On Fri, 27 Jul 2001, Jon Hareide Aarbakke wrote:
> Sett fra et fugleperspektiv: hvis man tager 100.000 demonstranter, herunder
> div som har lyst til å smadre & slåss, og en sikkerhetsstyrke som skal passe
> på bl.a. den amerikanske presidenten, så skal det mye til at alt gå stille og
> fredelig for seg.
Det hjelper lite at politiet aktivt provoserte fram kamper med
demonstranter. Det er temmelig utrolig at de deretter sendte paramilitære
inn blant demonstrantene med skarpladde våpen. Anklagen mot gutten som
skjøt er en avsporing, de virkelig ansvarlige sitter høyere opp i
systemet.
Les bla BBC-artikkelen nedenfor.
Mvh,
Per
The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem
in a way that will allow a solution. -- Bertrand Russell
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Italy's strategy of tension
Special report: globalisation
Vittorio Longhi
Friday July 27, 2001
The Guardian
That night, under helicopter searchlights, in front of the special police
special units, among the screams of young men and women, we were not in
Genoa, nor in Italy, but in another place and another time - it all looked
like an attempt to substitute the current order with a police state." That
is how a group of criminal and civil lawyers from Milan, who witnessed
last weekend's events in Genoa, have reacted to the authorities' actions,
accusing them of lawless suspensions of the basic liberties of those
demonstrators attacked or arrested in the G8 protests.
Along with the indiscriminate beatings, hundreds were deprived of their
rights of access to lawyers and contact with their families. Yesterday 220
people remained under arrest, including 28 foreigners, while 90 people
were released, without any explanation or excuse. The opposition was,
meanwhile, up in arms in parliament, demanding an investigation into the
widespread police abuses in Genoa.
There is no doubt that the Italian government broke some fundamental laws
of the penal code. What happened in Genoa during the G8 summit has no
precedent in Italy since the left-right street confrontations and the
terrorism in the 1970s. But the difference between the hundreds of
peaceful demonstrators and journalists beaten up in that school on
Saturday night, and the ghosts of the Red Brigades or the fascist terror
gangs of that time, should have been evident enough to the police and
carabinieri.
Part of the Interior Ministry, the Italian police seem to have a power
matched by no other European police, while the carabinieri are a military
force and have once again demonstrated that they act like an army. Add to
that a government whose ideology makes no allowance for legitimate
peaceful protests or the damage that a culture of repression will do to
Italy. Prime Minister Berlusconi and his post-fascist deputy, Gianfranco
Fini, both visited Genoa in the run-up to the summit, with Fini boasting
that he had personally finalised the security plans.
How different things would have been if the centre-left had still been in
power is hard to say. Certainly, the magistrates would have been less
marginalised and could have properly investigated what took place. But
Berlusconi's unwavering support for the police is as well known as his
aversion to magistrates. During the Tangentopoli bribery scandals of the
early 1990s and other investigations into his business affairs, Berlusconi
protested loudly about violations of human rights. But no one from his
party, Forza Italia, has had a single word to say on the repressive
violence in Genoa.
The centre-left's no-confidence motion in the interior minister, Claudio
Scajola, will inevitably be voted down. What Scajola fears, instead, is a
public investigation into both the police assaults and the connivance of
the police with violent demonstrators. It is not clear yet how black bloc
rioters could hang around the town undisturbed, when police already knew
who and where they were. "The black blocs were an instrument of the
police, it was a clear strategy," Luca Casarini, one of the leaders of the
Tute Bianche (White Overalls) activist group, said yesterday. "I'm not
saying everything was organised and planned in advance. But they used and
helped hooliganism to justify the crackdown. Now the government feels free
to attack us."
Everyone is wary of talking about a new "strategy of tension" - the name
given to the collusion between parts of the Italian state, fascist
terrorists and provocateurs in the 1970s - but Genoa social forum lawyers
say they have damning and incontrovertible evidence of links between
hooligans and police. Meanwhile, forum spokesman Vittorio Agnoletto has
been sacked from his job as a consultant on drugs and youth problems at
the labour ministry. Agnoletto is a doctor and president of Lila, the
Italian league which helps terminal HIV patients. The labour minister,
Maurizio Gasparri, another post-fascist, justified the sacking on the
grounds that that Mr Agnoletto had spoken against the government in Genoa.
The Genoa events have at least had the effect of helping the Italian left
to regroup. The leaders of the main centre-left party, the Left Democrats,
kept away from the protests and none of their leaders marched with the
peaceful army of 200,000 people, but they drew the line at Berlusconi's
attempt to justify police violence, which reached its climax with the
manslaughter of a 23-year-old boy. Now, in the aftermath, they are facing
up to the fact that politics has gone back on the streets and all these
people need to be represented. The possibility of a dialogue or even a
loose alliance with those campaigning against neo-liberal globalisation
has opened up.
Vittorio Longhi is an Italian journalist based in Rome.
longhiv@tiscalinet.it
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