Egads, this hasn’t happened for thirty years. The police just sent out an official warning to all shops, cafées, pubs and hotels in the downtown sentrum area to please take in all their chairs and ashtrays from the outdoor lounges, because they may be used as projectiles in tomorrow’s expected riot.
It’ll be the third day of protests leading to riots, with riot police armed with tear gas cannisters deployed in the main street, Karl Johan. Tomorrow’s occasion for the festivities will be the counter-protest march, “Gaza blør.” (“Gaza bleeds”) It really kicked off yesterday, thursday, when our premier right-wing politician, Siv Jensen, held a speech to pro-Israeli counter protesters in front of parliament.
A bad place to hold a speech like that, considering Palestinian protesters had only recently finished a hunger-strike protest in the same spot.
Most of the troubles are not, of course, caused by actual Palestinians or their sympathisers. Mostly gits, kids, youths, Blitzers and casuals were responsible for most of the damage. Even the heads of the criminal gangs of Oslo went out to condemn the rioters as childish. As it’s truth to say that most of the organised crime gangs in Oslo have ethnic backgrounds outside of Norway, the heads felt that the “kids playing” were seriously undermining efforts at taking the problem seriously. According to the police, the gang members appeared to police themselves during the riots on thursday.
As for me, I luckily live twenty minutes away from Karl Johan street, but my place of work is a hotel in a paralell street. Not looking forward to walking home at 11pm tomorrow. That said, I’m not going to make a bushel out of a leaf here, because so far, nobody has been critically wounded and the police are reacting well and proportionally to the escalation. Most of them are not even armed.
(I feel like a shadow of Siam Sam’s legendary topic, but riots in Oslo is so surreal I kinda had to put it up here.)