Day: November 20, 2021

Police arrested seven rioters in The Hague on Saturday night after youths set fires in the streets and threw fireworks at officers. The unrest came a day after police opened fire on protesters in Rotterdam amid what the port city’s mayor called “an orgy of violence” that broke out at a protest against coronavirus restrictions.

Elsewhere in the Netherlands, two soccer matches in the top professional league had to be briefly halted after fans — banned from matches under a partial lockdown in force in the Netherlands for a week — broke into stadiums in the towns of Alkmaar and Almelo.

Police said via Twitter that seven people were arrested in The Hague and five officers were injured. One needed treatment in a hospital.

Local media outlet Regio 15 reported that rioters threw bicycles, wooden pallets and motorized scooters on one of the fires.

The rioting in The Hague was on a smaller scale than the pitched battles on the streets of Rotterdam on Friday night, when police said three rioters were hit by bullets and investigations were underway to establish if they were shot by police. Earlier police said two people were hit. The condition of the injured rioters was not disclosed.

Officers in Rotterdam arrested 51 people, about half of them minors, police said Saturday afternoon. One police officer was hospitalized with a leg injury suffered in the rioting, another was treated by ambulance staff and countless others suffered minor injuries.

Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb told reporters in the early hours of Saturday that “on a number of occasions the police felt it necessary to draw their weapons to defend themselves” as rioters rampaged through the port city’s central shopping district, setting fires and throwing rocks and fireworks at officers.

“They shot at protesters, people were injured,” Aboutaleb said. He did not have details on the injuries. Police also fired warning shots.

Police combing through video footage from security cameras expect to make more arrests.

Photos from the scene showed at least one police car in flames and another with a bicycle slammed through its windshield.

Riot police and a water cannon restored calm after midnight.

It was one of the worst outbreaks of violence in the Netherlands since coronavirus restrictions were first imposed last year. In January, rioters also attacked police and set fires on the streets of Rotterdam after a curfew came into force.

Justice Minister Ferd Grapperhaus condemned the events.

“The riots and extreme violence against police officers, riot police and firefighters last night in Rotterdam are disgusting to see,” he said in a statement.

“Protesting is a great right in our society, but what we saw last night is simply criminal behavior. It has nothing to do with demonstrating,” he added.

Police units from around the country raced to Rotterdam to help bring Friday night’s situation under control. Aboutaleb said that gangs of soccer hooligans were involved in the rioting.

An independent investigation into the shootings by police was opened, as is the case whenever Dutch police use their weapons.

The government has said it wants to introduce a law that would allow businesses to restrict the country’s coronavirus pass system to only people who are fully vaccinated or have recovered from COVID-19 — that would exclude people who test negative.

Earlier Saturday, two protests against COVID-19 measures went off peacefully in Amsterdam and the southern city of Breda.

Thousands gathered on Amsterdam’s central Dam Square, despite organizers calling off the protest. They walked peacefully through the streets, closely monitored by police. A few hundred people also marched through the southern Dutch city of Breda. One organizer, Joost Eras, told broadcaster NOS he didn’t expect violence after consulting with police.

“We certainly don’t support what happened in Rotterdam. We were shocked by it,” he said.

The country has seen record numbers of infections in recent days and a new partial lockdown came into force a week ago.

Local political party Leefbaar Rotterdam condemned the violence in a tweet.

“The center of our beautiful city has this evening transformed into a war zone,” it said. “Rotterdam is a city where you can disagree with things that happen but violence is never, never, the solution.”

Source: Voice Of America

This was supposed to be the Christmas in Europe where family and friends could once again embrace holiday festivities and one another. Instead, the continent is the global epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic as cases soar to record levels in many countries.

With infections spiking again despite nearly two years of restrictions, the health crisis increasingly is pitting citizen against citizen — the vaccinated against the unvaccinated.

Governments desperate to shield overburdened health care systems are imposing rules that limit choices for the unvaccinated in the hope that doing so will drive up rates of vaccinations.

Austria on Friday went a step further, making vaccinations mandatory as of Feb. 1.

“For a long time, maybe too long, I and others thought that it must be possible to convince people in Austria, to convince them to get vaccinated voluntarily,” Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg said.

He called the move “our only way to break out of this vicious cycle of viral waves and lockdown discussions for good.”

While Austria so far stands alone in the European Union in making vaccinations mandatory, more and more governments are clamping down.

Starting Monday, Slovakia is banning people who haven’t been vaccinated from all nonessential stores and shopping malls. They also will not be allowed to attend any public event or gathering and will be required to test twice a week just to go to work.

“A merry Christmas does not mean a Christmas without COVID-19,” warned Prime Minister Eduard Heger. “For that to happen, Slovakia would need to have a completely different vaccination rate.”

He called the measures “a lockdown for the unvaccinated.”

Slovakia, where just 45.3% of the 5.5 million population is fully vaccinated, reported a record 8,342 new virus cases Tuesday.

It is not only nations of central and eastern Europe that are suffering anew. Wealthy nations in the west also are being hit hard and imposing restrictions on their populations once again.

“It is really, absolutely, time to take action,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday. With a vaccination rate of 67.5%, her nation is now considering mandatory vaccinations for many health professionals.

Greece, too, is targeting the unvaccinated. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced a battery of new restrictions late Thursday for the unvaccinated, keeping them out of venues including bars, restaurants, cinemas, theaters, museums and gyms, even if they have tested negative.

“It is an immediate act of protection and, of course, an indirect urge to be vaccinated,” Mitsotakis said.

The restrictions enrage Clare Daly, an Irish EU legislator who is a member of the European parliament’s civil liberties and justice committee. She argues that nations are trampling individual rights.

“In a whole number of cases, member states are excluding people from their ability to go to work,” Daly said, calling Austria’s restrictions on the unvaccinated that preceded its decision Friday to impose a full lockdown “a frightening scenario.”

Even in Ireland, where 75.9% of the population is fully vaccinated, she feels a backlash against holdouts.

“There’s almost a sort of hate speech being whipped up against the unvaccinated,” she said.

The world has had a history of mandatory vaccines in many nations for diseases such as smallpox and polio. Yet despite a global COVID-19 death toll exceeding 5 million, despite overwhelming medical evidence that vaccines highly protect against death or serious illness from COVID-19 and slow the pandemic’s spread, opposition to vaccinations remains stubbornly strong among parts of the population.

Some 10,000 people, chanting “freedom, freedom,” gathered in Prague this week to protest Czech government restrictions imposed on the unvaccinated.

“No single individual freedom is absolute,” countered professor Paul De Grauwe of the London School of Economics. “The freedom not to be vaccinated needs to be limited to guarantee the freedom of others to enjoy good health,” he wrote for the liberal think tank Liberales.

That principle is now turning friends away from each other and splitting families across European nations.

Birgitte Schoenmakers, a general practitioner and professor at Leuven University, sees it on an almost daily basis.

“It has turned into a battle between the people,” she said.

She sees political conflicts whipped up by people willfully spreading conspiracy theories, but also intensely human stories. One of her patients has been locked out of the home of her parents because she dreads being vaccinated.

Schoemakers said that while authorities had long baulked at the idea of mandatory vaccinations, the highly infectious delta variant is changing minds.

“To make a U-turn on this is incredibly difficult,” she said.

Spiking infections and measures to rein them in are combining to usher in a second straight grim holiday season in Europe.

Leuven has already canceled its Christmas market, while in nearby Brussels a 60-foot Christmas tree was placed in the center of the city’s stunning Grand Place on Thursday but a decision on whether the Belgian capital’s festive market can go ahead will depend on the development of the virus surge.

Paul Vierendeels, who donated the tree, hopes for a return to a semblance of a traditional Christmas.

“We are glad to see they are making the effort to put up the tree, decorate it. It is a start,” he said. “After almost two difficult years, I think it is a good thing that some things, more normal in life, are taking place again.”

Source: Voice Of America