Last Saturday we had two demonstrations right after oneanother. The goals of the demonstration were slightly different, altough probably most participating in one, could also have been in the other. However, they did turn out to be quite different.

While the first demonstration was against the Norwegian company Yara handing out an ecology prize to the dictator of Ethiopia, the second one was for a true left wing shift in Norwegian politics after the general elections next week, no matter how they turn out.

Now look at these pictures (more pics below). Aren’t the differences telling?

Actually, it’s not even all about race, as I’ll explain…

Now, first of all it must be noted that the Oslo 2005 was larger than the Yara-demonstration. Nevertheless, Oslo 2005 was not as big as had been hoped for. While the Oslo 2005 website talks about “more than 4000 demonstrators”, more realistic estimates talk about ca. 2300 demonstrations. In any case, this is far from the 20,000 demonstrations that one had hoped for. Nevertheless, the demonstration was big enough to make an impression on those attending and to not be completely embarrasing.

But comparing the pictures, one can notice one striking difference: the demonstrators against the Yara-prize really seemed to be into the meaning and goals of the demonstration, while at the Oslo 2005 demonstration, people more looked like it was part of their job to show up there.

Now is that maybe because the Yara-demonstration was so much better organized?

Well, not really. Although I have had nothing to do with the preparations, it was fairly easy to notice that the demonstration really consisted of three grups that had quite a few problems with oneanother internally. It even went so far as that one group was send to demonstrate a different place – by the police (!), as they were afraid of fights amongst the groups.

This stands in contrast with Oslo 2005, which had been planned since last winter, and in which major labor unions, solidarity organizations and ATTAC as well as quite a few smaller groups had been coordinating and cooperating ever since.

So how did people end up having so little enthusiasm for this demonstration? My theory is that it is exactly because of the co-ordination efforts. These had been completely centralied from the very start, and at the firts meeting of Oslo 2005, the political framework had been decided upon already. People that tried to start other sub-groups to plan activities (besides those groups that had been decided upon already) at that first meetings were send back to their seat, and anyone who asked why we couldn’t do things in another way were told that it had to be this way, because the labor unions were afraid of loosing control. But as one guy said to me after the demonstration: “well these people [the ATTAC leadership] went for the leadership of the unions, which of course is no guarantee that you’ll get normal workers to come.” And so it was, for anyone having been on the political left in Oslo for a while it is quite noticable that there are about no “normal workers” to be found on these pictures.

I hope those that have been in charge (and not just been working on the ground like myself) have learned their lesson, and that understand that nobody likes to be directed by others without much of any influence on the outcome.