Several members of Parliament were treated to a visit on board the aircraft carrier USS Harry S Truman yesterday, but this apparently broke Reykjavík’s law regarding military craft in Iceland’s capital. A City Councilperson for the Left-Greens has condemned the incident.
Fréttablaðið reports that yesterday, numerous members of Parliament were invited to take a small tour of the ship, which was docked off the coast of Iceland. In order to get there and back, these MPs were taken by two Grumman C2 Greyhounds from Reykjavík airport to the carrier and back again.
Although Greyhounds are cargo planes, they are nonetheless military aircraft. This detail is important, as the City of Reykjavík passed a law in 2013 banning the presence of military aircraft from the city except in the case of rescue operations.
Líf Magneudóttir, a Reykjavík city councilperson for the Left-Greens, was decidedly not pleased.
“Reykjavík should not be the setting for military shows and military admiration,” she told Fréttablaðið. “I think that those of us in City Council can agree with that. Wherever we are, whoever we are, people in positions of power and elsewhere, we should always reject war and militarism.”
War in general, and NATO in particular, are very prominent in discussions amongst various members of the Left-Greens these days, in light of recent news that next month, NATO will conduct extensive war exercises in the country involving hundreds of soldiers and ten warships. The Left-Greens are not only anti-militarist; they also have as a part of their platform the position that Iceland should withdraw from NATO.
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