A police operation to end a three-week sit-in protest against COVID-19 vaccine mandates in New Zealand’s capital turned chaotic Wednesday.
Protesters set fire to tents and other objects as they abandoned their encampment on Parliament grounds in Wellington, sending clouds of thick black smoke in the air and leaving behind piles of burned rubble after police doused the blazes. The fires scarred a large section of the grounds and destroyed a small children’s playground that had just opened a little more than two years ago.
The protesters threw water bottles and other objects at the police as they fled the scene. At least three police officers suffered non-life threatening injuries.
The operation began early Wednesday with police warning the protesters over loudspeakers that they were trespassing and urging them to pack up and leave. Police used pepper spray to disperse some of the protesters, who poured milk over their heads to clear their vision. At least 60 people were arrested in the operation.
The Wellington sit-in emulated a massive anti-vaccine demonstration in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, complete with tents, portable toilets, food distribution points and childcare facilities, that shut down streets near the country’s Parliament for three weeks before it was broken up by police in mid-February.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the protest had been “fueled by misinformation and conspiracy theories,” while also becoming a COVID-19 superspreader.
New Zealand has reported just 146,920 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 56 deaths since the start of the pandemic, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, due to the strict border controls and lockdowns imposed by Ardern’s government.
But the Pacific nation of 5 million people has struggled recently with a major outbreak of new cases driven by the omicron variant, including a single-day record of 32,674 on February 28.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
