AMSTERDAM — More than 100 people protesting the outlawing of squatting at unused buildings in the Netherlands clashed with police in Amsterdam’s historic center late Friday, throwing stones, setting fires and erecting barricades.
Squatting is the latest pillar of the country’s liberal institutions — such as legal prostitution and cafes that openly sell marijuana — to be abolished or curtailed as the Dutch rethink the boundaries of their famed tolerance.
In Amsterdam, the epicenter of the movement known in Dutch as “kraken,” or “breaking,” several hundred squatters had demonstrated during the day against a new law that makes their way of life punishable by up to one year in prison.
By nightfall, some began throwing rocks at police and vandalizing cars. Police attempted to disperse large groups on two streets.
By midevening, an Associated Press eyewitness saw squatters using metal fences and piles of bicycles to block one of the city’s bridges amid a haze of tear gas. Police on the scene declined to comment on the number of arrests.
“Of course we’re going to resist: resisting is part of what we do,” said a young, English-speaking woman at a “squat,” or occupied building, next to the Amstel River, ahead of the protest. She identified herself only as Lilo.
A study published this year by Amsterdam’s Free University estimated the number of squatters at roughly 1,500 in the Dutch capital, a city of 750,000.
Amsterdam Mayor Eberhard van der Laan says he plans to gradually empty the city’s remaining 200 squats.
Squatting gained public sympathy after World War II during a time of severe housing shortages and anger at real estate speculators. A Supreme Court ruling in 1971 found that entering an unused building is not trespassing. The thinking was that it was humane, or at least pragmatic, not to evict poor or homeless people living in a building that was not being used.
Yet that view changed as the Netherlands grew more prosperous and more sympathetic to business — and today the sentiment often runs against the squatters’ anti-establishment world view.
