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State terrorism in Genoa
-- International action appeal
by Genoa, early morning 22nd July 2001 8:30am Sun Jul 22 '01
(Modified on 11:13am Sun Jul 22 '01)
address: Genoa 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,
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