Melinda Henneberger :
©The New York Times, August 9, 2001
Outrage Rises Over Beating of Students in Genoa: Police Raid
During Summit Injured Peaceful Protesters
ROME More than two weeks ago, Susan Hager received a call
in Portland, Oregon, about her 20-year-old daughter, Morgan, an
honors student at the state university, who had stopped off in
Genoa to join demonstrators at the Group of Eight summit meeting
on her way to a junior-year-abroad program in Siena, Italy.
"Her friend had found her bloody belongings" at the Armando Diaz
school complex in Genoa, where protesters had been staying,
Mrs. Hager said. There, in the early hours of July 22, 92 young
people were dragged from their beds by squads of Italian riot
police, who beat and jailed them.
Sixty of these demonstrators were injured in the raid. At least two
dozen were hospitalized, including Mrs. Hager's daughter and two
other Americans. The 60 were originally described by officials as
marauding anarchists, but more recent official reports have
described most of them as peaceful demonstrators.
Witnesses described students crouching as they were kicked,
pummeled with clubs and thrown down stairs. Emergency room
doctors said a number of the injured would have died without
treatment. Television crews arriving on the scene later filmed pools
of blood and teeth knocked out during the raid.
It was a day or two "before we knew our daughter wasn't in a
coma," Mrs. Hager said. "The American Consulate told me she'd
been badly beaten but that I should feel lucky she wasn't
permanently injured, as some were."
Morgan Hager had cuts and bruises from her ankles to her neck
and three broken bones in her hand.
Almost as painful as the news about her daughter, Mrs. Hager
said, was the sense that most Americans at home remained
unaware of the brutality of the raid. Italian officials originally
justified the raid by saying that demonstrators staying at the school
- it was made available to nonviolent protesters - had been
harboring members of the violent Black Bloc anarchist group.
Four American demonstrators remain in jail.
Outrage about the behavior of the police in Genoa has built across
Europe.
The issue has become a major embarrassment for Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi and his conservative Italian government.
Thousands of people have marched in protest, governments have
expressed official concern and newspapers have been filled with
accounts of police brutality. One young man, an Italian, was shot
and killed in the demonstrations at the summit meeting, about 200
people were injured and about 300 were arrested.
Officials of a number of European governments have been harshly
critical. The Spanish secretary of European affairs, Ramon de
Miguel, called the scenes a replay of fascism.
Hans-Christian Stroebele, a member of the European Parliament
from Germany, said the Genoa police reminded him of "the military
dictatorship in Argentina."
Hermann Lutz, chairman of the European Police Union, said in an
interview with the German television network ZDF that when he
watched the riots on television he thought "it had to have been in
some kind of dictatorship or in Eastern Europe or in Cuba, but not
among us in the middle of Europe."
Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of Germany, himself a leftist
activist in his youth, has called on his Italian counterpart, Renato
Ruggiero, to urge the Italian government to press ahead with an
investigation of police actions. Twenty-one Germans are among
the 39 people still being held in Italian jails.
One German who was also arrested in the raid at the school in
Genoa, a man who asked not to be identified, described his ordeal
in a written statement issued by his lawyer, Dagmar Vogel, in
Oberhausen. "I was hit in the head, the back, and the legs and a
hard hit on the head. My skull flattened. I bled badly. I lay in my
own blood bath and didn't move at all," the statement said.
Police Chief Admits Excesses
Italy's national police chief, Gianni De Gennaro, admitted
Wednesday that the police had used excessive force during the
G-8 summit meeting in Genoa, Reuters reported from Rome. But
he told Parliament that the police had done so only when
provoked. Incidents of brutality would be investigated, he said.
"The guerrilla-like conditions created by violent and criminal
instigators in some cases provoked an excessive use of force by
police units, that may be true," he said in a written statement. "And
in some other very isolated cases, there was unlawful conduct" by
the police, "which will be rigorously looked into."