death and terror in genoa
by Ramor Ryan 9:04pm Mon Jul 30 '01ramorx@hotmail.com
A comprehensive and insightful analysis of state tactics and the movements response during the siege and battle of Genoa.Death and Terror in Genoa
(By Ramor Ryan)
The Siege of Genoa
The walls went up around the old quarter of Genoa, enclosing the Group of 8 (G8) and their cohorts. Huge heavy walls of concrete and metal, like medieval fortifications or prison fences, walls to keep the people out, the world leaders penned in. Genoa is a beautiful renaissance city carved out of a treacherous mountain slope that seems to slide irrevocably into the sea. Its pulsating streets, the mystery of its dense labyrinth and the expansive calm of the seafront create a surreal theatre for the battle that would consume it. .
Leading up to the summit, the authorities closed down the airport, the main railway stations and severely restricted access by road. Aside from the centre of town, (the red zone) which was completely forbidden to citizens, the area surrounding the red zone was also restricted (the yellow zone) with people enduring random stop and searches. Local people fled the town in droves, and most businesses had closed for the duration of the summit. The G8 had transformed Genoa from a thriving commercial and tourist metropolis to a war zone under a form of martial law.
As if to justify the extraordinary security measures, the media reported various bomb scares and explosive finds, all of which protesters viewed skeptically. No groups claimed responsibility, and these are not tactics used by the alternative globalization movement. The Italian military brought in an array of defensive missiles, and war ships were stationed in the bay. A state of paranoid terror was created to dissuade protesters from coming, and to criminalize the protesters who did.
Repression began at the border. On the Austrian border, activists from No Borders were attacked, one woman losing 5 teeth. A boat full of protesters from Greece was held and the passengers attacked by riot police. Several hundred British protesters on a train were detained in France and a group of cyclists were held at the German border. 70 migrants travelling from Germany to attend the Migrants march were refused entry into Italy. People disembarking at airports in Milan and Turin were subjected to interrogation and searches.
Cars were routinely pulled over and the occupants detained. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of outsiders would make it to Genoa and more than 200,000 demonstrators attended the final manifestation.
The logistical setup for the protesters centered on the Genoa Social Forum, the organizing body representing several hundred diverse groups. Their slogan was A Different World Is Possible. They pointed out that the movement was not anti-globalization, but an alternative vision of globalization, one that does not put profits before people, free trade before free movement; a movement that seeks to eliminate the gap between rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless. In a word, to democratize the process of globalization.
The GSF was based in a huge parking lot on the seafront. From this Convergence Centre, people were dispatched to camping in various stadiums and parks across the city, loosely based on group affiliation. A thriving Indymedia Centre was located near the Convergence Centre, There were legal, medical and administrative centers: the movement organizes itself, autonomously. Café Clandestino provided free food and drink, while `Manu Chao played a free late night concert before 25,000 ecstatic revelers the night before the summit began. A message from Sub-Commandante Marcos was boomed over the PA. How can one town hold so many Che Guevara t-shirts, Zapatista paliacates, Palestinian scarves? The international connection, bridges between 1st and 3rd worlds, North and South, were everywhere to be seen, not just in the presence of Kurdish, African, Japanese or Indian delegates, but also with Europeans who bring their foreign experiences home.
The police raided the camping centers at dawn on the 20th, even before the summit began. Dawn raids by paramilitary police! From the start it was clear- heavy repression, stifle protest, the iron fist. At the Carlini stadium, home to the strong Ya Basta faction, the loudspeakers woke us at 5.30am.
"The police have surrounded us, everybody defend the gates"..
Outside lines of heavily armored paramilitary police stood ready. They demanded to enter to search for 'arms and explosives'. Ya Basta is a non-violent direct action organization. "To show we have nothing to hide" and to diffuse the situation, the central committee allowed a delegation of cops in to search the premises. Many companer@s are furious to have to submit to this search, but the Ya Basta leaders prevail. From early on, a split emerges in the protesters ranks between those who wish to resist the repression, and those who want to avoid confrontation. All around the city, the campsites are raided- to cause distress, confusion, to create fear, to deprive people of sleep! Meanwhile houses of activists preparing to go to Genoa are raided in other cities, doors kicked down, people detained. 5 Germans are arrested while driving in a car close to the red zone.
The first mobilization takes place on Thursday 19 July. About 50,000 people gather for a Migrants March. The day is warm and sunny and the streets are thronged with a peaceful, high-spirited multitude. There are no cops in sight, and the mood is light. The first demand- open the borders to people as well as goods. We are not against globalization, but a globalization that criminalises and marginalises migrants. Are the G8 listening? Do they care? At least it is reported that they are shifting their agenda to talk about debt relief (for people who never they borrowed) and an Aids fund for Africa (A figure of $10 billion is requested, $1 billion is granted). The media is chocabloc full of street stories, scare stories, spectacular images, fuelling the tension. The stage is set: The New World Order, the Global Empire, protected by 20,000 police and military, besieged by the new Global protest movement. Graffiti appears on the walls. - They make misery, we make history.
Friday 20 July. Storming the Gates of Heaven.
A day of civil disobedience. The aim was to shut down the G8. The strategy was to attempt to breach the fortifications from a variety of positions. The tactics were direct action. The first task was to break through the myriad fortified police lines.
The strongest contingent was the Ya Basta grouping, numbering more than 10,000 militants. They used a previously successful tactic of wearing layers of protective padding, helmets and using plastic shields to push through the police lines. Some wore gas masks. The preparations began with talks and then training sessions. Resembling an army preparing for war, men and women, predominantly young and Italian spent all morning taping up their fragile bodies with foam and padding. The atmosphere was tense, the mood defiant. It really seemed anything was possible. There was an ecstatic mood of celebration when we finally set off on the 4km march to the city centre. An endless sea of bopping helmets, a vast array of flags of every hue and colour, lead at the front by a long line of Ya Basta militants behind a wall of plastic shields.
News filtered through from around the city. Bad news. That the Italian Trade Union group COBAS had been beaten badly before they got close to their target. In another part of the city, the Pink Block, a theatrical and prankster group of several thousands had also suffered heavy repression. A Women's Non-violent block had been attacked from the air by tear-gas firing helicopters. A strong section of Anarchists and Autonomes had come close to the Red Zone but was now being dispersed brutally. The Police were making pre-emptive strikes with tear gas and batons on every block. Only a roaming Black Block group is not getting pounded, as they indulge in property destruction aimed at banks and multinational businesses. The only good news- One elderly man had, remarkably, penetrated the Red-Zone before being arrested!
Despite all the ominous reports, we swept down the wide boulevard confidently- we are so many! Like an unstoppable river! So many people prepared to use their bodies to break through, to defend themselves, to struggle. 'El Pueblo Unido, Jamas Sera Vencido' they chanted. 'Genova Libera!', 'E-Z-L-N!'. Rage Against The Machine blasted from the mobile P.A. -Fuck You I Wont Do What You Tell Me! screamed along by thousands. It was momentarily powerful and wonderful.
2km from the Red Zone, the police attacked us. First a frantic barrage of tear-gas, lobbing over the front lines, deep into the heart of the demonstration. Nobody here had gas masks. The poisonous gas first blinds you, then hurts, and then disorientates you. It is immediate and devastating. The people, packed in tightly, panicked and surged backwards. The chaos was manic. 500 heavily armed Riot squad stormed the front lines. In brutal scenes, the Ya Basta militants defense crumbled despite brave resistance and they all got battered. People screamed, turned, fled, falling over each other.
We retreated up the road. The sky was heavy with gas and helicopters hovered overhead. A Watercannon blasted away, throwing bodies around like paper bags. What now? People looked to the Ya Basta leadership in all this horrible disarray but there was no Plan B. Silence from the microphone that had being commanding us to follow their directions the whole march. People retreated further and further, eventually sitting down. The Ya Basta leaders told people to hold this space, this nowhere space 2km outside the city centre signifying nothing. Meanwhile the frontlines struggled to hold on, and the fighting was intense, the tear gas volleys raining down, the police hitting out viciously, as the plastic shields shattered, the helmets cracked. Injured people were rushed to the back, injuries to the head, people who had been shot in the face with tear gas canisters.
We were defeated before having even begun The non-violent direct action tactics, active defense crushed in the face of decisively brutal Police tactics. As the majority of the march sat down further up the road, thousands of others streamed off into the side streets. The right side was blocked by the railway track, but the left side was a labyrinth of tight chaotic enclosed streets. Open new fronts! Break through police lines at 2, 3, 4 different points! A couple of thousand people stormed into the side streets. The Ya Basta loudspeaker requested people to stay put on the road, far from the Red Zone.
In a beautiful old barrio, the battle raged. Protesters would charge up tight streets flinging stones at the police lines. The police, protected head to toe, amassed behind shields and flanked by armored vehicles, responded with tear gas and by flinging back the rocks. The ferocious spirit of the protesters rather than the paltry stones, pushed back the police lines. Then barricades would be built, with dumpsters, cars, anything at hand. The front lines would retreat nursing wounds and poisoned eyes. The more seriously injured would be carried to ambulances. One man was carried by with blood splurting from his eye where a canister had hit him. New people rushed to the front, while others tore up the pavement for ammunition. A tall Irish man fell back saying " We almost got through, we almost did it, we just need a few more people…!"
Another surge, everybody rushed forward on 2 or 3 different streets. Some riot cops got stranded in their retreat and hand-to-hand fighting ensued. The people fighting are not necessarily in black, some are masked. Some have helmets. It is not the Black Block, and there are no agent provocateurs. This is a militant energy driven by people who have said- Ya Basta!, fuck the police, rage, energy, resolve.
They move forward; tear gas everywhere, the police retreating. An armored vehicle is captured, the occupants flee. It is smashed up and set ablaze. This armored Carabinieri truck, symbol of what they hate, the oppressive state, is ablaze and everyone is cheering and filled with rebel joy. Someone sprays 'We Are Winning!' on the side of the carcass of the armored beast. Now they are almost in Piazza Alimondo. They are pushing the police back, 2, 3 blocks, the protesters are euphoric, storming forward, overwhelming the despised carabinieri. Getting closer to the despised wall of the G8; here we are, they chant, we resist!
Hundreds strong, they poured into the expansive Piazza Alimondo. Two police vehicles drive recklessly into the crowd, one drives away, the other stalls; people rush towards the vehicle. Then shots rang out. Rubber bullets? No, the ominous thud of live ammunition. The air heaved. The protesters stopped, reeled around, and fled.
Carlo Guiliani was 23 years old. A rebel. The papers belittled him, called him a "ne'er do well," a bum, a hobo. But we know him as a comrade and a revolutionary. He fought the paramilitary police bravely, fearlessly, pitting the little streets against the great. He was involved In the Zapata Social Centre of Genoa. Zapata lives. Carlo's death was not heroic, nor tragic. It was the consequence of his life, how he lived, how he resisted. Moments before he was shot in the face, Carlo probably felt the extraordinary rebel joy of this spontaneous uprising against power in the little side streets of Genoa. He died instantly, or when the police drove over him, not once but twice, as if to make sure he was dead, really dead. For the police, Carlo had to die. Now they must kill us, because we are beginning to really threaten their power. Carlo was murdered. We are all Carlo.
The Ghost of Pinochet. Saturday 21 July.
This is how the police work. It is Saturday afternoon and there are as many as 200,000 people marching on Genoa against the G8. It is not a combative march. As they swing onto the seafront, a group of agent provocateurs began throwing stones at the police. These are undercover cops, or secret police, or mercenaries or nazi's. They are used by the police same way the paramilitaries are used by the state in Chiapas or Belfast, or even how they used them in Italy in the 1970's. The police want to pick the time and place of the confrontation. They are ready and prepared. This was planned.
This is how the Police work: a few stones fall harmlessly into their ranks and they open up with tear-gas. The canisters fly deep into the multitude, immediately creating panic and chaos. People flee, young and old, babes in arms, but there are too many people, nowhere to run, they are hemmed in and poisoned from the gas. It is horrific.
This is how the people resist. The militants stream through the crowd to the front. There they attempt to build barricades, hold back the advancing cops. The sky fills with stones. They hold the police and the people behind have a few moments more to retreat. Those who needed to get away from the zone could. The Communist party stewards directed people away. But a lot of people stayed, indignant that the demonstration could be so brutally dispersed even before it could get to the piazza. This could have been a dignified march of 200, 000. Now it is in chaos, and battle once more rages on the streets of Genoa. Now is the hour of the Black Block and the insurrectionary anarchists. All afternoon the streets were mad with tear-gas, with stones, with burning banks, burning cars, barricades. The air was shrill with screams, of beatings and violence and fear.
Eventually the rioters were driven back. The police advanced ferociously, beating random people, indiscriminately. In a most surreal scene, cops in grey overalls beat up people on the beach, the Italian Riviera, while bathers looked on. Police in small boats launched tear-gas onto the beach. A helicopter overhead fired gas into the fleeing hordes. Further up, people jumped off the rocks into the sea. The demonstrators were beaten back every inch to the edge of town.
The huge march ended in absolute mayhem. Let it be recorded- 200,000 overtly peaceful protesters were not allowed to demonstrate. "The Genoa Social Forum favored and covered the Black Block," said Berlusconi by way of explanation the next day. We are all guilty. We are all Carlo Giulliani.
At midnight, the next police operation began. We were eating in a restaurant near the Indymedia Centre. The quiet residential street was silent, the neighborhood sleeping.
A long line of heavily armored men rushed by, masked and with their batons swinging. In single file, silent but for the thumping of their boots on the pavement. A young women collapsed into the restaurant, hyperventilating from the shock of been pushed over by the cops as they stomped by. The next moment, a fleet of armored police vehicles rushed by. Then a helicopter shattered the night sky. Finally, a long line of ambulances blasting their sirens passed by. All this in a couple of minutes, a surgical strikes on the movement's offices. The police were extracting revenge.
They crashed through the front gates of the Indymedia Centre in an armored truck, then smashed up the computers, confiscated files and film and broke cameras and terrorized the occupants. Across the road in the school building being used by the Genoa Social Forum as offices and a dormitory for people who felt unsafe in the camping grounds, the real horror occurred. Police and plain-clothes cops entered, reportedly from the special paramilitary police unit called GOM, and attacked everyone inside. Most were asleep on the floor. 93 people were horribly injured, as the police closed the door and inflicted heavy punishment. Scores of people were eventually carried out on stretchers. Pools of blood remained on the floor, streaks of blood across the walls.
Attacks on property cannot be equated to the legions of broken limbs, broken teeth, broken ribs and damaged craniums that a squad of police men inflicted on a somnambulant group of weary protesters as they lay on the floor of a school. These men were following orders. Those who gave the orders get their general directives from a higher authority. The blame for this state terror lies at the feet of Berlusconi's regime, and ultimately, the G8. This is why we protest the G8. This is why comrades move from protest to resistance. The midnight attack on the school and Indymedia, the ensuing torture of the prisoners afterwards, was an attempt to terrorize the movement, to inflict extra-judiciary punishment on activists, and to instill mind-numbing fear within the hearts and souls of protesters. In many ways, it was successful- Saturday night in Genoa was one of widespread fear and terror.
At the Carlini Stadium, bastion of the Ya Basta movement, the officials ordered an immediate evacuation. "Like Saigon.." reported one eyewitness. Hundreds of other activists not present were left stranded. Plain-clothes police swarmed in, and criminals were allowed in to rummage through peoples' belongings. All over Genoa that night, people fled from the Camping sites to roam the streets and alleys and back lanes of the city in fear, hunted like escaped convicts. It was the longest night. Eventually dawn came, but everything had changed.
Genoa was gutted. No city will host the G8 for a while. 34 banks burnt. 83 vehicles both police and civilian, destroyed, 41 businesses torched or looted, 6 supermarkets, 12 government offices. Some protesters believe that hitting economic targets of the enemy is the most effective tactic. (No buses were burnt apparently because the bus drivers union was in solidarity with the protesters, ferrying everyone around for free the whole week).
Genoa in ruins, the G8 left quietly with a few promises to give some money to Africa. Berlusconi blamed, not just the Black Block and the anarchists, but the whole movement, rendering any distinction obsoletes. The Genoa Social Forum uncovered damning evidence of police collusion with agent provocateurs, and the inquiries into the night of terror at the school and the denunciations of torture afterwards continued unrelenting.
200 people were arrested, 600 injured. In the jails, the protesters were tortured while police mocked them with pictures of Mussolini and Nazi's. They tortured them, as they have done in Seattle, Prague and Quebec. They tortured them as they did in Pinochet's Chile, in Argentina, everywhere to terrorize activists when the movement begins to unsettle power. To destroy the movement by spreading panic and fear and horror. To break the back of the militants of this totally unarmed global protest movement.
*
A lovely tree filled piazza deep in the heart of Genoa. A pile of flowers. An endless flow of citizens passes by to pay their respects at the site of Carlo's murder. A memorial across the road at the side of an old church is overflowing with little gifts and offerings. Che Guevara dominates, amidst black flags and red flags and green flags, candles and flowers, cigarettes, beer bottles, tear gas canisters, Zapatista scarves, sunglasses, gloves, Lots of notes and poems and good-bye letters from his friends. A photo of Carlo with his school class. He is the one with the shoulder length hair and the Fuck Nike T-shirt. Politically conscious at 16. People weep gently. 2 squatter girls tie up a banner with the help of a posh older lady. A Mexican woman offers clasps from her coat to secure the banner. We with our hands, it read, they with their guns….
Someone else leaves a poem, Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 18. 'Shall I compare thee to a summers day?' On a summer’s day in Genoa, July 20, Carlo fell. Let the July 20 Movement flourish.