The anti-globalisation protesters who first gained prominence in Seattle are once again depicted as “thugs”, “maniacs” and “football hooligans”. Which must mean, since I left England for the G8 summit in Genoa, held over the weekend of 20-22 July, that football hooligans have become intensely politically engaged people who can authoritatively debate subjects as diverse as the philosophy of Marcuse, the internal workings of the World Bank, organic farming methods, the history of the Italian left, and countless other topics passionately discussed in Genoa.
In reality, protesters are people like Anna, a Dutchwoman in her mid-twenties who worked for several years for Medecins sans Frontieres, a group with a strong unofficial presence in the summit city. It provides humanitarian medical aid in war zones and areas of great poverty. “I can’t just forget the people we turned away,” Anna said to me, “because we didn’t have the drugs to treat them. The drugs exist. They are cheap to make. But the pharmaceutical companies denied them to us. The leaders here support those companies. I’m here for all those people we turned away to die.”
They are people such as Anthony, a recent graduate from a British university, who is horrified that even the minimalist Kyoto agreement has been rejected by the world’s biggest polluter, the United States. They are people like Julia, a Californian teenager, who feels that “my whole brain is just occupied by corporations. I could sing you a thousand jingles for every different kind of product. Who asked if I wanted those tunes in my head?”
And they are people like Carlo Giuliani. Giuliani’s friends say he was sympathetic to the Tute Bianche (known as the White Overalls Movement in the UK). They work in squats in the north of Italy with some of the most dispossessed people in Europe: junkies, the homeless, the socially excluded. They dress in white to symbolise that they speak for “the invisible people”, the people swept under the rug of a wealthy economy and ignored by successive governments. Giuliani was passionate in his desire to help the poor.
On Friday, before the real business of the summit began, the police shot him twice in the head and then ran him over. They killed him, even though he carried no weapon other than a fire extinguisher. When I saw the scene, I couldn’t believe so much blood had poured from just one body. In the city where Christopher Columbus first launched our planet on the path to globalisation, the anti-globalisation movement claimed its first martyr.
No one anticipated the scale of the disaster. Three police forces with no clear division of responsibility – the Polizia, the Carabinieri and the Guardia di Finanza – were spoiling for a fight. Their attitude seemed to be that trouble was inevitable, so they may as well get it over with.
More than once I saw them launch tear-gas canisters against non-aggressive crowds. In the most shocking example, a group of pacifist Christian anti-debt campaigners, accompanied by children, were tear-gassed simply, it seemed, for being there. On another occasion, the police pushed rioters into the path of a demonstration, causing the panic and violence to spread.
Further aggression was reserved, however, for the lull after the storm. It was early Sunday morning. The sun was beginning to rise, the protesters were gradually drifting away and Genovese residents were cautiously returning to the streets.
The council had allowed protesters to use several school buildings for accommodation and meeting points. As we sat there that morning, the mood was reflective. I saw my first spliff of the week. Suddenly, the laughter was drowned by a deafening marching sound. Around 50 police burst in and, swiftly, brutally, began beating people. The first thing I saw was Candice, a plump, shy, pacifist, being kicked against the wall.
I took the classic coward’s route and ran away as fast as I could. When I returned a few hours later I found the school splattered with blood and largely deserted. A few hardened anarchists stood outside, pale and shaking. “They didn’t even pretend to search our bags,” one muttered to me. “They didn’t even pretend to search . . . They just wanted to give us a good kicking.”
Such police actions do not discourage protesters. They radicalise them and push them into the hands of more hardline groups. For example, on the first day of protests, I met Amelia, a Harvard graduate studying for a PhD in Rome. This was her first protest and she was demonstrating for third-world debt relief. “I don’t have any time for violence at all. Violent protest is completely unacceptable, ” she told me then.
Four days later, I saw her on the Piazzale Kennedy lobbing a stone at a police line. She explained: “I can’t believe the police here! They’re murderers! How do you stay peaceful when you’re up against people like this?”
According to his friend Juan, Giuliani felt he couldn’t work within a democracy that had been “bought by corporations”. He pointed to Silvio Berlusconi, “the billionaire who bought Italy”, and George W Bush, for whom “big oil bought the White House even though he lost the election”.
Running parallel to the G8, the Genoa Social Forum (an umbrella group for more than 450 groups protesting in Genoa) organised a counter-summit. Speakers included Jose Bove (the French farmer famed for resisting McDonald’s), Colin Hines (author of Localisation: a manifesto) and a gay Holocaust survivor. From this thoughtful climate, not some primal hoard, people like Giuliani emerged.
The Forum spent months planning the protest and liaising with police. I spoke to the Italian girl on its committee who organised the first day’s protest, a “migrants’ march” calling for the abolition of borders and free movement of people. It was vital, the GSF told demonstrators, that there should be no violence that day, because a significant number of marchers would be illegal immigrants and the police would simply deport them. There was no violence that day, but the GSF was devastated when its plans and strategy crumbled over the following days. Its efforts to advise and guide protesters almost certainly prevented more deaths.
The hardcore “black” anarchists were clearly determined to enter the exclusion zone beyond the steel barricades by any means possible, and turned up with sticks, gas masks and helmets. At the other extreme were the pacifists who rejected any form of violence, even in self-defence. The majority were in the middle. Only about 10,000 of the protesters participated in the direct action on the Friday. The other 140,000 were in Genoa for the migrants’ march on the Thursday and the non-violent protests on the Sunday.
The most likeable group were the pink and silver bloc, who adopted an approach termed “tactical frivolity”. They wanted not to attack the system, but to ridicule it. Many dressed as pink fairies. Several spent the week leading up to the riots building a “revolutionary spaghetti catapult” to propel spaghetti into the red zone, and training “radical cheerleaders” to chant anti-G8 slogans.
Some see this as puerile, but in fact as Guido, an Italian protester, explained, it is a new aesthetic for the left based on the philosophy of Guy Debord. The Situationists, however, provided the best laugh – literally. At exactly the moment the G8 leaders’ photo-call began, many of the protesters stopped for a synchronised laugh at what one described as “the monstrous pomposity of these people”.
Politicians who have issued intemperate attacks on the apathy of the young must think again. One protester from Brighton, England, who brought her five-year-old son with her, said: “What would they rather I did? Would they like me to be like my mates and just go home, crash on the settee in front of Richard and Judy, crack open a few beers, and forget all about the poor?”
It falls to Tony Blair and Clare Short, who have been so loud in their condemnation of the protesters, to draw some of these 150,000 people into the democratic process. So long as our leaders try to crush protesters, rather than reach out to them, they have no option – as the late Carlo Giuliani argued – but to take their fight to the streets.
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