![handle is hein.journals/crmlsc7 and id is 1 raw text is: Contemporary Crises 7 (1983) 1-11
Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in The Netherlands
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE AT 70 NORTH
THOMAS MATHIESEN
January 14, 1981, was an important day in the recent political history of
Norway. Approximately 600 police officers, equipped with forty military
trucks, two helicopters, dogs, snowmobiles, snowscooters, and a large
passenger ship as headquarters for the battalion, removed - in the course of
one long day - about 800 demonstrators from the end of a particular road
near a particular river in a canyon in northern Norway. Several hundred
demonstrators, including quite a few Samis [1] (otherwise known as Lapps,
although the group itself prefers the word Samis), were from the local
area, and many were from other parts of Norway. The road in question was
the Stilla Road, the river the Alta River, and the canyon the Alta-Kauto-
keino Valley, located about 2000 km north of the capital city, Oslo.
The temperature that day was about - 20 C, the snow was deep, and
many of the demonstrators had been camping in tents for several weeks in
temperatures down to -35°C. A number of demonstrators were chained to
the rocks with large chains - in military tents, somewhat protected from the
cold. Most of them, however, were sitting outside, symbolically chained arm
in arm, singing The River Shall Live as they were carried away.
The demonstration concerned the building of a construction road and the
subsequent construction of a 100-meter-high dam in the canyon for the pro-
duction of electricity. The conflict has a long history, extending back at
least to the early 1970s, when some local people began to worry over govern-
mental plans to build a large dam in the great canyon. The first construction
plans were much more encompassing than the final plan of January 14,
1981. In 1968 a proposal had been presented which would have meant the
flooding of one of the largest Sami dwelling places in Norway. This met
massive resistance in the area, and, through the 1970s, the proposals were
gradually reduced in scale. But the main idea, to build a construction road
and a dam with an electricity plant, remained. In its final form, the plan
involves the flooding of some 3 km2 - not much in square meters, but,
ecologically and in terms of use, hundreds of square kilometers will be
affected by the road construction, etc. Vital grazing areas for thousands of
reindeer belonging to some of Norway's 2000-3000 nomadic Samis will be
University of Oslo Oslo, Norway
0378-1100/83/0000-0000/$03.00 © 1983 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/crmlsc7&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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