Every one has the right to protest where she or he wants. And because 3 Airlinecompanies, which are present on Schiphol, are sponsoring the WTO-summit, we asked them to provide us a charter to Seatlle to protest against the Milleniumround.

From a letter, send on forehand to Lufthansa, Northwest Airways and United Airlines (translation from dutch): "The decisions made in Seatlle are of influence on our lifes and even partly of direct influence. We would like to use the opportunity you give us by sponsoring the summit. Give us the democratic right to express our opinion about the policies of the WTO. At an estimate 300 persons will go with the free charter to Seattle. We will be on as a group on the 30th of november at 12.30 at your incheckcounters to collect our tickets and which way everything will be without hinderance for other passagers."

The action itself

We gathered at 12 o'clock with about 70 persons, which slowly became more than 100. Besides protesters there was a crowd of police and press. There was a lot of material produced for this action, partly to spread before and partly to spread during the action. Lots of flyers were distributed to explain the action to passagers and their companions, there were planetickets for the free flight to Seattle, luggagelabels and t-shirts with the text "Seatlle here we come" on the front and on the backside the No-Money-Tour of ' 99, with the 2 freetraintravels a nice list of 3. After a short introduction to WTO and the action the banners were unrolled and we entered the departurehal. At Lufthansa we asked for free transport to Seattle. They only had scheduled flights and not even directly to Seatlle, first we had to go to Frankfurt. So we walked to the ticketcorner of Northwest Airlines, one of the partners of KLM (the dutch airlinecompany, famous at the moment for deporting refugees), to inform about our charter. Northwest apperently thought it was enough to sponsor the WTO-summit without giving money to allow countersounds to be expressed. They didn't provide us a charter and were not willing to give us chairs for everyone on their scheduled flights to the USA. United was so scared they didn't even want to talk with us, there was no one at their counter. One of the activists jumped behind the counter and started to write tickets for all the passagers to Seatlle. The vouchers we could collect at Northwest. To visit all three the airlinecompanies we had to cross all the departurehalls. While we waited for the cooperation of Northwest Airways we practised in the departurehall American football, (hmmm, chrismasdecoration....), the making of protestboards for picketlines, walking in a picketline american style and sit-ins on which a policeattack with pepperspray was practised. Unfortunately the police used pepperspray later that day on protesters in Seatlle.

At the end of the action a pamphlet was spread with all the sponsors of this WTO-summit included some addresses of dutch seats of the companies. There was a lot of presscoverage, it was on the 8 o'clock news (the major dutch newsprogram) together with demonstrations in Seatlle. The atmosphere was very good, it was a successfull action and a lot of fun to do.

And this was of course only the beginning.
The whole week there will be actions against the 'carnival of capitalism' , in Seatlle and all around the world.