Earth First
January 2007
In the first week of the new year ELF (Earth Liberation Front) struck in Iceland for the first time. The target was the Alcan Aluminium smelter in Hafnarfjordur which is being expanded into pristine lavafields without local democratic consent which was promised in the town council elections.
This factory is part of ongoing heavy industrialisation of the Icelandic wilderness powered by large dams and geothermal power stations all around the country.
Three peices of machinery (2 diggers and a crane truck) were heavily sabotaged and the ELF signature was left on a workshed wall.
Help fight the heavy industrialisation of the wild!
Check out www.savingiceland.org and www.this.is/nature for more information on the destruction of Europes last wilderness.
Source: http://earthfirst.org.uk/actionreports/?p=2175
Areas in the Icelandic highlands that are threatened by ALCAN´s expansion:
Thjorsarver (listed by the international treaty of Ramsar as one of earth´s most important wetland areas), Lake Langisjor, one of Europe’s most beautiful lakes, the River of Thjorsa and numerous geothermal fields all over the Icelandic highlands. See ‘Threatened Areas’ to the top left.
Campaigners against ALCAN
Photos from everyday life and resistance in Kashipur
Seems like you may have a point here…
However, are Istak really such an innocent company?
Or are the ‘questions’ regarding the odious crime against the nature around Karahnjukar already being forgotten by the Icelandic people?
If you look at the ‘The Nature Killers” section on this website you will find that Istak are one of the main contractors on the “Power Station civil and tunnels” at Karahnjukar.
Istak stem from the old ‘Octopus’ (Kolkrabbinn), the highly corrupt Icelandic power mafia, and have certainly lined their pockets amongst others in the destruction frenzy at Karahnjukar.
I wonder if the above fact was relevant to the ELF, or whoever did this action.
This here is actually quite unbelievable.
I am a person that is an environmentalist and although I’m not as “green” as the people that do the protests every year, there are a lot of questionable matters regarding the whole Karahnjúkarvirkjun and Alcoa smelter in Reyðarfjörður that I feel haven’t been answered.
With that said, I am quite appalled by these actions of ELF. The fact is that the construction site that ELF targeted, thinking they were sabotaging the already started ALCAN expansion, in spite of the expansion not being democratically voted on by the people of Hafnarfjörður, does indeed not have anything to do with ALCAN or the proposed expansion of the smelter (that I am, like you, actually opposed to). It is a project that the company Ístak is doing, working for the municipality of Hafnarfjörður, building a pumping station for sewage. It has absolutely NO CONNECTION to ALCAN whatsoever! Work on this area started mid-last year, so this is nothing new. In my opinion, ELF has no excuse for doing this, and the fact that they did not do their homework AT ALL before doing this seriously makes me question the intelligence behind this…
This drastically hurts ELF’s cause in Iceland… and I for one think they owe Ístak and the municipality of Hafnarfjörður a big apology for doing this. The crane they wrecked had to be taken down and COMPLETELY rewired. Ístak could have almost bougth a new crane for the amount of damage done to it…
Dammit… you guys (ELF) really shot yourself in the foot here…
You can see a project document on this pumping station here http://pdf.istak.is/isl/nuverandi/0614.pdf
Thorsteinn Kolbeinsson
Unbelievable or not, this piece of news has been on this website and other well known international sites for almost four weeks.
It’s quite amazing that this has still not hit the news in Iceland. Surely the contractor reported the sabotage to the Icelandic police soon after it happened. But why the silence?
Is it because the Icelandic media still continue to sleep on their guard when it comes to environmental matters?
Or is it that the township of Hafnarfjordur has recently experienced other incidents of vandalism which were clearly not made to look like they had anything to do with environmental matters and it was deducted this was part of the same wave of teenage delinquency?
Or perhaps somebody who has a lot to lose has decided that it will come in handy to use this sabotage blown up in the media closer in time to the referendum about the fate of the extension of the ALCAN smelter in Hafnarfjordur (end of March).
If this will be the case it will certainly not be for the first time that politicians and the aluminium lobby in Iceland have tried to smear environmentalists as saboteurs.
We can only hope that the people of Hafnarfjordur will see through such blatant lies.
Seeing that this news has still not been in the Icelandic media could I ask you, Thorsteinn Kolbeinsson, how comes you have such a detailed knowledge of what happened and why have you not responded to this before if you are this well informed?
Take a look at the links and the comment below.
https://www.savingiceland.org/?p=318
SM