Associated Press Dispatches:
© International Herald Tribune, July 21, 2001
Day One: City Center Becomes War Zone
GENOA The death of an anti-G-8 protester here on Friday, the
first fatality since the big anti-globalization protests began in Seattle
19 months ago, touched off fresh rage on the streets of this Italian
port city.
The death occurred during a wild daylong melee, with
demonstrators who were trying to disrupt a meeting of the world's
richest nations hurling firebombs and stones at riot police, who
fired water cannon and tear gas to drive them back from the site of
the summit meeting.
Emergency services said more than 100 people had been injured
in several hours of clashes as thousands of protesters converged
on the heavily guarded city center.
As clashes continued, hundreds of protesters jeered police and
battered a police van escorting the ambulance carrying away the
corpse of the young man who was killed, apparently in a clash
with the police.
The angry crowd had gathered as the body lay in a pool of blood
under a white sheet for more than an hour as coroners made an
initial inquiry.
The crowd vented its rage at a 200-strong detachment of
carabinieri. As the body was lifted into the ambulance, there was a
brief round of commemorative applause and then the clashes
resumed.
Some protesters, many in tears, then began to move away from
the immediate vicinity.
The dead man was not immediately identified by police. Witnesses
gave conflicting accounts of the death, some saying the man had
been shot, others saying he had been beaten by the police. One
witness, Fabio Cardella, said some demonstrators near one of the
city's main train stations were throwing rocks at police vehicles
when he saw a man suddenly drop to the pavement. A police
vehicle then appeared to run the man over, he said.
There was no official word on the circumstances of the death. But
a paramedic, Paolo Cremonesi, said that the man had been around
20 years old and had bled profusely from the head.
Several hours later, at the same spot where the protester was
killed, about 200 demonstrators fought a pitched battle with about
the same number of police, throwing bricks and bottles and
screaming "Assassins!" The police responded with new volleys of
tear gas.
As the crowd dispersed, protesters heaped red flowered plants -
ripped out from a nearby public garden - on the spot where the
victim died. Someone placed a piece of notebook paper with the
words "Made in G-8" on the sawdust that covered the
bloodstains. The paper was held in place by an empty tear-gas
canister.
President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi of Italy, arriving in Genoa for a
state dinner with summit participants, said he was shocked and
saddened by the death, and pleaded with demonstrators "to
immediately cease this blind violence."
The clashes erupted in several parts of the city almost
simultaneously as small groups of demonstrators - sometimes
dozens, sometimes hundreds - broke away from a large main
march to confront police on the edges of the restricted zone.
Demonstrators ripped up cobblestones to hurl at riot police,
smashed windows and threw firebombs.
The riots were a violent offshoot of peaceful demonstrations by
tens of thousands of marchers - representing trade unions,
environmentalists, farmers, anarchists and the unemployed - who
descended on Genoa to express anger over the ill effects of
globalization and the widening gap between rich and poor.
Only blocks from the medieval palace where eight world leaders
including President George W. Bush met, demonstrators made a
determined bid to breach a high steel-mesh security barricade,
hurling themselves against it and managing to open a narrow gap in
one section of the double-layered fence.
But they were immediately driven back by drenching jets from a
water cannon - fired point-blank by police from the other side -
before any could get through. Inside the sealed-off "red zone"
surrounding the summit sites, riot police scrambled to erect new
barriers.
White clouds of choking tear gas and black smoke from trash-can
fires wafted over Genoa's medieval old town as the fighting raged.
Witnesses said about 200 people smashed windows at a bank,
and protesters hurled computers and other office equipment out of
nearby offices into the streets.