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
--
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