Protesters of Committee No AZC disrupted the meeting of the council committee in the town hall of Bergen op Zoom on Tuesday evening. The meeting was not about the arrival of the AZC in Bergen op Zoom, but the protesters still expected them to get a right to speak. From the stands they were heard ‘loud and clear’.
The activists started a protest march on Plein 13 in Bergen op Zoom on Tuesday evening, from where they walked to the old town hall on the Markt. The participants are against the plan of the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA) to compensate for three hundred asylum seekers in an empty office building at Plein 13. They want to force a referendum or an emergency debate.
At the Town Hall, therefore, about seventy people decided on Tuesday evening to enter, during the meeting of the council committee. The group was told again that there was actually no meeting about the AZC. Nevertheless, the protesters sat down in the stands and did their say in the form of the slogan: ‘AZC, gone with it’.
Fifteen minutes
“It was loud and clear,” says a spokesperson for the municipality. “They were able to have their say and let their sound heard, but that made us suspend the meeting. You couldn’t get through it anymore.”
The meeting has stopped for fifteen minutes, when the protesters went out again. Around half past eight the group had left and everyone went home again.
In itself, the protest went smoothly, but it sands at the municipality. Just as there is no meeting on the subject on the agenda on Tuesday, there is actually no meeting on this subject on the agenda anymore. “In fact, the COA has already applied for an environmental permit, which is now with the municipality,” says the municipality.