The protestors of “Geef Tegengas” are back on the rails in the Rotterdam port. No trains can pass the two locations of the protest, at the entrance into the port. Notably, their motives seem to have changed somewhat since the last protest.
“Geef Tegengas blocks Rotterdam’s port railway on multiple locations on the first day of the NATO summit! There’s also a noise demo taking place in the city! Only together we can block Maersk, Israel and NATO!”, the group writes on Telegram. The protest coincides with the first day of the NATO summit, which takes place in nearby The Hague.
“NATO is a colonial project built on exploitation, oppression and extreme forms of violence, which above all serves the interests of mass-murdering billionaires in the global north”, the group is cited as saying in SpoorPro.
“By giving NATO and Israel free rein, the port is complicit in war crimes and genocide. Geef Tegengas demands that the Port Authority immediately cease imports and exports from areas where human rights are violated, immediately implement a full trade and arms embargo with Israel, and present a plan to phase out the transit of all other polluting raw materials and products as soon as possible.”
Harmful to rail companies
The group has blocked access to the Rotterdam port five times before this year. Earlier, they cited the arms trade with Israel and polluting freight flows as their primary motivation for stopping trains.
For its part, the rail freight industry was not all too happy about the blockades. Hans-Willem Vroon, head of the Dutch rail freight association RailGood, earlier stated that the protests are “damaging,” creating excessive burdens for rail freight. Blocked trains lead to significant revenue losses (35,000 euros per train) and hinder profitability in an already dwindling market. Beyond the purely financial, repeated unreliability due to protests risks a further modal shift to the road sector.