The fuse that fizzled

One year on from Genoa, Italy's anti-globalisation movement is still no match for Berlusconi

Rory Carroll
Guardian

Saturday July 20, 2002
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4465400,00.html

Through the mist of tear gas and burning cars the story of Genoa seemed as shocking as it was momentous. Police officers tasked with guarding a G8 summit lashed out at protestors in a weekend-long frenzy of screams, cracked heads and snapped bones. More than savage, it was stupid. Many of the victims were foreigners, Germans, Britons, Americans, Spaniards, with good jobs and connections back home. And the world's media was there, cameras rolling, to record for posterity, not to mention the courts, what the Italian police did to the anti- globalisation movement.

Blocked by iron gates and water cannon from the Ducal palace where George Bush and Tony Blair were meeting fellow heads of government, there were more than 200,000 protestors who in years to come could boast they were at a historic clash. After Paris '68, Genoa '01. Some have returned and will be in the port city today to mark the anniversary of the summit with another demonstration which will demand, among other things, the arrest of Italy's deputy prime minister, Gianfranco Fini, for allegedly stoking police brutality. Demonstrators - along with the host of books and documentary films chronicling the events of last July - are determined that Genoa is not forgotten.

Beyond the anti-globalisation community, memories of events in Genoa were blotted out by what happened in New York 53 days later. Brutal as it was, the shooting dead of one rioter and beatings meted to more than 300 protestors lost shock value in the shadow of Ground Zero and the war in Afghanistan.

Genoa should remain shocking - and in the news - because the story is not over. It continues to evolve in a direction which says a lot about Silvio Berlusconi's Italy and the state of the country's anti-globalisation movement.

Let us rewind to one of that weekend's most egregious incidents, the early morning raid on the Diaz school used as a headquarters by the protestors. For the previous two days the Black Bloc anarchists had smashed up the city and attacked the police, who responded by lashing out, sometimes in panic, at peaceful demonstrators. The raid was different. Involving several units, hundreds of men and senior officers, it was approved by the interior minister. It was an operation to arrest Black Bloc members and seize weapons, police spokesmen said afterwards.

The blood-splattered walls told their own story of the ferocity which left 62 of the 93 people arrested needing hospital treatment. Most had been asleep when the police broke down the doors. From his hospital bed Mark Covell told me, with difficulty given his punctured lung, five broken ribs and absence of teeth, of being used as a football. "I thought, my God, this is it, I'm going to die. The last thing I heard was a lot of screaming. Then I lost consciousness."

At a press conference the police said an officer had been stabbed during the raid and paraded their seizures: an assortment of hammers, knives, pick-axes, balaclavas and two Molotov cocktails - enough, said magistrates, to charge all 93 people with conspiracy to bomb. Instead they were all released as it became clear they were not Black Bloc.

Some European governments complained of police brutality and the Italian government said wrongdoers would be punished. Then the Twin Towers fell, and Genoa vanished from headlines.

Since then, there have been three developments: new evidence has emerged showing the brutality was worse than initially thought; prosecutors have said they think the police planted the Molotov cocktails and faked the stabbing; and the government has protected the police. A raft of investigations by Italian magistrates and human rights groups such as Amnesty International, aided by police officers breaking the omerta , or code of silence, have built up a picture of systematic abuse in two holding centres. Police officers, prison guards, nurses and doctors have been accused of beating and humiliating detainees. Stories have emerged of body piercings being removed with pliers, people being stripped and insulted, threatened with rape, denied food and water, or forced to sing fascist songs. A disabled man was bludgeoned for being unable to keep his legs spread.

Prosecutors allege police tried to frame the Diaz occupants by planting Molotov cocktails found by a mobile patrol seven hours earlier in the city centre. Pasquale Guaglione, a deputy police chief, identified the wine bottles shown at the post-raid press conference as the ones he found. An officer who said he was stabbed during the raid is under investigation for lying about the gash in his body armour. Dozens of police are expected to face trial. Quite an indictment of what Silvio Berlusconi hoped would be his glittering debut on the world stage, especially given that the G8 meeting achieved nothing of substance, though Italy's prime minister strived to make it pretty: extra lemons added to trees, a plea to locals not to hang underwear out to dry, drapes of renaissance facades to hide ugly buildings.

An empty show? Not at all. History was made, said Mr Berlusconi, because it was at Genoa that he persuaded George Bush and Vladimir Putin to bring Russia into Nato. Mr Berlusconi's majority in parliament agreed the summit was a total success, and absolved the security forces. Overall no "illegality had emerged...just occasional individual excesses", said a parliamentary commission. The police "gave their best, paying a high price in terms of risking injury". Three senior Italian police commanders were transferred to other posts but so far nobody has been fired or convicted. If there are guilty officers they will face justice, said the government, but Gianfranco Fini, the deputy prime minister and ex-fascist whose presence at a police station during the riots allegedly signalled political cover for excesses, has not wavered in defending the security forces.

Genoa is a rallying cry for the anti-globalisation movement, each revelation feeding its indignation, and publishers and art house cinemas sense a market for its tales, but in terms of igniting something bigger the fuse has fizzled. The thousands expected at Piazza Alimonda today to remember the dead protestor, Carlo Giuliani, will be looking back, not forward.

To talk to its intellectuals is to realise the movement in Italy, once Europe's most vibrant, is alive but wrongfooted in an era with evils greater than McDonald's. Its leaders, feted as a rising national political force, have floundered. Luca Casarini, head of the Tute Bianche (White Overalls) protest group, got a derisory vote in local elections two months ago. So did Carlo Giuliani's father, Giuliano, when he stood in Genoa. Vittorio Agnoletto, head of the Genoa Social Forum, has vanished from public view.

At a poorly attended gathering in Rome last month I was about to interview Jose Bove when he realised his wallet had been pinched. He frantically grabbed his mobile phone to cancel credit cards. For a movement of symbols, here was an epitome of loss.

Nostalgia has suffused the build-up to today's anniversary. Genoa provides a fixed point for a movement groping for a way ahead. Who would have thought that that weekend of mayhem and tragedy would become - in Italy at least - a comfort memory, a time when the swelling influence of Italy's activists seemed a giddy, glorious inevitability?

Rory Carroll is the Guardian's Rome correspondent  rorycarroll@guardian.co.uk