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 | | From: | Lang ́ Burt | | Subject: | G8 2001 di Genova | | Date: | Sun, 23 Jan 2005 17:44:24 -0000 |
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Sui media inglesi e' ancora di attualita'....
In Italia cosa se ne dice?
Thanks
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1394586,00.html
Now, the reckoning
In the summer of 2001, Italian police launched a brutal raid on protesters
at the G8 summit in Genoa after they had returned to their sleeping
quarters. Among 62 injured were various Britons, some of whom have still not
recovered. Finally, more than 60 officers are being called to account in
court. Rachel Shabi and John Hooper report
Saturday January 22, 2005
The Guardian
On Saturday night, July 21 2001, Richard Moth and his girlfriend Nicola
Doherty left their friends in a Genoa bar because she was feeling tired and
wanted an early night. The two London care workers were among vast numbers
of people demonstrating at that year's G8 summit. Protesters against
corporate globalisation had been following the leaders of the world's major
industrial nations to their annual meetings in different parts of the globe
since 1998. But this was a gathering on a scale unlike anything that had
preceded it. The organisers put the numbers at 200,000; the police said
there were 100,000. And it had turned ugly. Even though - or perhaps
because - there were 20,000 police in Genoa, including reinforcements drawn
from all over Italy, the summit protests became a bloody battleground.
Demonstrators blamed heavy-handed, provocative policing. The authorities
pointed the finger at a minority of violent protesters who had, over the
course of the summit, looted shops, vandalised the streets and pelted police
with rocks. The authorities also didn't much like the repeated assaults made
by protesters on a high steel fence, topped with barbed wire, that had been
erected to isolate the G8 leaders. Tensions were running high. On Friday,
the first day of the meeting, a demonstrator, Carlo Giuliani, was shot dead
by a policeman, and more than 200 others were injured - around two-thirds of
them protesters.
Doherty and Moth were staying at the Armando Diaz school complex, which was
being used as a press centre and makeshift dormitory by the Genoa Social
Forum, the umbrella group behind the demonstrations. Doherty, then aged 27,
and Moth, 32, had been at the main demonstration that day. It had been
mostly peaceful, but there had been clashes between police and protesters,
some of them fierce. The two Britons settled down at the school, unaware
that it had been chosen for an organised police attack: at least 150 police
officers assaulted defenceless and - as was later proven - peaceful
protesters. Some of the most senior officers in Italy witnessed police going
into the building, and the raid was so ferocious that, as photographs taken
afterwards show, it left walls and radiators in the school spattered with
the blood of the victims.
At around 11.30, Doherty says, she and Moth were still awake and had just
zipped their sleeping bags together. "We heard a lot of noise," she says.
"We looked out of the window and saw that the whole street was covered in
police in riot gear." Everyone in the building immediately got down on the
floor. Moth climbed on top of Doherty, to protect her. "The police came in
and started beating people with batons and kicking everyone, and people were
crying and begging them to stop, but they just carried on," she says.
Doherty was hit on her arms, legs, side and hips, hit so hard on the arm
shielding her face that her wrist was broken. Moth was to need stitches to
his head and leg, while his back was beaten black and blue.
"It was relentless," he says. "Blow after blow after blow. When the first
lot [of police] were worn out, some others came along and had their turn as
well." It was apparently more than some of the police could stomach. A court
has since heard from an eyewitness that the deputy commander of an antiriot
unit sent up from Rome tore off his helmet, shouting "Basta! Basta!"
("That's enough! That's enough!").
Moth and Doherty were not even among the most seriously injured. Mark
Covell, a 37-year-old volunteer with the Indymedia news network, was set on
by police outside the building. "I was attacked three times in 15 minutes.
First, about eight officers beat me to the ground. There was a pause. I just
lay there. Then around 20 officers ran past and one of them came back. He
hooked his boot under my ribcage and tossed me into the air, then the others
joined in and I was used as a football. Eight of my ribs were broken and I
got a punctured lung. The last attack, though, was the most serious. One cop
hit me with his baton on the back of the head and another kicked me in the
jaw. Ten of my teeth were knocked out or broken. There was blood in my
throat and I couldn't breathe," he says. "I thought that was it, that I was
going to die that night."
He lost consciousness and did not come round for 14 hours. Four years later,
he is still far from recovered. "I have trapped nerves and tendons in my
spine, and a hand that is going to need to be re-broken," Covell says. "They
say my post-traumatic stress levels are still sky-high and that I'm going to
be in therapy for years. For me, Genoa is still going on."
Of the 93 people arrested that night at the Diaz, 62 needed medical
treatment. Of those, 28 were taken to hospital and three, including Covell,
were put on the critical list.
The raid happened in the heart of Europe, in a democratic nation with the
eyes of the world upon it. Yet, fortunately for Italy and Silvio
Berlusconi's government, the whole affair was to be swiftly forgotten. Less
than three months later, the World Trade Centre was attacked and after that
every other event began to take on reshaped proportions.
Back in Italy, though, the sequence of events that began at the Diaz school
has not been forgotten. It has given rise to two sensational court cases in
which more than 60 officers, including some of Italy's top policemen, stand
accused of violating the very principles of law and order they are sworn to
uphold. The second of two preliminary hearings is due to open next Thursday
and deals with what happened after the Diaz school raid, for the nightmare
did not stop there.
Forty of the protesters were taken to a holding centre at Bolzaneto, six
miles from Genoa, where they were put with others arrested elsewhere in the
city. Here, according to prosecutors, they were further humiliated and
abused, physically and verbally.
Moth, who had been taken out of the Diaz school on a stretcher, says he "had
to be held down, screaming with pain" at the hospital while they stitched
him up. Then he was taken to Bolzaneto in a police car. There, despite his
injuries, "I was made to stand for hours spread-eagled against a wall." On
his way to and from the lavatories, he says, he ran the gauntlet of prison
officers who kicked out at him as he passed. Other detainees have variously
testified that they were spat at, warned they would be raped, and threatened
with anal and vaginal penetration with truncheons. The most senior doctor
present is being charged with insulting detainees during their medical
inspections and failing to inform the authorities after protesters were
sprayed with asphyxiating gas in their cells.
At Bolzaneto, a new and sinister aspect of the whole affair emerged. The
prosecution claims that some of the detainees were forced to shout "Viva il
Duce" (Long live the Leader) and other slogans in support of Italy's fascist
dictator Benito Mussolini. They were also allegedly made to sing a song.
This is how the prosecutors say it went: "Un, due, tre. Viva Pinochet.
Quattro, cinque, sei. A morte gli ebrei." ("One, two, three. Long live
Pinochet. Four, five, six. Death to the Jews.")
Extreme rightwing attitudes crop up in many parts of the Italian police and
security forces, but are particularly prevalent in the antiriot units that
were deployed at Bolzaneto. In Italy, those with authoritarian ideas about
"law and order" often align with Gianfranco Fini's National Alliance party,
the direct successor of the fascist movement of the 1930s.
Crucially, the foreigners at Bolzaneto were told to sign a document waiving
their rights. "It wasn't translated," says a British lawyer representing two
of the victims. "It was a special form for the G8 summit, so it had been
prepared in advance." Among the questions and pre-filled answers on the
form, in Italian, were: "Do you want your embassy and consulate contacted?"
"No." "Do you want somebody informed of your detention?" "Nobody." "Do you
need an interpreter?" "No, because I understand Italian very well."
Forty-seven people are facing indictment in connection with what happened at
Bolzaneto. They include police officers, prison guards and medical staff.
Unsurprisingly, some of the victims have described what happened to them as
torture. But, in doing so, they have created a difficulty for the
prosecutors. One of several gaps in Italy's laws and regulations exposed by
events surrounding the G8 protests is the lack of a statutory ban on
torture. So, as torture is not a crime in Italy, if the staff at Bolzaneto
are shown to have been torturers, it would not be grounds for prosecution.
Proceedings against those allegedly involved in the Diaz school raid are
more advanced: 28 senior officers are variously accused not just of
trespass, false arrest and inflicting or authorising grievous bodily harm,
but of trying to justify what they'd done with a pack of lies. The
preliminary hearing began in June last year and continued until September;
after listening to an outline of the evidence against the defendants, a
judge in Genoa ordered that all 28 be sent for a full trial. It is due to
start in April this year. All the defendants in both trials deny the
charges.
The sensitivity of these court cases is hard to overstate. The charges raise
questions of the gravest kind about both the Italian police and the
Berlusconi government. In British terms, it is as if the head of the prison
guard, high-ranking officers from Special Branch and Scotland Yard, and
assistant chief constables from several regional forces were all in the dock
together. The defendants in the Diaz trial include Francesco Gratteri,
number two of the anti-terrorist division of the Italian police, several
squad commanders from police headquarters in Rome and past or present
assistant commissioners from Bologna and Genoa itself. The Bolzaneto hearing
will have before it General Oronzo Doria, the commissioner of the
penitentiary police, and an assistant commissioner from Turin.
Never has there been a calling to account of the Italian police on this
scale. In the past, individual policemen and women, or small groups of
officers, have been put in the dock, accused of falsifying evidence or
mistreating suspects. But no one, until now, has ever thought to arraign
such a broad cross-section of the top command. In many countries, it would
be inconceivable. But Italy, for all its chaos and corruption, has some
remarkable institutions, and one of them is a wholly independent prosecution
service. Unlike in Britain, a prosecutor who suspects an offence has been
committed does not have to seek permission from anyone - least of all the
government - before opening an inquiry or, indeed, bringing charges.
But to bring proceedings this far, the prosecutors of Genoa say that they
first had to demolish a wall of lies and obfuscation erected by the
defendants.
Dan McQuillan, 40, from north London, who suffered severe injuries to his
head and body, describes the protesters in the Diaz school that night as "a
right bunch of do-gooding people: care workers, social workers; young,
hopeful people trying to do something for society in their job, and who had
the social conscience to go on demos". According to the police, however, the
Diaz school was an operational base of the "Black Bloc", a loose anarchist
grouping that often uses property damage directed at corporations as a
protest tactic. This bloc was held responsible for much of the destruction
in Genoa. That destruction, and the violence against police that accompanied
it, is the focus of separate proceedings in which 25 demonstrators are being
tried.
There is some evidence that the rank-and-file officers who were ordered into
the school thought they were being given a chance to get even with the most
aggressive of the protesters. Covell says that, just before he was set upon,
the officer who grabbed him said, in English: "You are Black Bloc. We are
going to kill Black Bloc."
A police charge sheet stated that the occupants of the Diaz school had
resisted arrest and were in possession of various "arms, offensive weapons
and other material, illegally held within the school". A list included Swiss
army knives, hammers, shovels, nails and other carpenter's tools (the school
was being renovated over the summer holidays), an assortment of black
clothing (the uniform of the Black Bloc) and, most damningly, "two bottles
(Molotov cocktails) in the entrance hall on the ground floor". As if that
were not proof enough of the threat posed by the alleged subversives holed
up in the school, an officer from Rome, Massimo Nucera, came forward to say
that he had been attacked by a demonstrator with a knife. He produced a
slashed jacket to prove it.
At a press conference the following day, police said all 93 protesters
arrested at the school could be charged with conspiracy to bomb, and jailed
for five years. Five days after the demonstrators' ordeal began, they were
released and, in the case of the foreigners, briskly deported.
But as prosecutors and judges scrutinised the police claims, they concluded
that they were baseless. Italian justice is slow. It took almost two years
for the affair to reach court, but in May 2003 a Genoa judge ruled that not
one of the 93 people arrested had been involved in violence. Judge Anna
Ivaldi found, "Nothing has come to light against them that would lead one to
suppose the existence of associative relations with those who sacked and
wrecked the city."
In a speech towards the end of the preliminary Diaz hearing in September
2004, the prosecutor, Enrico Zucca, noted sardonically that no single
operation "in the long history of the Italian police" had ever resulted in
so many wrongful arrests. Returning to the attack at the court's next
session, Zucca argued that the police had conspired to justify the brutality
of the raid with trumped-up evidence. As he and the detectives working for
him had dug into the affair, discovering contradiction after contradiction,
they had found "a disturbing yet simple answer: the police officers must
have lied".
For a start, said Zucca, there never were any Molotov cocktails at the
school - or rather, none until the police planted them there. The police had
reported finding four petrol bombs in Genoa on July 21, two in the city
centre during the day and two at the school in the evening. But they could
produce only two. An explanation was eventually provided by Pasquale
Guaglione, an assistant police commissioner from Naples who, like many other
senior officers, had been drafted in from outside to help police the
demonstrations. He told prosecutors the bottles taken away from the school
were the same as those his unit had picked up earlier in the day at the
scene of fierce clashes between demonstrators and police. They were wine
bottles and he recognised the labels - Merlot and Colli Piacentini. Then a
junior officer is said to have admitted during interrogation that he brought
the Molotov cocktails to the Diaz school on the orders of a superior.
Finally, an assistant commissioner from Rome, Massimiliano Di Bernardini,
said that he had seen the two bottles being carried by another senior
officer, Pietro Troiani, at the school on the night of the raid. This made
Di Bernardini a key prosecution witness. Five days before the preliminary
hearing began in June, the assistant commissioner was involved in a
motorcycle accident that has left him in a coma ever since.
The Molotovs are not the only allegedly falsified evidence. The prosecution
claims that the knife attack was faked, too. It has produced forensic
findings which, it says, show it was the police, and not a demonstrator, who
slashed the jacket to provide evidence of an assault.
Lawyers representing the victims add that very basic details given by police
officers of events that night showed contradictions. There were claims that,
prior to their entering the building, they were attacked by stone-throwing
protesters inside. But, says Massimo Pastore, Covell's lawyer, "Some [police
officers] said the protesters threw a lot, some said a few, and others said
they didn't notice any stones." There is video evidence of the police
entering the building in which no stone-hurling is visible.
According to one of the defence lawyers, Silvio Romanelli, "there were at
least 150 police officers inside the school". Yet more than three years
after their ferocious attack, nobody can say for sure who - or how many -
they were. Police handed prosecutors a list of men involved in the
operation. That it was a partial list was established, says Pastore, only
because "one policeman would say, 'I was with X', then you look at the list
and see that X was not on it". Prosecutors also asked for photographs of the
men on the list. "They were for the most part pictures that not even their
mothers would recognise," Pastore says. In one case, prosecutors obtained a
video of a long-haired, plain-clothed officer, caught in the act of hitting
a protester. But despite his distinctive appearance, and despite there being
only a small number of officers permitted to work in plain clothes, no
police unit could identify him. The prosecutors have accused the police of
building "a wall of omerta [the term for the mafia vow of silence]" around
the case.
By far the biggest single obstacle to the identification of those who
carried out the beatings is that they were all masked and none of them
carried a name or number on their uniforms. Italian law does not require
them to do so. Out of the 28 officers on trial for the Diaz school raid,
just one is accused of inflicting bodily harm.
It can be argued that this is as it should be; that the rank-and-file
officers were carrying out orders from their superiors. But it invites the
question: were those superiors responsible for sanctioning the raid, or were
they in turn carrying out orders given to them by someone higher up? Pastore
says: "It is hard to think that any police, anywhere in the world, can do a
thing like this without political sanction."
Genoa was the high-water mark of a swelling anticapitalist, or social
justice, movement that had inspired mass action around the world. Similar
protests had already shut down a WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999 and forced
the early closure of an IMF meeting in Prague in 2000. Did someone,
somewhere, decide that enough was enough; that extreme measures needed to be
taken?
Even before the raid on the Diaz school, Guardian correspondents in Genoa
for the summit had reported "highly aggressive policing tactics, including
water cannon, tear gas and clubs". Richard Parry, a lawyer representing some
of the Britons, argues that "when they start attacking a peaceful
demonstration with tanks and helicopters, when they start dropping tear gas
on to pensioners, you realise this is a tactic to show that the state, by
which I mean the international world order, is not going to accept any
further interference with its plans."
Silvio Berlusconi's newly elected and assertively rightwing government was
certainly in a mood to flex its muscles. But did it actually plan and
authorise the raid on the Diaz school? Many of the victims believe it did,
and they point to media reports at the time indicating that Berlusconi's
deputy, the former neofascist Gianfranco Fini, was in the police operation
centre."We know that [Fini] was there, but whether it was for a few minutes
or longer, we don't know," says Senator Francesco Martone, a member of the
Green party, in whose constituency the school falls. The Greens and other
opposition politicians wanted a parliamentary commission of inquiry to
establish what political responsibility, if any, there was for the events of
that night. Berlusconi's allies and followers used their outright majority
to block it. Since then, they have made it quite clear what they think.
Ignoring demands from opposition MPs that the police officers on trial
should be suspended until legal proceedings are over, the Berlusconi
government has allowed several to be promoted to key positions. Francesco
Gratteri was made deputy head of the antiterrorist division after the Diaz
raid. General Oronzo Doria's alleged involvement in the abuses at Bolzaneto
did not stand in the way of his promotion from colonel to overall commander
of the penitentiary police.
"G8 represented a break with the past for Italy", says Senator Martone. "It
was a threshold moment in which the Berlusconi government gave an idea of
the stuff of which it is made."
Most Britons would like to believe their own government is made of very
different stuff. However, it was not until five days after the raid that any
of the victims was visited by a British official. "They were violently
assaulted, thrown into prison, mistreated and abused, then thrown out of the
country," Parry says. "Then the British consulate finally caught up with
them, had a few kind words, and that was it."
A spokesperson for the Foreign Office says: "According to Italian law,
detainees have to be seen first by a magistrate before they are allowed
consular access and contact with a legal representative." She adds that the
Italian authorities did not release a list of those detained until July 23.
"As soon as we had that list, we did manage to get access."
However, Matt Foot, another British lawyer who represents two of the
victims, argues that, given the detentions "breached every section of what
your rights are supposed to be when you are arrested in a European country",
this consular effort was not enough. "If it had been their own children,
they would have tried a bit harder," he says.
Moth recalls that, five days after the Diaz raid, he was "put in a holding
cell with the other protesters, and found that US and Spanish consuls had
already been in to see their people".
Peter Hain, then minister for Europe, ventured an opinion that the policing
of Genoa had been "over the top". He was soon put right by his boss.
According to the official account of a lobby briefing given by Tony Blair on
July 23 2001: "It was important to keep a sense of perspective. The Italian
police had had a difficult job to do. The prime minister believed that they
had done that job."
As Blair prepares to host the next G8 summit at Gleneagles in Scotland in
July, the Foreign Office pledges that "lawful protest" at the meeting will
be supported. Those not prepared to do that, it adds, will be policed
"robustly".
The 93 individuals assaulted and mistreated at Genoa three years ago were
peaceful, lawful demonstrators. But, as Parry says, even if those sleeping
at the Diaz building had been Black Bloc protesters, "Was that then a proper
reaction, to go in and nearly kill people by clubbing them until they are
lying in pools of blood?"
Italy's painstaking judicial system means the Diaz and Bolzaneto cases are
unlikely to end soon. Defendants - and, indeed, prosecutors - have a right
to two appeals, so it could be years before final verdicts are given. Like
many of the injured protesters, McQuillan received counselling for months
afterwards and was "traumatised to the core" by what happened to him. He is
not looking forward to testifying at the trial of the police officers
charged with involvement in the Diaz school raid. But, he says, "I think it
is important to go to court and look at these men who tried to kill me."
He and others who still carry the scars of Genoa remain determined to
exercise their right to demonstrate. Doherty has been at all the recent
protests in London against the war in Iraq. "I just felt really strongly
about things, so I made myself go," she says, adding that the feeling that
something terrible is going to happen to her at these demonstrations is
"always there, I am always anxious".
Moth, meanwhile, intends to attend the G8 Gleneagles demonstrations this
July. He says, "I want to make a statement by going, that intimidating
protesters will not silence us."
http://lacyroad.typepad.com/lacy_road/
--
http://lacyroad.typepad.com/lacy_road/
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| | From: | Claudio Bianchini | | Subject: | Re: G8 2001 di Genova | | Date: | Sun, 23 Jan 2005 22:31:16 GMT |
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"Lang ́ Burt" ha scritto nel messaggio
news:35i63mF4ncuamU1@individual.net...
> Sui media inglesi e' ancora di attualita'....
> In Italia cosa se ne dice?
Che ha rotto i coglioni
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| | From: | Lang ́ Burt | | Subject: | Re: G8 2001 di Genova | | Date: | Sun, 23 Jan 2005 23:02:17 -0000 |
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| "Claudio Bianchini" wrote in message
news:UAVId.752796$35.29668922@news4.tin.it...
>
> "Lang ́ Burt" ha scritto nel messaggio
> news:35i63mF4ncuamU1@individual.net...
>
> > Sui media inglesi e' ancora di attualita'....
> > In Italia cosa se ne dice?
>
> Che ha rotto i coglioni
allora hanno ragione sul giornale quando dicono "Che agli italiani la cosa
da fastidio"...giusto?
>
>
>
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| | From: | Stardust® | | Subject: | Re: G8 2001 di Genova | | Date: | Mon, 24 Jan 2005 09:28:07 GMT |
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| "Lang ́ Burt" wrote in message:
> "Claudio Bianchini" wrote in message
> news:UAVId.752796$35.29668922@news4.tin.it...
>>
>> "Lang ́ Burt" ha scritto nel messaggio
>> news:35i63mF4ncuamU1@individual.net...
>>
>> > Sui media inglesi e' ancora di attualita'....
>> > In Italia cosa se ne dice?
>>
>> Che ha rotto i coglioni
>
> allora hanno ragione sul giornale quando dicono "Che agli italiani la
> cosa da fastidio"...giusto?
Sbagliato. Da fastidio ** al governo** italiano.
--
Stardust®
I manifesti di Berlusconi che tappezzano le città
italiane lo fanno sembrare di vent'anni più bugiardo.
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| | From: | Pomero | | Subject: | ME NE FREGO ! | | Date: | Sun, 23 Jan 2005 17:47:07 GMT |
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io sono made Italy
--------------------------------
Inviato via http://arianna.libero.it/usenet/
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| | From: | PeterAngel | | Subject: | Re: ME NE FREGO ! | | Date: | Sun, 23 Jan 2005 21:52:00 +0200 |
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ha scritto nel messaggio
news:82Z50Z155Z229Y1106502426X23158@usenet.libero.it...
>
> io sono made Italy
>
Si vede quanto sei italiano: su quattro parole, due in italiano e due in
americano. Benito, almeno, le parole straniere le aveva proibite, camerata
di serie B...
--
-P-A-
"Credo di appartenere alla categoria degli ap̣ti, ossia di coloro che non la
bevono..."
(I. Montanelli)
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| | From: | Filippo Gastone | | Subject: | Re: G8 2001 di Genova | | Date: | Sun, 23 Jan 2005 19:34:44 +0100 |
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Lang ́ Burt wrote:
> Sui media inglesi e' ancora di attualita'....
> In Italia cosa se ne dice?
che e' colpa dei comunisti...
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