This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global-news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Le Monde.
The Mobile Unit was out in force; men and women ready for combat, wearing full-face helmets, clubs in hand, guns in their holsters. The heavily armed police faced people hurling rocks, bottles and paint. They retaliated with teargas and water canons that served their purpose. The barricades turned out to be weak, though some attempted trucks from passing through.
Fifty meters away, on Passeerdersgracht in the heart of Amsterdam, young girls wearing white wedding gowns came to the protestors’ aid. The operation, covered extensively in the media, was aimed at evicting the occupants of an abandoned building. The squatters belong to the art collective known as Schijnheilig, or “krakers.” The group is well known in the city. It’s a distant heir to the 1970s revolutionary movement in The Netherlands. At that time, the squatter movement organized occupations of buildings, and developed a very Dutch version of the large, global youth protest movement. (See TIME’s video: “Will Amsterdam Ban Pot for Tourists?”)
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