For Workers Strikes to Protest Deadly Police State of Siege!
Berlusconi and the G-8: Imperialist Butchers!
The following statement was issued by our comrades in the Lega Trotskista
d'Italia, section of the International Communist League (Fourth
Internationalist).
20 JULY--The imperialist rulers gathered in Genoa to intensify exploitation
and starvation of the working masses were thirsty for blood, and they got
it. Two anti-globalization protesters were deliberately killed today by
paramilitary police in Genoa. One young Italian man, Carlo Giuliani, was
shot in the head by the cops, who then drove a police van over his lifeless
body. According to French and Austrian media, the second was a young woman
killed by a gunshot wound. The imperialists prepared and provoked this
lethal terror. As a veteran of the Nazi occupation of Genoa stated last
week, "They have turned the city into a war zone. I lived here under the
Nazis as a young resistance fighter... but there was never this oppressive
militarized situation." The G-8 imperialist rulers must be hit where they
live--in their profit ledgers. The Lega Trotskista d'Italia says: We need
powerful workers protest strikes in Italy and beyond against the bloody
state repression.
In the weeks leading up to G-8 in Genoa, the right-wing government of
Silvio Berlusconi ordered that 200 body bags and 500 square meters of
freezer space be set aside for corpses. Having killed two youth, the police
continue to rampage through the ghettos set aside as penned protest areas,
arresting scores at random. Civil liberties have been suspended, those
arrested are being denied access to lawyers; political police (the hated
"digos") prowl hospitals to throw the wounded into jail. Surface-to-air
missile batteries have been installed at the airport, warships and
submarines patrol the coast, and the city has been turned into a medieval
fortress with twelve-foot high barricades: some "free world"! The Italian
borders have been sealed off to thousands seeking to join the protests in
Genoa. A boatload of Greek protesters was turned back in Ancona by police
who declared them persona non grata and clubbed them back onto the ship.
Trainloads of protesters and even bicyclists have been turned back at
border crossings. This is the treatment routinely meted out to immigrants
and refugees from the imperialists' bloody war in the Balkans and from
their impoverishment of Asia and Africa.
Preparations for capitalist "law and order" in Genoa began last month in
Goteborg, when Swedish cops fired live ammunition into a crowd of
demonstrators, critically wounding a 20-year-old man who was shot in the
back as he tried to escape the police onslaught. British Labour prime
minister Tony Blair urged more murderous repression in Genoa, ranting that
Europe's rulers had been "far too apologetic" to anti-globalization
protesters and needed to be "a lot more robust." And let's not forget that
it was the popular front government of D'Alema's Democratici di Sinistra
which organized the G8 gathering in the first place to boost Italy's
standing among its imperialist allies. The DS briefly posed in favor of the
protests, but when state terror was unleashed they came out against the
protesters and banned their own youth from boarding buses to Genoa.
Rifondazione leader Bertinotti echoed this, fulminating that the cops had
not taken sufficient action against the anarchists. With such statements
the DS and RC expose their appetite to administer Italian capitalist rule
in a new popular front government of anti-working class austerity,
anti-immigrant bigotry and attacks on women's rights.
Echoing the social-democratic rulers of capitalist Europe are the fake
leftists who campaigned and voted for them. They played into the state's
murderous plans by isolating the militants. In the immediate aftermath of
the shootings last month in Goteborg, ATTAC spokesman Susan George alibied
the state terrorists and blamed the victims for their own repression,
saying she was "sick and tired of these groups...who turn up at demos like
venomous flowers in order to cause destruction." Alain Krivine, leader of
the French Ligue Comuniste Revolutionnaire and member of the European
Parliament chimed in that he was "sickened that a minority could impose its
methods of struggle on the majority, with all its media consequences and
the increasing threats of repression facing future demonstrations like
those in Genoa." With such statements these miserable misleaders prove
their loyalty to the capitalist class and its police assassins and expose
their attacks on "globalization" as rooted in social chauvinist, reformist
support to their "own" bourgeoisies. Their "movement" aims not to overthrow
capitalism but to mask its monstrous reality.
While fake "leftists" flinch in the face of the state crackdown in Genoa
and criminally denounce the anarchists, we Trotskyists stand in full
solidarity with the anarchist youth and other protesters against the G8 in
Genoa and against state repression, regardless of our political
differences. In shooting down the two young protesters, the state is taking
aim at the workers of Europe and the rest of the world, an ominous warning
against any proletarian challenge to the imperialists' starvation austerity
and crushing exploitation. Only hours before the police killings, 15,000
workers organized by the COBAS rank-and-file unions marched through the
streets as part of a political general strike against the G-8. A chief
order of business at the G-8 conference was to order Argentina's government
to push ahead with wage cuts and starvation measures which have already
sparked massive workers' struggles. The capitalist rulers are deaf to
appeals to act more "humanely" in the "Third World." But a workers strike
against the G-8 and the cop terror would open the door to mobilizing
broader class struggle against the capitalists, the only road to combatting
and sweeping away the imperialist exploiters.
Drop the charges against all arrested protesters!
Down with the police state of siege in Genoa!
For Massive Labor Protest Strikes!
Spartacist League/Australia
Melbourne: (03) 9654 4315, GPO Box 2339, Melbourne Vic 3001
Sydney: (02) 9281 2181, GPO Box 3473, Sydney NSW 2001
21 July 2001
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