The occupation of two houses by a group of young squatters came to an
end shortly after 8:30 this morning when police arrived on Vatnsstígur.
The police made quick work of vacating the buildings, and had virtually
stripped the interiors within a half-hour, leaving a pile of wood
scraps and destroyed furniture in the road as journalists,
photographers and civilians looked on. Twenty-two people were arrested
in the altercation.

“They destroyed the whole house,” described one young woman who had
been involved in collecting phone numbers on Tuesday to alert people of
the police’s arrival. “They broke the walls, they broke everything to
take them out, and this proves what we’ve been claiming all this time:
that the owner wanted the houses to get ruined so they can tear them
down and build a shopping mall or something else ugly like the block of
flats over there [motioning to the unfinished high-rise buildings on
the waterfront].”

“These people that were arrested, they don’t have houses, they’re all
young people, they’re students. I think it’s very unfair to put them
out on the streets now,” she sympathised. “Especially in Iceland, you
can’t survive out in the cold if you don’t have a house, so what do
homeless people do? Do they just die in the cold? And the people are
going to be more and more without homes now that the banks are taking
houses because of debts.”

Bystanders applauded in support of the squatters as they were removed
one-by-one through the back door of the building and escorted by police
to waiting vans in handcuffs. Some shouted at the officers guarding the
police lines and some spat on the ground as a show of their distaste
for the proceedings.

"The banks are just kicking people out of their homes"

The scene on Vatnsstígur was different Tuesday afternoon, when police
were only present in the conversations of the supporters and in the
rumours of their impending arrival.

One young man, a philosophy student, explained yesterday that the owner
of the two homes had threatened to send police to deal with the
squatters if they had not vacated the premises by 4:00 p.m. However, as
it grew later into the evening whether or not the police would arrive
was anybody’s guess.

“Rumours quickly become facts in these situations, but I think they
will come in the night or in the morning when there’s not too much
media attention and there are less people here since they had horrible
violence at the January/February demonstrations.”

Speaking passionately about plans to convert the homes into thriving
social centres, complete with a non-profit publishing house alongside
the existing free shop, the young man explained the groups initial
motivation in claiming the vacant structures as their own: “There are
many empty buildings in the Reykjavík area, and the banks are just
kicking people out of their homes. This is just plain stupidity to have
people on the streets when you have lots of empty buildings.”

“One part of this action was to show that it is possible to do this and
take what is, according to Marxist doctrine, already ours as workers
and the lower classes. So we would like to encourage people to do the
same and show support; solidarity is the key.”

Reykjavík police officials were repeatedly contacted for this article, but declined to comment.

Photos by Páll Hilmarsson. View more of his photos here.