That Dam Wheel

On 26th October, eight people from ‘Solidarios con Itoitz and Narmada UK evaded security and climbed up the ‘Millennium Wheel’, in London. They unfurled banners with the slogans ‘Stop the Dams!’, ‘Free Narmada, Free Itoitz!’ and ‘Let the Rivers Run Free’. All eight were arrested on suspicion of criminal damage. (None had been charged as we went to print). They explained their action in a communique which we partly reprint below:

“By taking action on the Millennium Wheel we are rejecting an irrational and wasteful “development” - based system, which does not hesitate to spend millions of pounds on fatuous spectacles while denying dispossessed millions the chance to live on the eve of the Third Millennium.”

“For many years we have seen how the tendency of capital is to concentrate population in large conurbations to the detriment of rural areas, which have become more and more deserted. Rural Areas are transformed into resource-zones for large-scale transport infrastructure, production centres for energy and industrial agriculture, or for the accumulation of raw materials to satisfy the needs of large cities.

One of these raw materials which has become more and more valuable is water, which is accumulated in gigantic reservoirs, flooding towns, valleys, traditional cultures. Through these dams the powers that be control at their whim as indispensable a resource as water, they speculate with it squandering public money in order to promote corrupt private business interests, deceiving the public with hypothetical irrigation schemes and putting in grave danger the population living downstream. Emblematic examples of this type of ‘development’- driven infrastructures are the Itoitz reservoir (the Basque Country) and Narmada (India)”.