Riots that have resulted in 643 arrests in Copenhagen are expected to continue this week after anarchists travelled from across Europe to protest against the eviction of anticapitalist squatters.

They were answering an appeal to demonstrate against the seizure by antiterror police of Youth House, a centre for far-left activists. Once host to Lenin, it has now been bought by a Christian group.

Barricades were set up in surrounding streets, cars were burnt and officers pelted with petrol bombs after clearing the building on Thursday. Police responded with teargas but the clashes continued despite the arrests that included 140 foreigners.

Niels-Erik Hansen, the deputy police chief of Copenhagen, said yesterday that the violence could continue for several nights. “We expect that the moves to detain violent people and to expel the foreigners involved can calm the situation,” he said. “But we also expect that they will not give in.”

Initial sympathy for the squatters from some in Copenhagen evaporated yesterday after the scale and violence of the rioting, in which a school was ransacked and a nursery set on fire. “The good will of politicians who started to listen to the majority of Copenhagen residents who supported the young people’s wish for a house . . . has now been lost,” Politiken, Denmark’s biggest-selling liberal daily, said.

The Government was criticised by Berlingske Tidende, the country’s oldest newspaper, for failing to head off the clashes. “Families have seen their cars burnt. The people of Copenhagen have had enough. The violence and rioting are forcing people to leave the city.”

The four-storey Youth House was built in 1897 as a community theatre and centre for the nascent labour movement. Lenin went there when Copenhagen hosted the 1910 Socialist International Congress. The city authorities allowed the building to be used as a youth centre from the early 1980s, when it became a focal point for anticapitalist activism.

After a fire that damaged the structure in 1996, the city decided to sell the building, leading occupants to form a squat which displayed a banner declaring: “For sale, including 500 violent-loving psychos”.

The raid was carried out by antiterror police who stormed the building from helicopters. The occupants gave up without a fight, but an hour later an internet and mobile phone campaign had summoned rioters on to the streets.

Street protests

May 1968 Student strikes in Paris spiral into strikes by ten million French workers, forcing President de Gaulle to flee to Germany

August 1968 Democratic National Congress in Chicago is marked by anarchist protests

September 1969 The London Street Commune takes over a derelict building at 144 Piccadilly as a protest against rising homelessness

November 1999 Antiglobalisation protesters storm Seattle during the World Trade Organisation Ministerial Conference

Sources: BBC, Times archives

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