I am constantly amazed how naive these people are about the world. Often
brutal in their naivet� as well. The Anarchists in this article are the
equivalent of Libertarians in America with a violent streak.
While it amazes me that people are not afraid when people have the right to
carry guns, clubs, mace or anything else that is violent. I rewatched a
version of Ivanhoe on the TV yesterday and was reminded how noone had any
power to resist the various Knights who would cross countries hiring out to
the moneyed class in the name of Honor, Duty and Chivalry. We create the
world with the tools and processes that we surround ourselves with. I
still think that the best process doesn't come from religion, books or any
of the high sources but dear old Paul Harvey from the Radio. He said
"Your nose ends where my nose begins."
It would be good for the World Bank, the Trans-National Corporations and the
testosterone laden young Knights to remind themselves that no one gets a
free ride in this world. That trade is not simply about money and that
John Dunn was right when he said that "No man is an Island."
Ultimately all of life is individual. You don't have to work to be alone,
but being a part of an honorable, just and balanced society is not as easy.
You have to work at it and realize that you WILL pay for your
foolishness! -- precisely because without empathy we are less than human and
that is the punishment of being nothing, and with empathy, our very soul
rebels when we mistreat others.
Would you escape the Traumatic Stress caused by war by being immune to it
when immunity means you have no soul? Only soul growth and good works
will work that off. No Messiah's forgiveness will heal the alienation
caused by ignoring paying your debts. Not just the money, but the real
ones. No Messiah has made it OK for you not to do your inner work simply
because they have done it before you. If you study them hard and well,
then you will find that they do not provide an excuse or even forgiveness
but a path where you can learn how they accomplished it themselves. But
you still must walk that path. Loud prayers and swearing allegiance will
do little for people who are unwilling to put feet to the lessons learned
and taught by their Masters.
Two of the Masters of public demonstration were Gandhi and Martin Luther
King Jr. They walked their paths with awareness and acceptance. Why
would anyone who studied their lives be surprised by Genoa? It might have
helped if these folks had gone to Nabucco first and learned what song to
sing while the Italian police beat them about the heads. That would have
meant that they understood Martin Luther King and that great Italian Master
of public disagreement Giuseppe Verdi. They might have lost this battle
but great songs create great Myths and move the souls of your oppressors
especially if they are Italian and you are masterful about it. It also
would have helped if they had gotten a few Opera Singers with great voices
to join them. The Italians are about good voices they way the French are
with you being willing to struggle with their language. Applause is
often an Italian response to disagreement well sung.
REH
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Walker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, August 06, 2001 10:06 AM
Subject: WSJ on Genoa
> Wall Street Journal - August 6, 2001
>
> G-8 Protesters Say They Were Beaten,
> Deprived of Rights by Police in Italy
>
> By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV and IAN JOHNSON
> Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
>
> Just before midnight on July 21, Miriam Heigl, a political-science
> student from Munich, was figuring out a way to get home after three
> days protesting the Group of Eight summit in the Italian city of
> Genoa.
>
> As she scanned train schedules posted in the Armando Diaz school
> complex, some 70 members of an Italian SWAT team smashed through the
> front door, wielding truncheons and shields, their faces covered with
> blue and red handkerchiefs. Ms. Heigl and about 30 others were
> arrested and taken to a police barracks, where the 25-year-old says
> she was made to strip, humiliated and deprived of basic civil
> liberties.
>
> Hospital records show that 61 others in the school fared worse --
> they ended up requiring treatment for injuries. "All I remember is
> being hit on the head with a truncheon right away," says Melanie
> Jonasch, a 28-year-old archeology student from Berlin, "and then I
> woke up here" -- in a Genoese hospital, where she has had surgery for
> a broken mastoid bone behind her left ear.
>
> To millions world-wide, the Genoa G-8 summit two weeks ago will be
> remembered as the most violent in a series of international protests
> against "globalization," a rallying cry first popularized during
> clashes at a 1999 trade meeting in Seattle. As the leaders of eight
> leading industrialized countries met in Italy, TV viewers around the
> world watched police fight citywide battles with anarchist militants
> who set dozens of cars, banks and storefronts afire.
>
> But out of the TV cameras' gaze, another scene of violence was
> unfolding -- on the part of the police. Now, as details of the school
> raid emerge sketchily, it is turning into a political crisis for the
> government of Silvio Berlusconi, the pro-American media mogul who ran
> on a law-and-order platform.
>
> Initially, his government firmly defended police behavior. Mr.
> Berlusconi said the school raid simply proved "collusion" between the
> anarchists and mainstream demonstrators. Communications Minister
> Maurizio Gasparri said it was "a detail" whether "a cop used his
> truncheon four times instead of just three." The police, in a report
> a few hours after the raid, said that the school was a "refuge of the
> extreme fringe of the Black Block," and all those inside were members
> of that violent, anarchist group.
>
> More recently, however, the government said something may have gone
> wrong. The judiciary has launched an inquiry into the use of violence
> during the raid and the treatment of those detained. Parliament has
> formed a separate commission of inquiry. Interior Minister Claudio
> Scajola promised last Wednesday that "if some untoward behavior will
> emerge, and it looks like it is emerging, then it will be severely
> reprimanded." Shortly thereafter, he removed three top police
> officials, saying this would make it easier to investigate.
>
> Part of the pressure on the government is coming from abroad,
> especially Germany. After first helping gather information on 39
> Germans arrested in the sweep at Diaz, Berlin is calling for a fuller
> accounting. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer delivered that
> demand to his Italian counterpart in a telephone call last week.
>
> The official inquiries are just beginning, but interviews with
> numerous participants and witnesses offer the most complete account
> yet of the events at the Diaz school. The accounts of 19 Diaz
> detainees, who were interviewed in five countries, and those of
> doctors, local officials and neighborhood witnesses indicate that
> heavy force was used to arrest demonstrators who, for the most part,
> hadn't been organizing the preceding days' violence but had been
> peacefully protesting. After being denied contact with lawyers and
> families for anywhere from one to four days, most of the people
> detained at Diaz were brought before judges, who released all but one
> and found that the overwhelming majority of the arrests were
> "illegitimate."
>
> A complete response from the police wasn't possible because the raid
> is under investigation. In an interview, Francesco Gratteri, head of
> the national police Central Operative Service, partly defended the
> raid. "One must take into account that the raid was very energetic
> because it was met with an equally energetic resistance," said Mr.
> Gratteri, who stood in the school's courtyard when the police charged
> in. But he added that "evidently something abnormal happened there,
> which is why there is an investigation."
>
> For Ms. Heigl, the events began around 11 p.m. on Saturday, July 21.
> She and her boyfriend, Tobias Hubner, were heading over to the
> Pertini middle school, part of a group of junior and senior high
> schools known as the Diaz school complex.
>
> Ms. Heigl was feeling a sense of relief. On Friday, a militant had
> been shot dead by police. On Saturday afternoon, tear gas had been
> used to disperse a crowd estimated by the interior ministry at
> 200,000. As rumors circulated that the police would raid places where
> the demonstrators camped, such as the stadium where she and Mr.
> Hubner had been sleeping, they decided they wanted a safer place.
> They headed for the school, also open to the demonstrators, because
> it was just across the street from the headquarters and press center
> for the mainstream organizers.
>
> Eager to Get Home
>
> Back in Munich, Ms. Heigl had been engaged in fighting radical
> right-wing groups and won a prestigious national award for her work.
> But this was the first big demonstration she had attended, and she
> was exhausted from the crowds and flood of information. "Everyone was
> unsettled and we just wanted to get home," Ms. Heigl says.
>
> After checking train schedules near a computer area on the ground
> floor, she and Mr. Hubner walked upstairs to visit a friend.
> Suddenly, panic broke loose. From downstairs she heard cries of
> "Police! Police!" as the front door crashed open. Then she heard
> screams and the sounds of police yelling and smashing things. "We had
> total fear," she says.
>
> Panicked, she and her boyfriend looked for an escape. The school was
> under renovation, and scaffolding lined the outer walls. They climbed
> onto it and waited.
>
> Downstairs at the computers, Ms. Jonasch stayed put, figuring that
> her fluency in Italian would help her explain that she wasn't a
> violent militant. She says she had been working as a volunteer at the
> headquarters and hadn't been out to the protests. But she says a
> group of riot police wearing helmets and body armor charged around
> the corner, truncheons flying. She says that besides the initial blow
> to her head, which knocked her out, she was hit on the shoulder and
> buttocks.
>
> The hospital that treated her received dozens of similar cases. Among
> patients still there last week was Daniel Albrecht, a 21-year-old
> cello student from Berlin, who has undergone brain surgery to treat
> cerebral bleeding and says he hears metallic sounds when he speaks.
>
> Another patient was Lena Zuhlke, a 24-year-old student of Indian
> culture at the University of Hamburg, who says she was beaten, thrown
> down two flights of stairs and dragged by the hair. "I didn't see any
> faces. Throughout all this, I couldn't see anything at all above the
> knees," says Ms. Zuhlke, her hand on a jar attached to her chest to
> catch fluid draining from her lungs.
>
> Police, while asserting that all those inside the school were
> anarchist militants, also have said that any protesters who were
> hospitalized were extremists injured during earlier street battles.
> That's an explanation that doctors say doesn't mesh with the cases
> they saw. "There is no doubt that these wounds were fresh. We had to
> sew up many of them on the spot," says Roberto Papparo, head of the
> emergency department at Ospedale San Martino, Genoa's biggest
> hospital. It dealt with more than 50 injured youths from the Diaz
> school shortly after the raid, Dr. Papparo says, adding: "If these
> people weren't brought to the hospital, there is no doubt that some
> of them wouldn't be alive anymore."
>
> A visit to the school several hours after the raid showed pools of
> blood on the floor and walls and several teeth strewn around.
>
> Apart from a handful who escaped, all the demonstrators at Diaz who
> weren't hospitalized -- 32 people -- were rounded up. Ms. Heigl says
> that after she heard the screaming and saw police beating students
> unconscious, she and Mr. Hubner feared they would be in worse danger
> if caught clinging to scaffolding. They climbed into the room, knelt
> on the floor and put their hands on their heads. That didn't prevent
> Mr. Hubner from receiving a few blows to the back and head with a
> truncheon, and a dozen others interviewed say they too were hit while
> in a submissive position.
>
> Ms. Heigl says she wasn't hit. She was taken to the Bolzaneto police
> barracks, which had been turned into a holding center for the G-8
> summit. Situated inside a vast park-like complex of the national
> police VI Mobile Division, the center had a series of unfurnished
> cells that could hold 20 to 30 people each.
>
> Detainees say they had to stand spread-eagle against the wall for two
> to three hours. They add that police walked up and down the line,
> beating those whose hands slipped and whose heads weren't bent down.
> "They kept cursing us and calling us names that I couldn't
> understand," Ms. Heigl says.
>
> The man next to Ms. Heigl was pulled from the wall and sprayed
> directly in the face with tear gas, say Ms. Heigl and a protester
> interviewed separately. He collapsed and was dragged away to be
> showered. He came back later, shivering, saying he had been stripped
> naked and left under the water for half an hour. The group was then
> sent to their cells, and the man had nothing to clothe himself with
> except a plastic shower curtain, according to Ms. Heigl and the other
> person, who both say they received just one cookie each to eat on
> Sunday. At night, they say, they slept on a concrete floor and had
> just three blankets for 30 or so people.
>
> "We had this feeling that everything was completely arbitrary and
> that they had lost their minds," Ms. Heigl says. "But now I see that
> it was all done extremely professionally. They wanted to disorient us
> and break us, as though they were dealing with a gang of hardened
> terrorists."
>
> The prisoners were registered on Monday, and their numbers at
> Bolzaneto police barracks grew as many initially hospitalized were
> sent over. Among them was Sherman Sparks, a 23-year-old from Oregon
> spending a year in Europe. He said in a sworn affidavit that he had
> been kicked in the head and groin during the raid.
>
> He, too, said he had to stand spread-eagle for two hours. He said in
> his affidavit, which he sent to the U.S. Consulate in Milan, that
> people standing next to him had broken arms and legs and that one man
> collapsed, shaking uncontrollably. That incident is related by others
> as well. WhenMr. Sparks couldn't understand commands in Italian, his
> affidavit alleges, he was slapped or beaten or his head was rammed
> into the wall.
>
> Detainees held in different cells and not known to each other paint a
> common picture of the one to three days they spent in the detention
> center: Strip searches were common. Men and women alike were forced
> to use the toilet with police officers, usually men, in attendance.
> Women were denied sanitary napkins, and requests for medical
> attention were often refused. Roll calls went on day and night.
> Detainees were asked to sign documents in Italian that they couldn't
> understand and then sent back to the cell. Some signed, while others
> refused. Phone calls and contact with attorneys weren't permitted.
>
> A Little Better
>
> Relief for Ms. Heigl came on Tuesday, July 24, when she was one of
> the last to be transferred to a normal prison. Before leaving, she
> says, she was ordered to strip naked again while a man in a blue polo
> shirt inspected her. Some others say the same thing happened to them.
> Then they were allowed to dress and eyeglasses taken from some
> detainees were returned. But rings, earrings and money that had been
> confiscated were not returned, Ms. Heigl and some other detainees
> assert.
>
> Many detainees say they felt relieved when they got to the regular
> prison. There, they had cots with sheets, and three meals a day. Ms.
> Heigl received a message from her parents.
>
> They had been contacted by German authorities one day after the raid.
> Her father, Wunibald Heigl, a high-school history teacher in Munich,
> says the German authorities hadn't called to provide help but to find
> out as much as possible about his daughter. "We called the German
> consulate in Milan and were coldly told that everything was going
> according to procedures," Mr. Heigl says. The German foreign ministry
> had no comment on the raid, saying it was a subject of bilateral
> talks.
>
> Detainees say they were given consular access for the first time on
> Wednesday or Thursday, except for U.S. citizens, whose diplomats
> visited them hours after the school raid. The detainees were also
> taken before judges but not allowed to speak to an attorney
> beforehand.
>
> All were charged with "aggravated resistance to arrest" and
> "membership in an armed conspiracy to cause destruction." The raid
> confirmed this membership, the police say. According to their report,
> youths inside tried to block the entry gate and "engaged in scuffles"
> with the agents. One allegedly tried to stab a policeman. At a news
> conference, police displayed a small knife and a half-pierced
> protective jacket but couldn't name the attacker.
>
> Many protesters interviewed agree that some Black Block militants may
> have been hiding inside the school. But they say that if present,
> these militants were a minority and didn't advertise their
> affiliation.
>
> Possible Motive
>
> Local government officials say the center of the Black Block was
> elsewhere. According to Marta Vincenzi, governor of the Genoa
> province, 200 to 300 militants had kicked nonviolent demonstrators
> out of a province-owned gym next to the Martin Luther King High
> School in theevening of July 19, breaking school furniture inside to
> fashion weapons. Ms. Vincenzi and other provincial officials say they
> repeatedly called police with requests to intervene, to no avail. Ms.
> Vincenzi theorizes that in their raid at Diaz, "police tried to
> offset their initial excess of tolerance with an excess of vendetta"
> at the school.
>
> Material seized in the raid suggests the police missed their mark.
> The police report said the school "was a place dedicated to the
> strategic planning and material manufacturing, by all persons present
> inside, of instruments to attack police forces." The chief evidence
> was two wine bottles filled with flammable liquid plus hammers and
> nails taken from the construction site on school premises. In
> addition, the police say they confiscated 17 cameras, 13 swimming
> goggles, 10 Swiss army knives, four spent tear-gas shells, three
> cellular phones, two thermos bottles and a bottle of suntan lotion.
> The charges were presented to a team of judges who decided to free
> all but one detainee.
>
> Ms. Heigl was released on Wednesday evening. The police initially
> decreed that she and the other 77 foreign detainees would be expelled
> from Italy and barred for five years, but Italy later said the ban
> didn't apply to EU citizens. Ms. Heigl's parents, who had driven to
> Genoa to find their daughter, followed the police truck that carried
> her and about 30 others to the Austrian border. There, those released
> were put on a train to Munich.
>
> Ms. Heigl now will resume work on her master's degree. Earlier this
> year, she visited Peru to collect material for a thesis on the
> collapse of democracy under Alberto Fujimori. She says her experience
> in Genoa has given her a new appreciation of the fragility of civil
> liberties: "I realize now I didn't have to go all the way to Peru to
> do my studies."
>
> -- Alessandra Pugliese contributed to this article.
>
> Tom Walker
> Bowen Island, BC
> 604 947 2213
>
