George Bush will visit the province of Limburg in the Netherlands to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Europe’s liberation on 8th of May. He will also attend several bilateral talks in the region around Maastricht on May 7th. Local activist groups and students are planning demonstrations to receive Bush in Maastricht. However, a website created to disseminate information about these protests has been censored and taken off air. The website (www.bushinlimburg.tk) was an initiative of the University Environmental Platform (UMPM) of Universiteit Maastricht and was hosted on part of the space provided for the UMPM site (www.umpm.nl) on a university server. On Thursday, 21st of April, the university authorities blocked access to the sites without any prior warning or notification to UMPM members. Their reasons for instituting this ban include an inquiry from the local police, the website having no direct relationship to the university, and an assumed violation of the regulations concerning web-hosting on university servers. The real reasons are of course directly related to limiting freedom of speech inside the university.

In a meeting with student members of the UMPM on Friday, 22nd April, two officials of the university regularly contradicted each other, demonstrating the arbitrariness of their reasons for the ban. One official claimed that the site was being used for commercial purposes which is against the university web-hosting regulations. His preposterous assumption was that mobilising people to join in an anti-Bush demonstration could be financially profitable to the UMPM. At the same time, his colleague maintained that there was no commercial element here. Another regulation about the dissemination of threatening or obscene material was also supposedly violated. One of their biggest concerns was with an old plan of the heavily-guarded hotel, where Bush is going to snore on the night of 7th May, and a set of maps of the surrounding area that were linked from the website. Finally, they asked the UMPM not to engage in political activities that concern general societal issues but focus their efforts on issues directly related to the university. Yet immediately afterwards, they allowed UMPM to hold an info-evening on the Israel-Palestine conflict on the university campus in May. In general, the university officials’ presentation of their standpoint was interspersed with several threats to remove all funding and access to university facilities to the UMPM. Further, they thought that the website in question was politically biased by being anti-Bush and this affected the assumed neutrality of the university as a public institution. The UMPM members responded that they, both as an environmental organization and as individuals, had no pretensions of being politically neutral. One of their core mandates is to raise awareness about environmental issues in the university through such campaigns and websites. The university must not act as ‘big brother’ and stifle the UMPM’s ability to perform and make choices.

UMPM members were helping to plan this demonstration as a statement against the drastic and by now disastrous environmental policies of the Bush administration. The United States spews 36% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the North but treats Kyoto Protocal as toilet paper. This gives all the valid reasons for an environmental group such as the UMPM to protest against Bush during his visit to Maastricht. In order to be as ‘appropriate’ as possible, the UMPM did not call for a demonstration at the war memorial ceremony in a town near Maastricht that Bush is attending on 8th May. The planned demonstration is inside the city of Maastricht on the 7th of May. This stand of the UMPM was conveyed to the university authorities but they refused to restore access to the sites. This ban is a straightforward infringement of the students’ right to free speech. Instead, the university should encourage discussion among students on critical global issues such as climate change.

On Friday, 22nd of April, the website was transferred to a socially responsible web-hosting service called Antenna. The site www.bushinlimburg.tk now runs on 100% green electricity.

This act of censorship is emblematic of the general atmosphere of control and surveillance being propagated by governments worldwide after 9/11, along with the travesty called ‘war on terror’ by George Bush. In this particular instance, the police made one phone call to inquire about a website hosted on a university server. Following this call, the university authorities immediately removed the site from its server apparently even without any orders or requests by the police to do so. This pre-emptive penalisation was carried out while no criminal or civil offence was committed through the website. This clearly demonstrates how easy it has become for public institutions, such as the local administration and the university in this case, to eat into one’s freedom of expression under the pretext of ‘security’.

In a society like the Netherlands known for its liberal political climate and engaged civil society, one would expect that the efforts and money being spent on hosting Bush in Limburg would be equal to efforts ensuring freedom of speech to its citizens and the right to protest. However, limits imposed upon movement of people and information are tighter than ever during this period prior to Bush’s visit. The local police have become completely arbitrary on what is proper in public. Four young people returning from a bar were locked up for one night last week because they didn’t have id’s on them. The usual hourly train connecting Amsterdam to Maastricht will not enter Maastricht during the period of May 1st to 9th - passengers must transfer to a bus in a nearby town. The train service will be restored the day after Bush leaves the region. Of course the reasons cited by the authorities for this disruption are not security. In the nearby city of Meerssen, people are only allowed to take roads dictated by the local police to reach their destinations. Taking another route will lead to arrest. Taking walks in neighbourhoods where one doesn’t reside is also banned.

This oppressive state of affairs must be resisted. Please join the UMPM in protesting against THE tyrant of present times and his international security appendage. If you can’t be physically present in Maastricht on the 7th of May, please feel free to send an e-mail in solidarity to  info@umpm.nl.