Saving Iceland
17 October 2007
The Directorate of Immigration has decided that they will not grant the request of the Icelandic police and deport SI activist Miriam Rose.
The Directorate confirmed this tonight speaking to the Icelandic National TV news program Kastljos.
So far we are not aware of any legal reasoning for the decision. But it was clear already some time ago that the police had lost the propaganda war almost from the beginning. The “…serious threat to the fundamental values of society” claim, in the letter requesting that Miriam Rose was to be deported, was for example something that the Icelandic public was just not going to swallow so easily. Instead the deportation request caused great alarm with the public about the state of civil rights and democracy in Icelandic society, not without reason.
It has not passed unnoticed here in Iceland that even if the police are used to getting away with all sorts of power abuse most of the time, they have frequently got so carried away in the heat of the moment that they have repeatedly shot themselves badly in the foot. This website has reported a considerable number of such instances when it comes to SI protests.
Now that the police have finally exhausted the bogus threat of deporting environmental protesters they should maybe pause for some reflection.
Instead of constantly making fools of themselves with thuggish persecution and illconceived plots, perhaps the time has come that they do something sensible for a change. Like turning their attention to the corruption that is ripe in the Icelandic energy companies and not least the multinational corporate criminals they have tried so hard to protect from legitimate protest.
Miriam Rose is a co-author of ‘Aluminium Tyrants’, an article published this month in The Ecologist. /?p=1021
The decision of the DI finally spurred the Kastljos editors to transmit an interview they recorded three weeks ago with Miriam Rose. This had obviously been kept off the air in order not to further Miriam’s cause:
http://dagskra.ruv.is/streaming/sjonvarpid/?file=4365527/3
About the deportation case(s) see also:
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We have no reason to assume that the interview was delayed in order not to further the cause. A lot has been going on in the politics the last weeks and it is quite common that Kastljós interviews are not broadcasted for some weeks. I think that Helgi Seljan gave Miriam a good opportunity to explain her matter and that all journalists who have taken an interest in the cause have been fair and factual.
I applaud the decision of the Directorate of Immigration. In fact they never could have decided otherwise. Simply because it was clear to them that to deport Miriam Rose would have caused uproar in Icelandic society. Public opinion was against them.
They, or the police have absolutely no right to deport foreign people for exercising their constitutional right to protest, even if they cross into the legally gray area of non violent civil disobedience. Nor does the State apparatus have any authority to define what are the “fundamental values of society”. This “fundamental value” business just shows how sloppy Icelandic cops are.
A few OK journalists have looked into this deportation case. Helgi Seljan being one of them, but Helgi Seljan is not an editor of Kastljós, so I really can’t see that you can be so certain that the delay in transmitting this interview didn’t have anything to do with Kastljos not wanting to rock the boat at a “delicate” time.
Helgi Seljan is an upright journalist, he also wrote an important article against the dams at Kárahnjúkar, but he was already on the Kastljos team this summer when the RUV TV news department broadcast unsubstantiated slander about Saving Iceland. At the time the news department refused to give SI members a chance to answer for themselves in Kastljos, but instead let two notorious right wing commentators, Agnes Bragadottir and Egill Helgason, heap scandalous bile over Saving Iceland as if they had been hired to do it. I am sure Helgi Seljan had nothing to do with that. The decision was obviously taken at a higher level in the RUV hierarchy.
Lets face it, there is no reason what so ever to think that those at the helm in RUV are not biased to the hilt when it comes to all opposition to heavy industry in this country. The fact is that the entire media in Iceland, newspapers, radio and televison is firmly under the control of the right wing, and they abuse that power when it suits them.
S.M.
Icelandic media manipulatiion: https://www.savingiceland.org/?p=694#comment-914