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AFP reports [source] that thousands marched in Reykjavik Saturday in what has become a weekly protest over the financial crisis, many charging that an International Monetary Fund bailout would lay waste to Iceland’s generous welfare system. Following the demonstration, a number of protesters also broke into a local police station to demand the release of a demonstrator arrested Friday, but no one had so far been arrested, police told AFP. “The IMF will crush education, welfare, healthcare and democracy,” one protests sign read, showing the International Monetary Fund portrayed as a monster eating the North Atlantic nation.
The demonstration came three days after the IMF, which is often criticized for imposing harsh conditions on already struggling nations, approved a $2.1 billion loan to Iceland. The island nation thus became the first Western European country to be rescued by the international body since the U.K. in 1976. Protesters, who have gathered every Saturday for the past six weeks, also reiterated demands for a new elections and a new government. One of the speakers at the event, law student Katrin Oddsdottir, went so far as to say that if the government failed to call new elections within a week, people would storm the parliament and other government buildings.
“Peaceful protest will do in peacetime, but there has been an attack on the Icelandic constitution and democracy in Iceland,” she said in her address, charging that the government through its negotiations for loans from the IMF and the European Union was making the island one of the most indebted countries in the world. “We will carry you out!” she shouted. “The Icelandic people will not be subjugated.” Police didn’t give an official number of demonstrators, but an AFP reporter on the scene estimated that roughly as many people showed up this week as last, when authorities said some 6,000 people had protested.
After the demonstration, around 200 people charged to a nearby police station to demand that they release a protester arrested on Friday. Police said they had been forced to use pepper spray against the protesters to prevent them from entering the station, but at least twenty people nonetheless managed to get in. Windows at the station were broken and blows had been exchanged, but so far none of Saturday’s protesters had been arrested, police said.
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