Greta Thunberg evacuated by police during anti-wind protest

A tireless defender of fossil fuels, Sweden’s Greta Thunberg has thrown all her media weight behind the battle led by the Sami in Norway to obtain the demolition of wind turbines declared illegal because they encroach on reindeer pastures.

Wrapped in a scarf and a hat, a Sami flag in her hand, the young woman was forcibly taken away, but without violence, by two policewomen on Wednesday morning as she blocked a door of the Norwegian Ministry of Finance in Oslo in the company of a dozen activists, also dislodged.

Mobilized since last Thursday, first by occupying then by blocking ministries, the activists are demanding the demolition of two wind farms still in operation in Fosen, in the west of the country, despite an unfavorable court ruling handed down more than 500 days.

“I will continue to participate in the protests”

To win their case, they promise to “close the Norwegian state” as long as the wind turbines remain standing and have been joined since the beginning of the week by the Swedish muse in the fight against climate change. “I will continue to participate in the protests,” she told the newspaper. Verdens Gang (VG) on Wednesday, after being dislodged from the entrance of another ministry, that of Climate and the Environment. Neither she nor the other activists were arrested.

In the middle of the day, behind an official building, she listened to the heat of a fire – and without wanting to answer questions – speakers plead the cause of the Sami (formerly called Lapps) between two interpretations of joik, ancestral song of this population native.

In October 2021, the Norwegian Supreme Court concluded that the two wind farms in Fosen violated the right of Sami families to practice their culture, namely reindeer herding, in violation of a UN text relating to civil and political rights, and that the authorizations granted were therefore not valid. But the highest court in the country had not ruled on the fate to be granted to the 151 turbines which are still in operation today. To the chagrin of six Sami families who used this land as winter pasture for their herds.

Numbering around 100,000 members spread between Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, the Sami population has long lived mainly from fishing and semi-nomadic reindeer herding. According to the breeders, the noise and the shape of the turbines frighten their animals.

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