An intense anti-hydraulic fracturing protest is underway in a remote tiny Romanian village, Pungesti, where the Jandarmeria (military style police from the central government) were deployed to brutally put down protesters, and ensure that Chevron can go ahead with plans to begin fracking and drilling for natural gas. As I wrote in earlier reports, Chevron doesn’t have clear rights to proceed, there are strong legal doubts whether hydraulic fracturing is even allowed in Romania, and the local population voted unanimously to ban Chevron’s access to the land. Despite all that the government is pushing ahead with granting Chevron permission to proceed.
Protesters have been on site since early October doing whatever they can to stop Chevron from beginning operations, the first stage of which is to drill holes and begin injecting frack fluids. The protests have gained national attention and become tied with a high profile protest against a gold mine proposal in Rosia Montana.
There’s a world-wide pattern that fossil fuel rich nations are also highly dictatorial, brutal regimes, that trample on civil rights, and produce huge inequity between the ultra rich and everyone else.
I’ve found a few videos from the protests in Pungesti that demonstrate what could be the beginning of turning Romania into one of these extremely brutal regimes whose job is to produce fossil fuels with which the global elite drives their megacorporations.
More than once in these videos the question is asked what will other countries do in response to this anti-democratic actions by the Romanian government? Will the U.S. start sending in Drones to enforce something or other, just like the U.S. is doing elsewhere?
This is the downside of the Obama Administration’s tactics in fighting the War on Terror. Sending in the Drones just gets people around the world thinking the U.S. believes that we have the right to subjugate any country we like through the use of Drone aircraft. And, here is the proof, a Romanian villager raising the question of whether she will be the victim of a Drone attack for daring to speak out against an American company?
The Romania I know is a beautiful place, with wonderful people in it. I am shocked to see Romanian Police (who I experienced as being kind and gentle) doing this kind of thing to fellow Romanians.
This first video was filmed on December 9, 2013, by a crew from Epoch Times Romania, who wrote an article about the protests on the weekend of December 7
.
It is a series of interviews with local villagers, mostly old women, who tell about the police brutality they witnessed or was inflicted on them. One of the women says her children had been beaten up by the police, so she went down to the protest and demanded that the police kill her too. If everyone was going to be killed by these police, she wanted to be killed too. In general everyone interviewed showed that kind of fiery spirit and a determination to drive out what they are describing as invaders.
Who are the invaders? Foreigners in the guise of Chevron.
What we see in this video is Police, Government officials in other words, doing the bidding of a giant international megacorportation, Chevron.
This next video was filmed on December 7, a day on which there was a pitched battle between protesters and police. This video shows that battle, and if you look closely some of the faces in the first video are visible here.
The site is tiny – just a little rectangle of land next to the highway, where there’s a bit of equipment with which Chevron is going to do their drilling etc.
The protesters group is also small, surprisingly small given the attention they’ve managed to bring onto the situation. And, they are oh so very brave.
This next video was filmed on December 2, and shows interviews with people who’d been in protests the week before. They’re describing the abuse received from the police.
These protests began in early October, and what we see is the result of continuous protests since.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFZhxabPkkM
This video, filmed on December 5, shows just a tiny group of people yelling from across the road at the Chevron workers.
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