Michael Albert:
ZNet Update, 22 July 2002
 

                                           Genoa
 

As most recipients of ZNet Updates likely know, July 20 began a series
of demonstrations in Genoa Italy against the G8 (major industrialized
nations) meetings. As with demonstrations in Seattle, Prague, and
Quebec, activists seek to explain and reveal global institutions like
the IMF, World Bank, and WTO and to reverse worsening rules of
international cultural and economic exchange, as well as address
domestic sexist, racist, statist, and capitalist injustice. And, indeed,
our steadily growing opposition to "globalization" has brought world
leaders and corporate heads to fear for their most revered agendas.
Bush, Berlusconi, and cohorts know that if a huge mass of humanity gains
sufficient knowledge, hope, and confidence, we will force new and more
participatory relations against the tide of their preferred elitist
globalization. Bush, Berlusoni, et. al. have therefore decided to try
their usual recourse, violence.

In Genoa they sought to send a message. Oppose us and you will pay a
high price. And the simple fact is that we need to recognize that if the
context of our actions leaves world rulers the option to do so, they
most certainly have the military means to make good their threats. In
Genoa they set loose their police, aroused beyond even normal levels of
violence by grotesque fascist imagery, to brutalize dissent via torture
and shooting. They seek to intimidate not solely the dissenters on the
scene from even conceiving of disobeying further, but also the broader
public. Bush, Berlusconi, et. al., are trying to ensure, for example,
that in the next go around in Washington DC, from September 28 to
October 4, there will be a small showing of manageable proportions
rather than the feared immense outpouring of dissent and resistance they
fear. Corporate elites want to reverse our momentum, pure and simple.

So what is our response to their violence?

Fear will exist. It is human. To read about what the police have done in
Genoa can't help but arouse concerns about safety. And it ought to. We
should not be ostriches about their vile capacities. But trembling
should also not exist. Passivity should not exist. And we should not do
their work for them, dwelling so insistently on our physical pains as to
disrupt our mental focus and interfere with our broader messages. Nor
should we react in a kind of dance of danger, thinking we must escalate
our actions in the same terms they think about escalating theirs. The
compelling and powerful answer to addressing state violence rarely
varies from a simple logic. Given our resources and means, we must
educate about the issues at stake more widely. We must attract and
sustain ever wider and more lasting support. Our demonstrations must
include so many people, with so many backgrounds, from so many parts of
society and so many societies, that the effect of elites utilizing wild
and intimidating repression will not be to diminish our size and
capacity, but to enlarge both. We must make Bush and Berlusconi's
favored tatics benefit us, not them. That is the road to victory.

If the state can enter our organizational centers, like the Italian
Indymedia and organizing offices, and can beat to physical submission
our members, if the state can assault our marches and rallies, and if it
can do all this with impunity and without a cry of outrage not only from
us but from much wider circles threatening to join us, then the state
will do so.

In coming days and weeks, our discussion about tactics at our
demonstrations needs to keep forefront a simple logic. What choices on
our part will best widen our base of support and thereby grow our size
and deepen our commitment and knowledge, entrenching our dissent and
even threatening its percolation into other dimensions of social life?
And what choices, at the same time, will best restrain the military
capacities of the state by creating conditions under which for them to
unleash their dogs of war costs them more in lost public support then it
costs us in harshly broken bodies?

This is not a pretty cnor even a humane calculus, but it is the logic of
dissent against monstrous violaters of human civility. We need to make
known the state's violence against our dissent, of course. But we need
to retain our priority focus on globalization and capitalism, and on the
vastly more widespread and deeper violence of these ubiquitous systems.
We have to achieve growing popular support, growing morement commitment
and insight, and to simultaneously saddle the state's preferred
repressive options.
 

                                        *****

Here then are a number of sources of direct reports from Genoa...and
there is more online on ZNet...at http://www.zmag.org

The most complete reporting now coming from Italy seems to be that which
is made available by the Italian and the international Indymedia Sites.
Already, in the short history of emergence of these movement
institutions, they have become critically important and powerfully
influential vehicles of our efforts to speak truth to the powerless and
simultaneously confront those with military and economic power with our
even greater people's power.

IndyItaly: http://www.italy.indymedia.org/

IndyCentral: http://www.indymedia.org/

There have additionally been numerous reports emerging from Genoa,
including from people affiliated with ZNet sending us materials. What
follows are three links to essays by ZNet folks from on the scene.then
the full text of a collective statement emerging from Genoa on the 22nd.

Starhawk's second report. http://www.zmag.org/day_two.htm

Starhark's first report. http://www.zmag.org/genoa_7.htm
 

                                    *******

Update: Genoa, early morning 22nd July 2001
 

    "State terrorism in Genoa: International action appeal"

 We write from the building of GSF and Indymedia in Genoa after
witnessing the worst human rights violations in the short history of the
young movement against capitalist globalisation. Two people were killed
by the police on the 20th, one in Genoa and one at the border, and
someone else might have been killed in the most outrageous display of
fascist state brutality that all of us have seen in our lives, just a
few hours ago in front of this building.

This night the police broke into the school Diaz (across the road), one
of the accommodation places of GSF were people were sleeping at that
moment, and beat up everyone to the extent that most of the people could
not walk out and had to be carried in stretchers out of the school. We
don't know how many people were badly injured because we lost count of
the amount of stretchers carried out of the school, but they brought
about 30 ambulances for the injured people. The police also brought at
least one body bag outside, maybe two, but we don't know yet whether
there was a corpse inside either or both of them. Everybody was either
arrested or taken to hospital. According to the testimony of one person
who could escape before being arrested, people were lying on the floor
saying 'no violence' when the police broke into the first floor where he
was, and they battered people so badly that one of the officers had to
intervene to stop the massacre. In one of the pictures taken by
Indymedia (http://italy.indymedia.org) you can see a plank of wood with
nails covered with blood lying next to a corner with big patches of
blood on the walls.

The police also broke violently into the GSF and Indymedia building at
the same time, but here they only destroyed and stole materials. They
did not attack anyone (although in part of the building it was difficult
to breathe due to the tear gas). Italian parliamentarians were also
struck by policemen while they were trying to enter the school Diaz
while the police was beginning to remove the injured.

On the 20th and the 21st the police terrorism in the streets was
unprecedented in recent Western European history. On the 20th they
murdered a young protestor from Genova, who was shot once in the
forehead and once in the cheek, and drove backwards over his corpse. A
young french woman was killed in the Ventemiglia border on the same day,
while the police was preventing her and other people from entering the
country. Police attacked and teargassed all the different groups that
took part in the action. For instance, they threw tear gas from
helicopters into the assembly point of the pacifist march, charged
against the tutte bianche and the Network for Global Rights before they
even started their actions, and injured a still unknown number of
people. They deliberately mixed the different sorts of political
expression, trying to create conflicts (for instance by pushing part of
the black block into the pacifist assembly point). On the 21st they
massively attacked part of the demonstration for absolutely no reason,
teargassing the whole area (including the parking lot that served as the
GSF convergence centre and a nearby beach) and some people were forced
to jump into the sea just to escape from them - only to find police
boats facing them in the water. Both on the 20th and the 21st there were
riots all day, all over the city, which were clearly provoked by the
police. The forms of provocation were diverse: the television showed
images of a group of people dressed in black going out of a police van
and breaking windows, and the black block was visibly infiltrated
throughout these days. We respectfully ask our friends from the black
block to reflect on the meaning of this fact, not just for them but for
everybody else. This request is not meant to imply that they should not
be present in large collective actions, but merely that we encourage
them to rethink their role and choices in them. One possible way would
be to play a role focused on solidarity and defense of other groups,
similar to the one so successfully carried out by the black block in
A16.

People who are taken to the hospitals are arrested immediately after
receiving first aid, unless they are in an extremely bad condition. One
person, a member of a nonviolent group, who was horribly beaten up while
sitting on the floor with his hands up, went through that experience. In
the police station he was repeatedly tortured like everyone else there.
The police was hitting the already wounded areas of his body and
battering him for no reason. Another person who was arrested and
released says that they were beating everybody and forcing them to
scream 'viva il duce', which means long live Mussolini.

The police terrorism started well before the actions. The last weeks
were characterised by police searches all over Italy, followed by what
everybody here considers to be a reproduction of the strategy of tension
used by the Italian state in the 70s to crash social movements. Letter
bombs were sent (by whom?) to policemen, the police exploded a car in
the centre of Genova because it was parked in the same place for several
days, and they alleged in the media that bombs had been planted in
several places (including one of the accommodation spaces of the GSF) -
all of these in order to create an atmosphere of paranoia, fears about
demonstrators and social terror. They also arrested several people
before the actions, including a particularly brutal case of a young
woman who was kept in isolation for four days for having a van (which
they claimed would be used to break into the red zone) where she kept a
hatchet for camping purposes. The people who were arrested with her
report that they were also tortured physically and psychologically,
including forced exposure to a succession of three posters: a
pornographic one, followed by one of Mussolini and then one of the Nazi
Army in action.

We know that many solidarity and denounciation actions have already
taken place all over the world and that many more are being planned (see
http://italy.indymedia.org). We encourage all the groups that have not
planned actions yet to do so, and to prepare for sustained actions to
continue until those responsible for these outrageous human rights
abuses pay the full price for their actions. We suggest to these groups
that their minimum demand would be the resignation of the Berlusconi
government. There is a list of Italian embassies at
http://www.ethoseurope.org/ethos/embassies.nsf/(go down to the link
Embassies of Italy).

We think that we need to turn this situation into a serious
international problem for the Berlusconi and the other G8 governements,
not just due to a basic sense of justice but also because we feel that
the survival of the movement and of many of us might depend on it. This
brutality shows the actual panic with which the rich and powerful are
reacting to the clear fact that the world is beginning to listen to us.
Seeing that they can no longer write us off as a marginal, temporary
phenomenon, they are now removing all masks of ostensible democracy and
showing their real face - one of oppression, violence and terrorism.
 

Por todos nuestros muertos, ni un minuto de silencio. Toda una vida de lucha. (To honor our dead, not a minute of silence. A whole life of strugge.)