Pages

Monday, May 26, 2014

71

Back in his room, Bjorn took the gun safe out of the box and put it on the table by the window. Then he put his gun in the safe and locked it before changing into civilian clothes. He had only brought two sets of clothes with him, so there was no thinking involved in choosing what to wear for the evening. It simply had to be the black shirt and trousers, the other set being corduroy trousers and a flannel shirt.

Bjorn turned on the TV at four thirty to watch the news, curious to see what they had to report on the Lier riots. He was just in time to catch the dramatic music intro, followed by the days headlines, and not surprisingly, the riots were the day's top story. Images of burning buildings, and helpless firefighters being prevented from entering the area by furious protestors pelting them with rocks, filled the screen. It looked bad, and Bjorn felt a growing sense of unease as the news report unfolded.

The fires had broken out about mid night when no staff had been present at the premises, and there had been no atempt at stopping the fires from spreading. Quite the contrary had apparently been the case. People had gone from one building to another, setting fire to them all. And when the fire fighters came to the rescue they were overwhelmed by protester pushing their way out through the gates as soon as these were opened by them. Many of the detainees had fled, but most of them had remained at the premises tossing stones at the firefighters instead.

The protesters were hell-bent on making sure the asylum centre burned down to the ground, and to Bjorn's dismay this was presented by the reporter almost as if it was a completely legitimate way of showing anger with the decision to close the centre and send them away, either to Lundby or to their country of origin, in which case they would get a free ticket home and some cash to go with it. It was clear that these were people who would mindlessly set fire to public buildings just in order to attract attention for their plight. And yet they were getting the sympathy of the news reporter. The dominant theme of the reporting was that the detainees were so desperate that they had no other choice but to commit arson.

The reporting was fiercely anti-Lundby. The anachronistic punker from a few days ago appeared in the studio as a neutral expert on the subject of asylum politics, despite being obviously partial in his views. And a police officer and a fireman who would presumably have presented a different view on the situation, given a chance to elaborate on their thoughts, were asked leading questions to which they could only agree.

The reporting was a farce, and it scared Bjorn to see how the public opinion was so deliberately being manipulated. But on the other hand, Bjorn felt confident that most people would see the riots as just another proof that the decision to send them all to Lundby was a good one. The anti-Lundby people were fighting an uphill battle, and no amount of manipulation would sway the general opinion of the public. The latest swing of public opinion towards the far right parties was not going to disappear any time soon. Bjorn felt confident of that. But it was nevertheless disturbing to see how the rioters were being treated with so much understanding in the news, and how the Lundby project was being demonized. If there was to be an arson attack on the check point, the news angle on such an event would no doubt be just as understanding and forgiving as this one.

After watching the news, Bjorn no longer found Frank's decision to step up security measures at the check point as strange as he had originally found them to be. If people like those that he had just been watching on TV were coming to the colony in their hundreds, or even thousands, the chances of some of those people coming up with the bright idea of trying to burn the check point to the ground, seemed quite real, and with weapons freely available in Lundby, what could possibly stop them apart from a determined stance and threat of severe repercussions?

No comments:

Post a Comment