It’s that time again: an international summit begins, and so, in an otherwise democratic country, a police state is erected overnight in order to terrorise peaceful protesters. If you think this is hyperbole, you should have seen Genoa in the days before the weekend summit.
Police were so numerous that they outnumbered protesters. They lolled aggressively on every street corner, fingering their handguns and scowling at anybody under the age of 30 who passed by. They erected huge barriers around the centre of town to maintain a “red zone” to prevent protesters from being seen, heard or in any way inconveniencing the G8 leaders. The stadium housing large numbers of protesters was ransacked by Italian police, who pushed demonstrators out of the way and provided no legal documents to justify their intrusion.
I have chatted with a few police officers. None of the 12 officers I spoke to could tell me what “globalisation” was; several could not name the British Prime Minister. Why did they think the protesters were here? What did they want? Invariably, the same answer came: “They want anarchy.” (In fact, only about 10 per cent of the protesters are anarchists.) “They want to smash things. They are mad. They want a fight.”
I do not share the protesters’ aims. I think they are often wrong-headed and foolish, but nobody deserves to be indiscriminately beaten because of their political beliefs. The extent of police violence at these protests was driven home to me when a Canadian film-maker, who asked not to be named, handed me a videotape that he described as “explosive”. After much haggling with the hotel-owner to persuade him to let me use his VCR, I finally viewed its contents, compiled from recordings of protests in Seattle, Quebec City, and Gothenburg.
I should stress that what I saw was partial and decontextualised, and it may be faked. But if it is, the protesters have gone to great lengths in their subterfuge: faking riots, dressing as police officers, hiring horses, releasing tear-gas cannisters. If it was real, it is scandalous.
People clearly wearing doctors’ and nurses’ uniforms, clearly tending to the sick, are tear-gassed. The clip goes dead. Another clip. Police use tear gas as a smokescreen to beat protesters. The camera is disturbed, and goes dead. Another clip. A man attending the protests at the recent Salzburg World Economic Forum is strangled as he begs for mercy, until eventually he passes out. The clips go on, and on, for 90 minutes.
This video, and the behaviour of the police, shows is that we are seeing a creeping but quite obvious criminalisation of the right to protest. Protesters should not have the right to trash shops and attack police; this needs to be stopped. But the police do not have the right to use the actions of a few protesters who engage in violence as a pretext to beat and maim anybody who happens to be on the scene, including peaceful protesters. They do not have a right to “restrain” people by strangling them and breaking their bones.
The policing of anti-globalisation protests must become an urgent matter of public debate. The attempt to close down such a debate by labelling the protesters as akin to football hooligans, or an “anarchists’ travelling circus” (in Tony Blair’s words), is disgraceful.
Ultimately, we must adopt a much lighter approach to policing these summits. A few smashed windows is a small price to pay for preserving the democratic right to protest.
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