Violent clashes as Dutch outlaw squatting

Local television station AT5 broadcast footage of police with batons battling squatters in narrow streets and alleys, with the protesters throwing rocks and setting off fireworks.

AT5 published a photo of one young woman with a mohawk haircut being escorted away by a police officer while bleeding from a head wound.

Squatting is the latest pillar of the country’s liberal institutions – such as legal prostitution and cafes that openly sell marijuana – to be abolished or curtailed as the Dutch become more conservative and rethink the boundaries of their famed tolerance.

In Amsterdam, the epicentre of the movement known in Dutch as “kraken” or “breaking”, several hundred squatters had demonstrated peacefully during yesterday against the new law that makes their way of life punishable by up to a year in prison.

By nightfall, some began throwing rocks at police and overturning cars. Police attempted to disperse large groups on two streets by carrying out charges.

By mid-evening an Associated Press eyewitness saw squatters using metal fences and piles of bicycles to block one of the city’s bridges amid a haze of tear gas.

An AP photographer saw police using bulldozers and water cannons in an attempt to clear the streets lining the city’s ancient canals of such barricades and to quench fires set in piles of rubbish.

“Of course we’re going to resist: resisting is part of what we do,” said a young woman at a squat next to the Amstel River, before yesterday’s protest.

A study published this year by Amsterdam’s Free University estimated the number of squatters at roughly 1,500 in the Dutch capital, a city of 750,000. Amsterdam mayor Eberhard van der Laan says he plans to gradually empty the city’s remaining 200 squats.

“Here and there squatting definitely causes problems for a neighbourhood,” he said, but until now it has been seen mostly as a civil dispute between owners and occupants.

Building owners can now argue that squatters are breaking the law, the mayor said. That would “bring us to take action, where in the past we might not have done anything”.

City officials said however that no major evictions were expected yet.

Amsterdam and other Dutch cities remain unusually liberal, even by European standards, but they have gradually moved away from their free-for-all attitudes.

Prostitution is legal but has become more regulated, and Amsterdam has shut a third of its brothels. The number of marijuana cafes is declining amid new restrictions to distance them from schools.

Squatting gained public sympathy after the Second World War during a time of severe housing shortages and anger at property speculators.

A supreme court ruling in 1971 found that entering an unused building was not trespassing, with the thinking being that it was humane, or at least pragmatic, not to evict poor or homeless people living in a building not being used.

But that view changed as the Netherlands grew more prosperous and more sympathetic to business – and today the sentiment often runs against the squatters’ anti-establishment world view.

“Once squatting was maybe a romantic thing for people to do, but now they have children and jobs. Things have changed,” said Amsterdam city councillor Frank van Dalen, a member of the pro-business VVD party.

These days most squatters were migrants from eastern and southern Europe “who want a cheap place to live”, he said.