Politivolden i Gøteborg var bare blåbær til sammenligning med hva som har
skjedd i Genoa. Les dette. - Per
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Genoa, early morning 22nd July 2001
GSF media centre
phone: 0039-010-3627149
Please Distribute Widely - an appeal from the activists fighting in Genoa as we
speak
We write from the building of GSF and Indymedia in Genoa after witnessing the
worst human rights violations in the short history of the young movement
against capitalist globalisation. Two people were killed by the police on the
20th, one in Genoa and one at the border, and someone else might have been
killed in the most outrageous display of fascist state brutality that all of us
have seen in our lives, just a few hours ago in front of this building.
This night the police broke into the school Diaz (across the road), one of the
accommodation places of GSF were people were sleeping at that moment, and beat
up everyone to the extent that most of the people could not walk out and had to
be carried in stretchers out of the school. We don't know how many people were
badly injured because we lost count of the amount of stretchers carried out of
the school, but they brought about 30 ambulances for the injured people. The
police also brought at least one body bag outside, maybe two, but we don't know
yet whether there was a corpse inside either or both of them. Everybody was
either arrested or taken to hospital. According to the testimony of one person
who could escape before being arrested, people were lying on the floor
saying 'no violence' when the police broke into the first floor where he was,
and they battered people so badly that one of the officers had to intervene to
stop the massacre. In one of the pictures taken by Indymedia
(http://italy.indymedia.org) you can see a plank of wood with nails covered
with blood lying next to a corner with big patches of blood on the walls.
The police also broke violently into the GSF and Indymedia building at the same
time, but here they only destroyed and stole materials. They did not attack
anyone (although in part of the building it was difficult to breathe due to the
tear gas). Italian parliamentarians were also struck by policemen while they
were trying to enter the school Diaz while the police was beginning to remove
the injured.
On the 20th and the 21st the police terrorism in the streets was unprecedented
in recent Western European history. On the 20th they murdered a young protestor
from Genova, who was shot once in the forehead and once in the cheek, and drove
backwards over his corpse. A young french woman was killed in the Ventemiglia
border on the same day, while the police was preventing her and other people
from entering the country. Police attacked and teargassed all the different
groups that took part in the action. For instance, they threw tear gas from
helicopters into the assembly point of the pacifist march, charged against the
tutte bianche and the Network for Global Rights before they even started their
actions, and injured a still unknown number of people. They deliberately mixed
the different sorts of political expression, trying to create conflicts (for
instance by pushing part of the black block into the pacifist assembly point).
On the 21st they massively attacked part of the demonstration for absolutely no
reason, teargassing the whole area (including the parking lot that served as
the GSF convergence centre and a nearby beach) and some people were forced to
jump into the sea just to escape from them - only to find police boats facing
them in the water. Both on the 20th and the 21st there were riots all day, all
over the city, which were clearly provoked by the police. The forms of
provocation were diverse: the television showed images of a group of people
dressed in black going out of a police van and breaking windows, and the black
block was visibly infiltrated throughout these days. We respectfully ask our
friends from the black block to reflect on the meaning of this fact, not just
for them but for everybody else. This request is not meant to imply that they
should not be present in large collective actions, but merely that we encourage
them to rethink their role and choices in them. One possible way would be to
play a role focused on solidarity and defense of other groups, similar to the
one so successfully carried out by the black block in A16.
People who are taken to the hospitals are arrested immediately after receiving
first aid, unless they are in an extremely bad condition. One person, a member
of a nonviolent group, who was horribly beaten up while sitting on the floor
with his hands up, went through that experience. In the police station he was
repeatedly tortured like everyone else there. The police was hitting the
already wounded areas of his body and battering him for no reason. Another
person who was arrested and released says that they were beating everybody and
forcing them to scream 'viva il duce', which means long live Mussolini.
The police terrorism started well before the actions. The last weeks were
characterised by police searches all over Italy, followed by what everybody
here considers to be a reproduction of the strategy of tension used by the
Italian state in the 70s to crash social movements. Letter bombs were sent (by
whom?) to policemen, the police exploded a car in the centre of Genova because
it was parked in the same place for several days, and they alleged in the media
that bombs had been planted in several places (including one of the
accommodation spaces of the GSF) - all of these in order to create an
atmosphere of paranoia, fears about demonstrators and social terror. They also
arrested several people before the actions, including a particularly brutal
case of a young woman who was kept in isolation for four days for having a van
(which they claimed would be used to break into the red zone) where she kept a
hatchet for camping purposes. The people who were arrested with her report that
they were also tortured physically and psychologically, including forced
exposure to a succession of three posters: a pornographic one, followed by one
of Mussolini and then one of the Nazi Army in action.
We know that many solidarity and denounciation actions have already taken place
all over the world and that many more are being planned (see
http://italy.indymedia.org). We encourage all the groups that have not planned
actions yet to do so, and to prepare for sustained actions to continue until
those responsible for these outrageous human rights abuses pay the full price
for their actions. We suggest to these groups that their minimum demand would
be the resignation of the Berlusconi government. There is a list of Italian
embassies at http://www.ethoseurope.org/ethos/embassies.nsf/ (go down to the
link Embassies of Italy).
We think that we need to turn this situation into a serious international
problem for the Berlusconi and the other G8 governements, not just due to a
basic sense of justice but also because we feel that the survival of the
movement and of many of us might depend on it. This brutality shows the actual
panic with which the rich and powerful are reacting to the clear fact that the
world is beginning to listen to us. Seeing that they can no longer write us off
as a marginal, temporary phenomenon, they are now removing all masks of
ostensible democracy and showing their real face - one of oppression, violence
and terrorism.
Por todos nuestros muertos, ni un minuto de silencio. Toda una vida de lucha.
To honor our dead, not a minute of silence. A whole life of struggle.
_______________________________________________
Imc-europe mailing list
Imc-europe@lists.indymedia.org
http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/imc-europe
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 03-08-01 MET DST