Bleeding Liberties by Jim Carey
redpepper september 2001
International law enforcement organisations are increasingly collaborating to prevent protesters reaching their destination. Jim Carey looks at the behind-the-scenes strategies designed to head off the growing anti-capitalist movement
Peter Quail wasn't expecting to be looking down the barrels of four machine guns after dropping his dad off at Victoria Bus Station. But, as he returned to his north London home on the evening of July 21, he suddenly found himself surrounded by 30 Metropolitan Police officers armed to the teeth.
With a helicopter buzzing overhead and four automatic weapons training their sights, a police officer screamed at him to leave his vehicle. Both he and his van were thoroughly searched. "When they went away they gave me a note which thanked me "for my co-operation"," said Quail. "As if I had any choice in the matter. These were young lads, really hyped up. My legs were like jelly."
Peter Quail's experience is telling. A van delivery driver by trade, he has no previous convictions and no political associations. Two days earlier, however, his father, Brian, had been deported back to Britain by the Italian authorities, who had been keen to prevent him reaching the anti-capitalist protests in Genoa. "It's too much of a coincidence," says Brian. And while Peter Quail prepares to sue the police, Brian Quail is just one of many protesters now finding themselves on an international database of political undesirables.
"There is the need for a new and stronger collaboration among European countries," opened the Italian interior minister Claudio Scajola at the beginning of August. He called for "a different formation of men to confront this problem and a European anti-riot force that could manage the phenomenon". His comments came after a meeting with his German counterpart in Rome at which the two men agreed to back a call for a new police force.
There is, however, increasing evidence that such "collaboration" is already very much in existence. The Schengen Information System (SIS) is a pan-European database of police intelligence shared by European countries signed up to the Schengen agreement. When the database first became active in 1995, it was described as a necessity to track serious criminals. Information on individuals was confined to whether they had been found with weapons or convicted of violent crimes. But since then the use and size of the database has increased considerably to take on all sorts of information, including information on political activity. The first well documented occurrence of its anti-protest usage came in 1998 when a Greenpeace activist from New Zealand was denied access to the whole Schengen area because the French government had entered her name in the Schengen Information Service database.
Recent legislative changes in European countries, hurried through on the pretext of dealing with travelling football hooligans, accelerated the breadth of the database's information cache. And without any public debate on its expansion, it is filling up with the personal details of political protesters.
Brian Quail is both joint secretary of Scottish CND and a member of the Trident Ploughshares 2000 (TP2000) peace movement. His only court convictions are for minor offences related to avowedly non-violent protest actions in Scotland.
"When I went through customs at Stansted Airport on my way to Italy, they asked loads of intrusive questions," he told Red Pepper. "I handed them my passport and there was a furious shuffling of paper. Then they asked, "was I a member of a political group?" and "did I attend demonstrations?". Then they said, "you're not a member of CND are you?". And, of course, they already knew that I was."
Brian proceeded on his journey but made it only as far as Turin airport. After being detained for two and a half hours, the 63-year-old peace campaigner was told he was "a threat to national security" and was sent back to the UK.
"When I asked them why I was being deported, the Italian customs officer just shrugged his shoulders and said 'Orders from Rome'."
Deployed by the Austrian government to prevent protestors reaching the Davos group meeting earlier this year, and by the Czech government to stop IMF protestors getting to Prague last September, the technique of using database information to prevent people from crossing borders is on the increase.
Speaking to the Italian Chamber of Deputies, interior minister Claudio Scajola revealed that 2,093 people had been refused entry to the country in the run-up to the G8 conference in Genoa. Brian Quail was one of five TP 2000 campaigners to be denied entry and deported back to the UK. Peaceful protestors argue they are being singled out in order to break the back of international protest. But who is directing the strategy?
The world now knows that the paramilitary-style Italian Carabanieri went berserk during the demonstrations in Genoa. In an interview with Italian national newspaper La Republica, one Italian policeman was candid about what went on: "I still have in my nostrils the stench of those hours, that of the faeces of the arrested who weren't allowed to use the toilets... They [fellow police officers] lined them up against the wall. They urinated on one person. They beat people up if they didn't sing Facetta Nera [a fascist song]. They threatened to rape girls with their batons."
Few people doubted that Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's right-wing media mogul prime minister, would do anything other than order a heavy police reaction to the Genoan protests. The man who said he wanted Italy to be "America's biggest friend in Europe" after becoming prime minister a few months ago would be keen to show his credentials.
But faced with global condemnation and candid film footage of the Carabanieri at work, Berlusconi denied involvement. The anonymous Genoan police officer, however, was in no doubt that the policing tactics used in Genoa were orchestrated from the top down: "the raid has been done from the colleagues from the Rome department, the 'celerini' from the capitol. And to direct them were the top level of SCO NOCS (special police/armed forces)."
As revealed in the last issue of Red Pepper Investigations (August 2001), the Global Forum for Law Enforcement and National Security (LENS) had its first meeting in Edinburgh in June. Present at the meeting were high-level representatives from both corporate security and state security services. The FBI, Interpol, Europol, NATO and the UK National Crime Squad rubbed shoulders with security personnel from the likes of British American Tobacco, Lockheed Martin, Shell, BP and American Express. Under discussion were issues such as "Public-private partnerships: The role of business and governments in fighting the new threats".
Among a list of statements, designed as fundamental starting points for the conference, was the following: "Changes in societal groups and social interactions based on popularisms rather than established politics will be considered in terms of threats to order and stability."
Two weeks after this conference, Louis J Freeh, director of the FBI delivered a "statement for the record" to the Senate Committees on Appropriations and the Armed Services, and the US Select Committee on Intelligence. His subject was the "Threat of terrorism to the United States".
"From the 1960s to the 1980s, leftist-orientated extremist groups posed the most serious domestic terrorist threat to the United States," he said. "In the 1980s, however, the fortunes of the leftist movement changed dramatically as law enforcement dismantled the infrastructure of many of these groups and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe deprived the movement of its ideological foundation and patronage."
In a list of extant terrorist threats, Freeh cited "anarchist and extremist socialist groups -- many of which, such as the Workers' World Party, Reclaim the Streets and Carnival Against Capitalism -- have an international presence and, at times, also represent a potential threat in the United States". He added: "For example, anarchists, operating individually and in groups, caused much of the damage during the 1999 World Trade OrganisationŐs ministerial meeting in Seattle."
Here in the UK, the new Terrorism Act, which came into force earlier this year, includes wide definitions of terrorism that casually embrace many forms of non-violent direct action. In Europe, a Police Chiefs' Operation Task Force, created after recommendations arising from an EU conference, has been formed as a forum for "defining strategies and joint operational actions in the field of maintaining public order whenever events occur that are likely to threaten it".
Increasingly, the Metropolitan Police have been using a new "corralling" tactic at demonstrations, by which groups of protesters are surrounded by rings of riot police and held captive under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. Although this law only gives police the right to search for weapons and the right to remove clothing that masks a protester's identity, the Met have been going much further. Having been held prisoner for hours (seven hours in the case of the recent Mayday demonstrations), most protesters - perhaps unfamiliar with the law, perhaps keen to leave - give their name, date of birth and allow their photograph to be taken.
This information is held on databases overseen by the National Criminal Intelligence Squad, another agency with representatives at the LENS conference in Edinburgh.
Red Pepper Investigation readers may recall the police's culpability in giving intelligence information to McDonald's about activists during the burger giant's preparation for the McLibel trial (Red Pepper, Oct 2000). In an out-of-court settlement, the Met Police issued an apology for their conduct. However, it was only the tenacity of the two McLibel defendants that forced the revelation in the first place. No accountable independent scrutiny over such cosy information exchanges was set up as a result of the incident.
Italian police are evidently going one step further. Norman Blair, one of the protesters badly assaulted and arrested in the now infamous raid on the Genoa Social Forum building, issued a statement after he was finally released. In it he says: "I was photographed directly onto a laptop, and they also used an eye camera, presumably to take a retina scan and I was fingerprinted." Norman was released without charge but his personal details remain on a database.
In October this year, Dutch police are planning an international conference in The Hague entitled: "Maintaining public order; a democratic approach". They have invited police forces from Europe, Canada, the US and Australia. The conference, which will further cement moves for more international law enforcement co-operation on political protesters, will be held behind closed doors. The concept of "civil liberty", meanwhile, will be lying outside the conference hall, haemorrhaging at an alarming rate.
Jim Carey is Investigations Editor for Red Pepper and Political Editor of Squall