Le Samedi a BruXXXels au Rhythms of Resistance

The frozen foursome awoke to find the thermometer has struggled up to a balmy 3 degrees above freezing. After plenty of faffing around town we met up with some of the Amsterdam and Gent bands at Place Luxemburg; the Nijmegen had gone AWOL, had they been deported again?


Anyway, we proceeded to Gare Midi deciding to get off at a neighbouring station in case of cops checking for the metro tickets we did not have. The penalty could have been a 12 hour bang-up and a deportation! So a disappointingly small number, some 500 assembled with a techno sound system up the front, a van in front of us selling beer soup and sarnies, an Anarquist Euro style wind and brass band on the back of a cattle truck, and all the usual carny props that go to make up the street party vibe.


One by one a good number of Sambistas got it together and got the punters a’ movin’, little did we know that the Anarcho demo had joined onto the rear along with the peace demo, with cops at a good distance some 3000 of us processed through a poor inner city quarter of Brussels With much merriment the locals were well into it as we moved through ever narrower streets. Then the cops blocked us front and back on a sloping street a la le section 60, we Brits all know and hate. Down the front at a 5 - way junction, shops and bars did a rorin’ trade as everyone we saw kept cool and enjoyed the music of their choice, and then fire-breathers as the night kicked in. It was our job to keep them entertained, and even though there was pissed up New Kids On the Black Block in abundance, they didn’t resort to any mindless trashing in these car-lined working-class streets. Proof if any there were no cop infiltrators out today, and that if there were, they had wised up to any of them trying to lead a charge at the cop lines etc.


After about 2 hours the cops removed the cordon and allowed us to process the short distance to a square where the techno carried on plus more fire-breathing, we played a little more then disappeared down the metro playing as we went, with punters waving to us as we left, here we departed from our Dutch and Belgian mates with more Euro co-operation on the samba front likely in future.


These three days had seen a broad cross section of Euro citizens saying no to the neo-liberal project of the Blair, Schroeder, Chirac and Berlusconi, the corporations and the USA. With the Euro imminant, Trade Unionists who have been betrayed over the dream of a social Europe to the No Borders activists against fortress Europe, to the anticapitalist dispossessed of the Black Bloc we were pleased to be amongst them