ATV Road Disput

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In Kangerlussuaq, construction of the ATV road started immediately in July 2020, following approval by the regulatory authority. However, as someone from Kangerlussuaq told me in the summer of 2020, the start of the project with the ATV road was apparently a big failure that did not come close to delivering what had been promised before. For example, it had been announced that the construction of 800 m of road per day was expected. The actual construction work, however, fell far short of these expectations. On the one hand, construction apparently did not proceed at the previously promised pace. And on the other hand, the costs may have threatened to get out of control.

Apparently, the management of the road construction project was under great pressure. Probably for this reason, an article in English about the road was published in the journal "The Polar Connection" of the "Polar Research and Policy Initiative (PRPI)" of 30.11.2020, which allegedly contains an interview with the mayor of Qeqqata, Malik Berthelsen, under the title "The Arctic Circle Road: The Road to Freedom?". At least writing it with a questionmark, is o.k. The article begins with a promising picture of the starting point of the road to freedom, which you can see here:

This photo is from the original link at https://polarconnection.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_2273-min-min.png. A year later, on 20 June 2021, I was there and took a photo of the same place. But the starting point of the "Road to Freedom" had changed its face, as you can see:

By the way, in Danish the name "Road to Freedom" is "vejen til frihed", which in Denmark (and Greenland) is the title of the Danish version of the Nelson Mandela film "Long March to Freedom". And on the backside of the brochure on the construction of the ATV road, it is claimed that Prof. Minik Rosing gave the ATV road the title "vejen til frihed". Minik Rosing is very well known in Greenland. As a Greenlander, he is a professor of geology in Copenhagen and, together with Olafur Eliasson, melted twelve blocks of ice from Greenland as a happening at the Paris World Climate Conference. In fact, however, two years earlier Laust Løgstrup, when he was still vice-director of the municipality of Qeqqata, had already called the ATV road "vejen til frihed" in Greenland's national newspaper "Sermitsiaq". Later, when he was project manager for the ATV road, it naturally looked better if someone like Minik Rosing had invented the name.