Violence at Genoa - A "Question of Detail?"
Most of what the world saw and knows about the G8 summit held in Genoa in July 2001 is that there was violence and that one demonstrator, a 23-year-old Italian boy named Carlo Giuliani, was shot and killed by an Italian carabiniere. But the equation “Genoa = violence” is deceptive. There were an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 demonstrators in Genoa, of whom, according to various estimates, between 500 to 5,000 were violent. Violence did, however, play a crucial part in the Genoa summit, as well as in the way in which the summit was perceived and how it will be remembered.
After the summit weekend, the Italian Ministry of the Interior issued what read almost like a war bulletin: 280 arrests and 231 wounded, of whom 121 were demonstrators, 94 were police, and 16 were journalists. Of the 280 arrested, 105 were foreigners. 150 of those arrested were released almost immediately, while 130, 78 of whom were foreigners, were held pending further investigation. However, protest groups maintain that the number of wounded demonstrators was much higher, and that published statistics represent only those who received hospitalization. They also consider the estimates of injuries among the police to be too high.
When the smoke cleared from the streets of Genoa, the net result of the violence was that large numbers of peaceful demonstrators were beaten by police, while a small contingent of genuinely violent demonstrators—in particular, the so-called Black Bloc (easily recognizable because they dress in black from head to toe and generally wear black ski masks)—were allowed to rampage through certain parts of the city, breaking windows, looting stores, setting cars on fire, and breaking bank machines. Whether by design or incompetence—or some combination of both—the violence produced a clear political effect: hundreds of thousands of peaceful protesters were physically intimidated by both the police and the Black Bloc, and yet at the same time were discredited in the eyes of worldwide public opinion, heavily influenced by television images of violent factions running wild through the streets.
The violence occurred in a very particular political context. The center-right coalition of Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian media tycoon-turned-politician, had recently assumed power, and the summit was seen as a “test” of the new government. In the weeks leading up to the summit, a member of the new government coalition, the “post-fascist” party Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance), anxious to solidify its place as the party of law and order, made it clear that it intended to play a major role in Genoa. Alleanza Nazionale announced it was sending a delegation of parliamentarians to Genoa as an act of solidarity with police. And Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini—the head of Alleanza Nazionale (known for his statement that Mussolini was the greatest statesman of the 20th century)—was in the command room of the carabinieri(Italy’s military police) during the weekend of the demonstration, a highly unusual political presence in what was supposed to be a purely professional context. It is difficult not to see a connection between this political presence and some of the excesses and abuses that occurred in Genoa: a number of the demonstrators who were arrested—as well as suffering severe beatings at the hands of the police—were forced to sing the fascist song Faccetta Nera, and chant Viva il Duce! and Viva Pinochet!
But the genesis of and responsibility for the violence in Genoa is complex, and the way in which the summit unfolded tells a strange story about the nature of democracy, governance, and dissent in the age of globalization and modern communications technology.
THE ROAD TO GENOA
Violent protests have taken place for centuries, but one has the impression that in Genoa we saw either the end of something or the beginning of something—or perhaps both. Starting in Seattle in 1999, a new kind of protest movement mushroomed out of the ground to protest globalization, or the world system that has begun to emerge after the past 20 years or so of increased liberalization of trade.
Previously, most significant protests had been local or, at the most, national in scope and scale. Anti-war protesters at Kent State were mostly students from the university itself and from the surrounding area. The marches on Washington were national protests, though the majority of demonstrators lived within a day’s bus ride of the United States capital. Seattle witnessed the emergence of a new kind of protest, with global reach, composed of people who are in fact products of the globalized world against which they are protesting, organized through the Internet, and armed with cell phones and frequent flyer miles. When Carlo Giuliani was killed on Friday afternoon, July 19, throughout the throngs of demonstrators, most of them far from the scene of the tragedy, suddenly everyone’s cellular phone started ringing.
Genoa saw a confusion of new and old: police with helicopters, surveillance cameras, riot gear, guns, nightsticks, and tear gas, and protesters carrying cell phones, armed with paving stones and sticks and using trash can lids as shields. At the center of this discordant clash of old and new technology was the ancient ritual of the international summit—in this case, the national leaders of the industrialized world following a script that harked back to the days of the Treaty of Westphalia, which put an end to the Thirty Years' War in 1648, the Concert of Vienna in which the great powers of Europe convened after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, the Versailles Treaty after World War I, or the meeting of the Big Three—Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin—at Yalta in World War II. In those days, summits were held quietly and in relative privacy, before the Information Age. Thus, in 1999, Seattle—the city of Microsoft and an emblem of the postmodern economy—found itself woefully unprepared for the demonstrations that rocked the meeting of the World Trade Organization. Following that clash, there seems to have been an escalating challenge between protesters and summit organizers. In Quebec City in 2001, the summiteers placed themselves behind an enormous security wall.
The mechanics of holding a summit appear to have become cumbersome beyond the realm of reason. With each passing year, the summits seem to grow in size and seeming importance, as do the corresponding protests. The Genoa summit seemed to suffer from a kind of elephantiasis. The United States delegation alone comprised some 600 people—a far cry from the intimate diplomacy of Yalta.
Globalization, by spreading Western notions of individual economic, legal, and human rights around the world, has contributed to a growing desire for democratic participation around the world—witness the emergence of popular democratic movements in places as diverse as Russia, the Philippines, Indonesia, South Korea, and South Africa. But the economic forces of globalization increasingly pass over the heads of national and democratically elected governments (even the most powerful ones) and create the impression among millions or billions of people that many of the most important decisions affecting their lives are being made without any possibility of participation on their parts. Globalization creates a genuine problem of democratic governance. Globalization affects everyone, but the bodies governing the world economy, such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, are unelected and dominated by the wealthiest countries in the world. The contradiction between a world system that touches everyone but whose decision-making mechanisms appear beyond people’s grasp has generated a floating, global, international protest movement whose representatives travel from summit to summit in the hope of making their voices heard in these meetings.
Complicating the problem of political participation, a small, self-declared anarchist movement is committed to the use of violence and property damage. These people may be the political equivalent of the “hooligans” who have added an element of potential danger to every major international soccer match in recent years, and for whom protesting is another “extreme” sport like bungee-jumping or snowboarding.
The Genoa summit promised to be bigger than any other, and the protest against it loomed equally large. The Italian government shut down most of the center of Genoa for several days, creating various restricted areas such as the Blue Zone, the Yellow Zone, and the sacrosanct Zona Rossa, the Red Zone, in which the summit meetings would take place. Normal transportation and life ground to a halt for miles around the city. Fifteen-foot-high barbed wire fences were built across every street and alley leading into the Red Zone, like a kind of Berlin Wall in the middle of the city. The atmosphere was eerie: the streets and piazzas, with their Renaissance palaces and baroque fountains, were entirely empty and quiet, while the protesters massed on the periphery of the city, miles from the Ducal Palace, the main seat of the summit. Many Genoans living in the city center left town, and most shops and cafés closed, leaving the oldest and poorest residents of Genoa in an ill-served ghost town. A rumor swirled among the community of protesters that the people trapped in the center had run out of garlic, and so some protesters were passing or pressing garlic through the barbed wire fences leading to the Red Zone. “Free Genoa!” was one of the cries of the demonstrators.
The Italian government appeared to be preparing for Armageddon. Anti-aircraft missiles were stationed at various places, ships and submarines patrolled the harbor, and helicopters hovered close overhead—their deafening sound a menacing leitmotif of the summit. The police, prepared for action, bought thousands of new inflammable uniforms, gas masks, and sets of body armor. (They supposedly also brought 200 body bags in case things got really bad.) The decision to keep protesters as far as possible from the center of action and the erection of a massive barbed wire fence in the middle of the city made the idea of penetrating the Red Zone an obsession for some protesters, like breaking into the end zone for a touchdown. Some of the organizers made inflammatory statements which added to the rising tension that preceded the summit. Luca Casarini, the coordinator of a series of “social centers” from northeast Italy, declared “war on the lords of Empire.” Unlike the Black Bloc, Casarini’s organization normally preaches a form of nonviolent civil disobedience, but Casarini, with his declarations of war before Genoa, did not do a good job of distinguishing between violence and non-violence. His group, the so-called tute bianche (“white overalls”), dressed up with body padding under their clothing like football or hockey players, made it clear they intended to break through the Red Zone. Casarini held a press conference, with members in their white uniforms, their faces covered in ski masks—an alarming reminder of the violent protests that marked Italy in the 1970s—announcing their intention to invade the Red Zone. “It’s the only gesture that is left to us after the government’s closed attitude, which has mobilized the army for the first time in the history of the Italian Republic to stop a demonstration... It is a choice you have forced on us, because we prefer peace, but we are obliged to make it.”
These statements were not particularly helpful, nor were they representative of the intentions of the vast majority of protesters, who had no interest in trying to scale fifteen-foot barbed wire barriers or crash through heavily armed police barricades. And indeed, no serious attempts to break into the Red Zone materialized. Many demonstrators who attended the summit say that the protest leaders they encountered made a point of stressing that all protest actions were to be non-violent.
But the declarations of war played nicely into the hands of the right-wing element of the Berlusconi government, which insisted that the police must be prepared to use a firm hand with the demonstrators. “Genoa is a city in a state of terror,” one politician from the post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale (AN) declared a week before the arrival of demonstrators. Police and politicians continued to leak alarming but unconfirmed—(and often baseless) reports from the secret services, painting possible scenarios of violence. Prime Minister Berlusconi announced that he was not sure Genoa could be made safe, and others predicted massive violence.
THE SUMMIT BEGINS
When the demonstration started on Thursday, 19 July, the atmosphere was peaceful and festive. There was a march for immigrants’ rights, with a great deal of music and dance. “It was very well organized,” says Brenda Biddle, an American graduate student in anthropology, who attended the demonstrations in order to conduct interviews. “There was a welcoming committee. The parade was flowing in a relatively smooth way. There was a strong police presence, but there was a very hopeful, positive, colorful atmosphere. There was a group called the Pink Bloc, which was sort of frivolous, and dedicated to subversion through art and music.” There was also a “counter summit”—which took place continuously throughout the week—with more than one hundred sessions at which economists, activists, and others presented their critique of globalization and distributed literature.
Trouble did, however, begin on Friday. With the police heavily concentrated around the Red Zone to protect the summit, the Black Bloc took advantage of the situation by committing acts of vandalism some distance from the restricted area. Although they were easy to spot, dressed in black, often with protective padding, the police failed to respond. Calls from citizens often went unheeded. In fact, even before the summit officially began, the Black Bloc took over a gymnasium being used by the Genoa Social Forum (GSF), an umbrella group for more than 700 protest groups attending the summit. The Black Bloc kicked out the peaceful demonstrators and began smashing things. The GSF called the police, but to no effect. Action by the police at this moment, before the demonstrations started, might have prevented subsequent violence by the Black Bloc. But the passive posture adopted by the police continued on Friday. There are scores of photographs and videotapes of Black Bloc protesters on the rampage as contingents of Italian police stand by, doing nothing. In some cases, it is possible that these police agents were under orders not to respond, and in some cases, they may have been present in such small numbers that they might have been at risk had they tried to make arrests, but the fact remains that the worst violence at Genoa went almost entirely unchecked by the police. Moreover, the Black Bloc violence was generally restricted to two quite specific areas—around Piazza Alimonda, where Carlo Giuliani was killed, and around Piazzale Kennedy, where thousands of demonstrators were camped out in sleeping bags—a likely flash point and an obvious place for substantial police presence.
Everyone knew about the Black Bloc—the Italian police had names of potentially violent demonstrators, and many of the Black Bloc had been arrested at previous demonstrations—but the Italian government seemed to have no plan for dealing with the problem. Police officials later testified to the Italian parliament that there was a special division that was supposed to deal with the Black Bloc, but the officers didn’t know Genoa and repeatedly got lost. This seems like a woefully inadequate excuse for two days of inaction, although one of the people I interviewed, Luca Caminati, who is originally from Genoa and teaches film at the University of Florida, reported that he ran into a squad of policemen from Rome who were lost and asked him for directions.
The greatest trouble occurred during a march from the Carlini Stadium to Piazza Verdi on Friday afternoon. The march was authorized, although some police appeared to think otherwise. “When we were about 500 meters from Piazza Verdi,” Caminati told me, “armored police vehicles began to move in on us, and from balconies they began to fire tear gas canisters. No one in Italy had even seen such a thing, firing tear gas from balconies!” Tear gas was even fired from the helicopters hovering overhead. “The police attacked the demonstration, and at that point warfare broke out.”
This account of things has been substantially borne out by subsequent parliamentary hearings into the Genoa violence. A television journalist, Franco Berruti, who was filming the demonstration for Mediaset, the television conglomerate owned by Prime Minister Berlusconi—clearly not an anti-government news organ—reported at various points that the demonstration was non-violent, and that at 2:30 the demonstrators had disarmed and sent away several protesters carrying clubs. “Shortly thereafter, the parade in Via Tolemaide was attacked by a contingent of carabinieri,” stated the parliamentary report of the Democrats of the Left, the largest opposition party in Italy. “The action is clearly seen in the videos … which clearly show the attacks, the situation and behavior of the demonstrators … The films show that no objects, stones or Molotov cocktails were thrown from within the crowd toward the authorities.” “The police lost control,” said Caminati. “I saw things like police hitting middle-aged women, who were simply taking backstreets to get away from the trouble.” Caminati himself ended up running away with a group of nuns who were attending the march.
The effect of the attack was a great deal of panic, confusion, and street fighting. Rather than facing a crowd concentrated in one orderly mass, the police then had to contend with scattered bands of demonstrators, most of them terrified, many of them enraged at being tear-gassed and beaten for no apparent reason. It was in this context that the death of Carlo Giuliani occurred.
Giuliani ended up in a side piazza in which a crowd of about 50 demonstrators were fighting with a small contingent of carabinieri, three of whom were in a truck. A demonstrator knocked a hole in the window of the truck, from which a young, inexperienced carabiniere fired his gun, striking and killing Giuliani. It is a matter of dispute and judicial investigation exactly what happened. But a photograph shows Giuliani holding aloft a fire extinguisher. Police maintain that he was about to hurl it at the window of the police truck and that the agent fired in legitimate self-defense. Demonstrators claim that the photograph of the fire extinguisher was taken a few minutes earlier in the course of a general fracas and that he was not throwing it at the truck when he was shot. Footage of the scene in Piazza Alimonda, where the tragedy occurred, shows a contingent of police failing to intervene when the carabinieri in the truck were under attack. All in all, bad planning appears to have played a major part in the tragedy. The carabinieri in the piazza were generally young, and with very little training or experience in crowd control. The indiscriminate use of tear gas on the demonstrators—an apparently unprecedented 6,200 canisters of tear gas were used during the weekend—the improper use of a new brand of police nightstick, which broke many bones and sent many demonstrators to the hospital, and the attacks on demonstrators who were not (initially) violent, all contributed to the palpable sense of violence and terror. One of the carabinieri who was at the scene of the tragedy testified before Parliament that he had been on duty for eleven hours at the moment of the shooting and had had nothing to eat all day. The combination of fatigue and inexperience may have affected officers’ judgment and behavior.
SATURDAY – A BEAUTIFUL DAY GETS UGLY
Saturday, 21 July, was a beautiful day, and most of the day’s activities, the centerpiece of which was a march by some 250,000 people, began peacefully. There were thousands of young people, families, church groups, farmers, union members, and supporters of every possible political party in Italy, who had arrived by bus from every corner of the country. "The march, contrary to what had been agreed to in advance, was not preceded, accompanied or followed by police escort," stated the parliamentary report of the Left Democrats. "Before the march reached Piazzale Kennedy, the first incidents occurred, provoked by a group of violent demonstrators, composed of an estimated 200 to 300 persons, whose front line was composed of demonstrators dressed in black... The great majority of them wore motorcycle helmets, ski masks or had their faces covered by handkerchiefs. The violent demonstrators threw rocks, dug up pavement stones and used bricks and poles taken from stores they had looted the day before... At 2:06, the action of the Black Bloc was reported to the authorities, who did not intervene and, remaining immobile, launched tear gas at the crowd. There was no effort to circle or disperse the violent demonstrators, who continued undisturbed for about a half an hour."
Curiously, these events—in an enormous city-wide demonstration of 250,000 people—did not mar the entire event. Millicent Marcus, a professor of Italian studies at the University of Pennsylvania, was toward the back of Saturday’s march and described the first part of the day as "euphoric," because of the beauty of the day and the energy of the crowd. As the march snaked its way slowly through the streets of Genoa, the crowd would suddenly lurch backwards like a body recoiling. "We found out later that the Black Bloc were at the front of the rally. They would throw bottles and bricks at the police and then run back into the crowd for protection, at which point the crowd would pull back. I saw several attempts to keep the Black Bloc demonstrators out, and they would accuse them of being fascisti." There were helicopters flying very low, whose noise was deafening, launching tear gas into the crowd. "Something that was wonderful and peaceful was turned into something frightening and frustrating because of the Black Bloc."
Many demonstrators suspected that the attitude of the police towards vandalism was part of a conscious policy and that many of the people dressed in black were actually police infiltrators. (The Italian government has vigorously denied this, although—because the parliamentary inquest into the Genoa summit was not granted any investigative powers—we may never know the truth of this matter.) As one author on an Italian Black Bloc anarchist website wrote, the violence of the Black Bloc is limited to banks, food chains and symbols of international capital—and is not random, indiscriminate or directed at other demonstrators, as occurred in Genoa, leading him to conclude that some of the violence in Genoa was the work of agents provocateurs.
The police did acknowledge having a number of agents masquerade as journalists, wearing yellow press tags. It is not clear whether this tactic contributed to the fact that many members of the press were beaten up, a number of them requiring hospital treatment. Indeed, the Italian press federation issued a list of 19 members of the press who were seriously injured—some of them suffering from broken legs and ribs. Of the 19, 12 were beaten by police, and 7 by protesters, generally identified as Black Bloc. A number of journalists complained that police confiscated their film and videotapes or smashed their equipment, evidently in response to them filming images that might be damaging to police.
THE POLICE RAID ON THE DIAZ SCHOOL
On the night of Saturday, 21 July, for reasons that are still unclear, police staged a large-scale raid on the Armando Diaz School, which was being used as a dormitory and staging ground for the Genoa Social Forum and its affiliated groups. There were no reports of violence occurring at the school—at that or any other moment—which might have justified the raid. The police blitz occurred around 11:30 at night, when many of the demonstrators were asleep on the gymnasium floor. As demonstrators became aware of the imminent raid, they blockaded the doors to the school, but when the police broke in through windows and began to beat people in their sleeping bags, terror ensued. One police officer was stabbed during the raid, while 60 demonstrators were injured.
93 people were arrested. In 80 cases, judges ruled that their arrests were illegal and they were immediately released. In 12 other cases, the arrests were allowed to stand but the prisoners were released because there was no evidence of wrongdoing. In only one case was the original arrest upheld.
In the hours after the raid, when Joel Sternfeld and others visited the scene, it was possible to reconstruct from the nature of the destruction and disorder what had happened. There were pools of blood on the floor of the gymnasium and in the upstairs classrooms where many protesters had tried to barricade themselves. Hundreds of rubber gloves were discarded by police officers after the fracas. In the classrooms, rows of desks and chairs neatly stacked for the summer months were in disarray, revealing the path the police took as they charged through the rooms. On the scaffolding outside the 5th floor, where demonstrators had taken refuge, were scattered broken crucifixes that demonstrators had raised before themselves, in the hope of avoiding beating. A number of computers that had been set up in the center were either smashed or had been ripped open in order to remove their hard drives.
Afterwards, in an attempt to justify the raid, Italian police held a press conference showing the “weapons” they had confiscated. The Wall Street Journal quickly pointed out that almost all of them were simply construction equipment taken from temporary scaffolding set up outside the windows of the classrooms.
Police called the raid at the Diaz School a mistake, but it appears to have served as an occasion for angry and frustrated police officers to take out their rage on protesters.
BEATINGS AND FASCIST HYMNS AT THE JAIL
Many of the arrested demonstrators were taken to the Bolzaneto barracks, which had been converted into a temporary jail. Here, a second major series of abuses took place. Italian medical personnel and even some police officers confirm that many prisoners were beaten unnecessarily, as well as forced to stand for hours in handcuffs, with their faces to the wall.
Alfonso Munno, a 26-year-old freelance photographer from Rome, who was beaten up and arrested on the afternoon of Saturday, 21 July while photographing some Black Bloc demonstrators, told La Repubblica, the Rome newspaper, about his ordeal at the Bolzaneto barracks. "When we arrived, they threw us out of the truck and began hitting us with nightsticks and insulting us... A Swedish girl was dragged by the hair. The agents put out a cigarette on the hands of a Frenchman. Another young man wet his pants, whether out of fear or because he couldn't hold it." Munno himself suffered a fractured foot and bruised ribs. "The soundtrack of the horror," he said, "is a song that the agents know by heart and which I, unfortunately, came to learn: Un due tre, viva Pinochet, quattro cinque sei, a morte gli ebrei, sette otto nove, il negretto non commuove." “One, two, three, Pinochet. Four, five, six, death to the Jews. Seven, eight, nine, no pity for the niggers.”
There were a number of reports of chanting fascist songs and slogans that night, which, given the prominent role of "post-fascist" politicians in police headquarters in Genoa that weekend, is hard to see as purely coincidental. Alleanza Nazionale(AN) seemed intent on predicting terrible violence and the need to repress it, while at the same time offering, in advance of events, to absolve the police of any responsibility. One member of Parliament for AN, Filippo Ascierto, declared a week before the summit that he and his colleagues would stay in the police command center in order "to be sure that no one can make easy accusations against the security forces." To members of the police, this must have seemed like an offer of political cover.
Before the summit, the Italian government declared that the police in Genoa would have three objectives: 1. To protect the Red Zone and allow the summit to take place; 2. To guarantee the rights of peaceful protesters to demonstrate freely; and 3. To isolate the Black Bloc and other violent demonstrators. Clearly, only the first of these three objectives was achieved.