train tracks during the early evening hours. Despite the many obstacles of the day, the mass action managed to blockade the Port of Hamburg for several long hours, successfully bringing to a halt key fossil fuel infrastructure while demonstrating once again the power of Ende Gelände’s rallying cry - “who shuts shit down? We shut shit down!”