News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
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[Regarding the following: "The police poured into the Diaz Pertini
school. Some of them were shouting 'Black Bloc! We're going to kill
you,' but if they genuinely believed they were confronting the notorious
Black Bloc of anarchists who had caused violent mayhem in parts of the
city during demonstrations earlier in the day, they were mistaken. The
school had been provided by the Genoa city council as a base for
demonstrators who had nothing to do with the anarchists: they had even
posted guards to make sure that none of them came in." Readers should
bear in mind that this "Black Bloc" was a phony Black Bloc consisting of
Neo-Nazi Skinheads, not anarchists. It was known that many of these
fascists were headed to Genoa, but while many legitimate protesters were
stopped at the border, they were permitted to enter. Far from acting
against them, the police were seen having friendly conversations with
them on the street.--DC]
http://tinyurl.com/622kxk
The bloody battle of Genoa
When 200,000 anti-globalisation protesters converged on the Italian city
hosting the G8 summit in 2001, all but a handful came to demonstrate
peacefully. Instead, many were beaten to a pulp by seemingly
out-of-control riot police. But was there something more sinister at
play? And will the victims ever see proper justice?
Nick Davies re****ts
It was just before midnight when the first police officer hit Mark
Covell, swiping his truncheon down on his left shoulder. Covell did his
best to yell out in Italian that he was a journalist but, within
seconds, he was surrounded by riot-squad officers thra****ng him with
their sticks. For a while, he managed to stay on his feet but then a
baton blow to the knee sent him cra****ng to the pavement.
Lying on his face in the dark, bruised and scared, he was aware of
police all around him, massing to attack the Diaz Pertini school
building where 93 young demonstrators were bedding down on the floor for
the night. Covell's best hope was that they would break through the
chain around the front gates without paying him any more attention. If
that happened, he could get up and limp across the street to the safety
of the Indymedia centre, where he had spent the past three days filing
re****ts on the G8 summit and on its violent policing.
It was at that moment that a police officer sauntered over to him and
kicked him in the chest with such force that the entire lefthand side of
his rib cage caved in, breaking half-a-dozen ribs whose splintered ends
then shredded the membrane of his left lung. Covell, who is 5ft 8in and
weighs less than eight stone, was lifted off the pavement and sent
flying into the street. He heard the policeman laugh. The thought formed
in Covell's mind: "I'm not going to make it."
The riot squad were still struggling with the gate, so a group of
officers occupied the time by strolling over to use Covell as a
football. This bout of kicking broke his left hand and damaged his
spine. From somewhere behind him, Covell heard an officer shout that
this was enough -- "Basta! Basta!" -- and he felt his body being dragged
back on to the pavement.
Now, an armoured police van broke through the school gates and 150
police officers, most wearing crash helmets and carrying truncheons and
****elds, poured into the defenceless building. Two officers stopped to
deal with Covell: one cracked him round the head with his baton; the
other kicked him several times in the mouth, knocking out a dozen teeth.
Covell passed out.
There are several good reasons why we should not forget what happened to
Covell, then aged 33, that night in Genoa. The first is that he was only
the beginning. By midnight on July 21 2001, those police officers were
swarming through all four floors of the Diaz Pertini building,
dispensing their special kind of discipline to its occupants, reducing
the make****ft dormitories to what one officer later described as "a
Mexican butcher's shop". They and their colleagues then illegally
incarcerated their victims in a detention centre, which became a place
of dark terror.
The second is that, seven years later, Covell and his fellow victims are
still waiting for justice. On Monday, 15 police, prison guards and
prison medics finally were convicted for their part in the violence --
although it emerged yesterday that none of them would actually serve
prison terms. In Italy, defendants don't go to jail until they have
exhausted the appeals process; and in this case, the convictions and
sentences will be wiped out by a statute of limitations next year.
Meanwhile, the politicians who were responsible for the police, prison
guards and prison medics have never had to explain themselves.
Fundamental questions about why this happened remain unanswered -- and
they hint at the third and most im****tant reason for remembering Genoa.
This is not simply the story of law officers running riot, but of
something uglier and more worrying beneath the surface.
The fact that this story can be told at all is testament to seven years
of hard work, led by a dedicated and courageous public prosecutor,
Emilio Zucca. Helped by Covell as well as his own staff, Zucca has
gathered hundreds of witness statements and analysed 5,000 hours of
video as well as thousands of photographs. Pieced together, they tell an
irrefutable tale, which began to unfold as Covell lay bleeding on the
ground.
The police poured into the Diaz Pertini school. Some of them were
shouting "Black Bloc! We're going to kill you," but if they genuinely
believed they were confronting the notorious Black Bloc of anarchists
who had caused violent mayhem in parts of the city during demonstrations
earlier in the day, they were mistaken. The school had been provided by
the Genoa city council as a base for demonstrators who had nothing to do
with the anarchists: they had even posted guards to make sure that none
of them came in.
One of the first to see the riot squad bursting in was Michael Gieser, a
35-year-old Belgian economist, who subsequently described how he had
just changed into his pyjamas and was queuing for the bathroom with his
toothbrush in his hand when the raid began. Gieser believes in the power
of dialogue and, at first, he walked towards them saying, "We need to
talk." He saw the padded jackets, the riot clubs, the helmets and the
bandanas concealing the policemen's faces, changed his mind and ran up
the stairs to escape.
Others were slower. They were still in their sleeping bags. A group of
10 Spanish friends in the middle of the hall woke up to find themselves
being battered with truncheons. They raised their hands in surrender.
More officers piled in to beat their heads, cutting and bruising and
breaking limbs, including the arm of a 65-year-old woman. At the side of
the room, several young people were sitting at computers, sending emails
home. One of them was Melanie Jonasch, a 28-year-old archaeology student
from Berlin, who had volunteered to help out in the building and had not
even been on a demonstration.
She still cannot remember what happened. But numerous other witnesses
have described how officers set upon her, beating her head so hard with
their sticks that she rapidly lost consciousness. When she fell to the
ground, officers circled her, beating and kicking her limp body, banging
her head against a near-by cupboard, leaving her finally in a pool of
blood. Katherina Ottoway, who saw this happen, recalled: "She was
trembling all over. Her eyes were open but upturned. I thought she was
dying, that she could not survive this."
None of those who stayed on the ground floor escaped injury. As Zucca
later put it in his prosecution re****t: "In the space of a few minutes,
all the occupants on the ground floor had been reduced to complete
helplessness, the groans of the wounded mingling with the sound of calls
for an ambulance." In their fear, some victims lost control of their
bowels. Then the officers of the law moved up the stairs. In the
first-floor corridor they found a small group, including Gieser, still
clutching his toothbrush: "Someone suggested lying down, to show there
was no resistance. So I did. The police arrived and began beating us,
one by one. I protected my head with my hands. I thought, 'I must
survive.' People were shouting, 'Please stop.' I said the same thing ...
It made me think of a ****k butchery. We were being treated like animals,
like pigs."
Officers broke down doors to the rooms leading off the corridors. In
one, they found Dan McQuillan and Norman Blair, who had flown in from
Stansted to show their sup****t for, as McQuillan put it, "a free and
equal society with people living in harmony with each other". The two
Englishmen and their friend from New Zealand, Sam Buchanan, had heard
the police attack on the ground floor and had tried to hide their bags
and themselves under some tables in the corner of the dark room. A dozen
officers broke in, caught them in a spotlight and, even as McQuillan
stood up with his hands raised saying, "Take it easy, take it easy,"
they battered them into submission, inflicting numerous cuts and bruises
and breaking McQuillan's wrist. Norman Blair recalled: "I could feel the
venom and hatred from them."
Gieser was out in the corridor: "The scene around me was covered in
blood, everywhere. A policeman shouted 'Basta!'. This word was like a
window of hope. I understood it meant 'enough'. And yet they didn't
stop. They continued with pleasure. In the end, they did stop, but it
was like taking a toy away from a child, against their will."
By now, there were police officers on all four floors of the building,
kicking and battering. Several victims describe a sort of system to the
violence, with each officer beating each person he came across, then
moving on to the next victim while his colleague moved up to continue
beating the first. It seemed im****tant that everybody must be hurt.
Nicola Doherty, 26, a care worker from London, later described how her
partner, Richard Moth, lay across her to protect her: "I could just hear
blow after blow on his body. The police were also leaning over Rich so
they could hit the parts of my body which were exposed." She tried to
cover her head with her arm: they broke her wrist.
In one corridor, they ordered a group of young men and women to kneel,
the easier to batter them around the head and shoulders. This was where
Daniel Albrecht, a 21-year-old cello student from Berlin, had his head
beaten so badly that he needed surgery to stop bleeding in his brain.
Around the building, officers flipped their batons around, gripping the
far end and using the right-angled handle as a hammer.
And in among this relentless violence, there were moments when the
police preferred humiliation: the officer who stood spread-legged in
front of a kneeling and injured woman, grabbed his groin and thrust it
into her face before turning to do the same to Daniel Albrecht kneeling
beside her; the officer who paused amid the beatings and took a knife to
cut off hair from his victims, including Nicola Doherty; the constant
shouting of insults; the officer who asked a group if they were OK and
who reacted to the one who said "No" by handing out an extra beating.
A few escaped, at least for a while. Karl Boro made it up on to the roof
but then made the mistake of coming back into the building, where he was
treated to heavy bruising to his arms and legs, a fractured skull, and
bleeding in his chest cavity. Jaraslaw Engel, from Poland, managed to
use builders' scaffolding to get out of the school, but he was caught in
the street by some police drivers who smashed him over the head, laid
him on the ground and stood over him smoking while his blood ran out
across the Tarmac.
Two of the last to be caught were a pair of German students, Lena
Zuhlke, 24, and her partner Niels Martensen. They had hidden in a
cleaners' cupboard on the top floor. They heard the police approaching,
drumming their batons against the walls of the stairs. The cupboard door
came open, Martensen was dragged out and beaten by a dozen officers
standing in a semicircle around him. Zuhlke ran across the corridor and
hid in the loo. Police officers saw her and followed her and dragged her
out by her dreadlocks.
In the corridor, they set about her like dogs on a rabbit. She was
beaten around the head then kicked from all sides on the floor, where
she felt her rib cage collapsing. She was hauled up against the wall
where one officer kneed her in the groin while others carried on la****ng
her with their batons. She slid down the wall and they hit her more on
the ground: "They seemed to be enjoying themselves and, when I cried out
in pain, it seemed to give them even more pleasure."
Police officers found a fire extinguisher and squirted its foam into
Martensen's wounds. His partner was dragged by her hair and tossed down
the stairs head-first. Eventually, they dragged Zuhlke into the
ground-floor hall, where they had gathered dozens of prisoners from all
over the building in a mess of blood and excrement. They threw her on
top of two other people. They were not moving, and Zuhlke drowsily asked
them if they were alive. They did not reply, and she lay there on her
back, unable to move her right arm, unable to stop her left arm and her
legs twitching, blood seeping out of her head wounds. A group of police
officers walked by, and each one lifted the bandana which concealed his
identity, leaned down and spat on her face.
Why would law officers behave with such contempt for the law? The simple
answer may be the one which was soon being chanted outside the school
building by sympathetic demonstrators who chose a word which they knew
the police would understand: "Bastardi! Bastardi!" But something else
was happening here -- something that emerged more clearly over the next
few days.
Covell and dozens of other victims of the raid were taken to the San
Martino hospital, where police officers walked up and down the
corridors, slapping their clubs into the palms of their hands, ordering
the injured not to move around or look out of the window, keeping
handcuffs on many of them and then, often with injuries still untended,
****pping them across the city to join scores of others, from the Diaz
school and from the street demonstrations, detained at the detention
centre in the city's Bolzaneto district.
The signs of something uglier here were apparent first in superficial
ways. Some officers had traditional fascist songs as ringtones on their
mobile phones and talked enthusiastically about Mussolini and Pinochet.
Repeatedly, they ordered prisoners to say "Viva il duce." Sometimes,
they used threats to force them to sing fascist songs: "Un, due, tre.
Viva Pinochet!"
The 222 people who were held at Bolzaneto were treated to a regime later
described by public prosecutors as torture. On arrival, they were marked
with felt-tip crosses on each cheek, and many were forced to walk
between two parallel lines of officers who kicked and beat them. Most
were herded into large cells, holding up to 30 people. Here, they were
forced to stand for long periods, facing the wall with their hands up
high and their legs spread. Those who failed to hold the position were
shouted at, slapped and beaten. Mohammed Tabach has an artificial leg
and, unable to hold the stress position, collapsed and was rewarded with
two bursts of pepper spray in his face and, later, a particularly savage
beating. Norman Blair later recalled standing like this and a guard
asking him "Who is your government?" "The person before me had answered
'Polizei', so I said the same. I was afraid of being beaten."
Stefan Bauer dared to answer back: when a German-speaking guard asked
where he was from, he said he was from the European Union and he had the
right to go where he wanted. He was hauled out, beaten, given a face
full of pepper spray, stripped ****d and put under a cold shower. His
clothes were taken away and he was returned to the freezing cell wearing
only a flimsy hospital gown.
****vering on the cold marble floors of the cells, the detainees were
given few or no blankets, kept awake by guards, given little or no food
and denied their statutory right to make phone calls and see a lawyer.
They could hear crying and screaming from other cells.
Men and women with dreadlocks had their hair roughly cut off to the
scalp. Marco Bistacchia was taken to an office, stripped ****d, made to
get down on all fours and told to bark like a dog and to shout "Viva la
polizia Italiana!" He was sobbing too much to obey. An unnamed officer
told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that he had seen brother
officers urinating on prisoners and beating them for refusing to sing
Faccetta Nera, a Mussolini-era fascist song.
Ester Percivati, a young Turkish woman, recalled guards calling her a
whore as she was marched to the toilet, where a woman officer forced her
head down into the bowl and a male jeered "Nice arse! Would you like a
truncheon up it?" Several women re****ted threats of rape, anal and
vaginal.
Even the infirmary was dangerous. Richard Moth, covered in cuts and
bruises after lying on top of his partner, was given stitches in his
head and legs without anaesthetic -- "an extremely painful and
disturbing experience. I had to be held down." Prison medical staff were
among those convicted of abuse on Monday.
All agree that this was not an attempt to get the detainees to talk,
simply an exercise in creating fear. And it worked. In statements,
prisoners later described their feeling of helplessness, of being cut
off from the rest of the world in a place where there was no law and no
rules. Indeed, the police forced their captives to sign statements,
waiving all their legal rights. One man, David Larroquelle, testified
that he refused and had three of his ribs broken. Percivati also refused
and her face was slammed into the office wall, breaking her gl***** and
making her nose bleed.
The outside world was treated to some severely distorted accounts of all
this. Lying in San Martino hospital the day after his beating, Covell
came round to find his shoulder being shaken by a woman who, he
understood, was from the British embassy. It was only when the man with
her started taking photographs that he realised she was a re****ter, from
the Daily Mail. Its front page the next day ran an entirely false re****t
describing him as having helped mastermind the riots. (Four long years
later, the Mail eventually apologised and paid Covell damages for
invasion of privacy.)
While his citizens were being beaten and tormented in illegal detention,
spokesmen for the then prime minister, Tony Blair, declared: "The
Italian police had a difficult job to do. The prime minister believes
that they did that job."
The Italian police themselves fed the media with a rich diet of
falsehood. Even as the bloody bodies were being carried out of the Diaz
Pertini building on stretchers, police were telling re****ters that the
ambulances lined up in the street were nothing to do with the raid,
and/or that the very obviously fresh injuries were old, and that the
building had been full of violent extremists who had attacked officers.
The next day, senior officers held a press conference at which they
announced that everybody in the building would be charged with
aggressive resistance to arrest and conspiracy to cause destruction. In
the event, the Italian courts dismissed every single attempted charge
against every single person. That included Covell. Police attempts to
charge him with a string of very serious offences were described by the
public prosecutor, Enrico Zucca, as "grotesque".
At the same press conference, police displayed an array of what they
described as weaponry. This included crowbars, hammers and nails which
they themselves had taken from a builder's store next to the school;
aluminium rucksack frames, which they presented as offensive weapons; 17
cameras; 13 pairs of swimming goggles; 10 pen-knives; and a bottle of
sun-tan lotion. They also displayed two Molotov cocktails which, Zucca
later concluded, had been found by police earlier in the day in another
part of the city and planted in the Diaz Pertini building as the raid
ended.
This public dishonesty was part of a wider effort to cover up what had
happened. On the night of the raid, a force of 59 police entered the
building opposite the Diaz Pertini, where Covell and others had been
running their Indymedia centre and where, crucially, a group of lawyers
had been based, gathering evidence about police attacks on the earlier
demonstrations. Officers went into the lawyers' room, threatened the
occupants, smashed their computers and seized hard drives. They also
removed anything containing photographs or video tape.
With the courts refusing to charge the detainees, the police secured an
order to de****t all of them from the country, banning them from
returning for five years. Thus, the witnesses were removed from the
scene. Like the attempted charges, all the de****tation orders were
subsequently dismissed as illegal by the courts.
Zucca then fought his way through years of denial and obfuscation. In
his formal re****t, he recorded that all the senior officers involved
were denying playing any part: "Not a single official has confessed to
holding a substantial command role in any aspects of the operation." One
senior officer who was videoed at the scene explained that he was off
duty and had just turned up to make sure his men were not being injured.
Police statements were themselves changeable and contradictory, and were
overwhelmingly contradicted by the evidence of victims and numerous
videos: "Not a single one of the 150 officers re****tedly present has
provided precise information regarding an individual episode."
Without Zucca, without the robust stance of the Italian courts, without
Covell's intensive work assembling video records of the Diaz raid, the
police might well have evaded responsibility and secured false charges
and prison sentences against scores of their victims. Apart from the
Bolzaneto trial which finished on Monday, 28 other officers, some very
senior, are on trial for their part in the Diaz raid. And yet, justice
has been compromised.
No Italian politician has been brought to book, in spite of the strong
suggestion that the police acted as though somebody had promised them
impunity. One minister visited Bolzaneto while the detainees were being
mistreated and apparently saw nothing or, at least, saw nothing he
thought he should stop. Another, Gianfranco Fini, former national
secretary of the neo-fascist MSI party and the then deputy prime
minister, was -- according to media re****ts at the time -- in police
headquarters. He has never been required to explain what orders he gave.
Most of the several hundred law officers involved in Diaz and Bolzaneto
have escaped without any discipline or criminal charge. None has been
suspended; some have been promoted. None of the officers who were tried
over Bolzaneto has been charged with torture -- Italian law does not
recognise the offence. Some senior officers who were originally going to
be charged over the Diaz raid escaped trial because Zucca was simply
unable to prove that a chain of command existed. Even now, the trial of
the 28 officers who have been charged is in jeopardy because the prime
minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is pu****ng through legislation to delay all
trials dealing with events that occurred before June 2002. Nobody has
been charged with the violence inflicted on Covell. And as one of the
victims' lawyers, Massimo Pastore, put it: "Nobody wants to listen to
what this story has to say."
That is about fascism. There are plenty of rumours that the police and
carabinieri and prison staff belonged to fascist groups, but no evidence
to sup****t that. Pastore argues that that misses the bigger point: "It
is not just a matter of a few drunken fascists. This is mass behaviour
by the police. No one said 'No.' This is a culture of fascism." At its
heart, this involved what Zucca described in his re****t as "a situation
in which every rule of law appears to have been suspended."
Fifty-two days after the attack on the Diaz school, 19 men used planes
full of passengers as flying bombs and ****fted the bedrock of
assumptions on which western democracies had based their business. Since
then, politicians who would never describe themselves as fascists have
allowed the mass tapping of telephones and monitoring of emails,
detention without trial, systematic torture, the calibrated drowning of
detainees, unlimited house arrest and the targeted killing of suspects,
while the procedure of extradition has been replaced by "extraordinary
rendition". This isn't fascism with jack-booted dictators with foam on
their lips. It's the pragmatism of nicely turned-out politicians. But
the result looks very similar. Genoa tells us that when the state feels
threatened, the rule of law can be suspended. Anywhere.tT
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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