[guardian.co.uk] When 200,000 anti-globalisation protesters converged on the Italian
city hosting the G8 summit in 2001, all but a handful came to
demonstrate peacefully. Instead, many were beaten to a pulp by
seemingly out-of-control riot police. But was there something more
sinister at play? And will the victims ever see proper justice?
It was just before midnight when the first police officer hit Mark
Covell, swiping his truncheon down on his left shoulder. Covell did his
best to yell out in Italian that he was a journalist but, within
seconds, he was surrounded by riot-squad officers thrashing him with
their sticks. For a while, he managed to stay on his feet but then a
baton blow to the knee sent him crashing to the pavement.
Lying
on his face in the dark, bruised and scared, he was aware of police all
around him, massing to attack the Diaz Pertini school building where 93
young demonstrators were bedding down on the floor for the night.
Covell’s best hope was that they would break through the chain around
the front gates without paying him any more attention. If that
happened, he could get up and limp across the street to the safety of
the Indymedia centre, where he had spent the past three days filing
reports on the G8 summit and on its violent policing.
It was at
that moment that a police officer sauntered over to him and kicked him
in the chest with such force that the entire lefthand side of his rib
cage caved in, breaking half-a-dozen ribs whose splintered ends then
shredded the membrane of his left lung. Covell, who is 5ft 8in and
weighs less than eight stone, was lifted off the pavement and sent
flying into the street. He heard the policeman laugh. The thought
formed in Covell’s mind: "I’m not going to make it."
The riot
squad were still struggling with the gate, so a group of officers
occupied the time by strolling over to use Covell as a football. This
bout of kicking broke his left hand and damaged his spine. From
somewhere behind him, Covell heard an officer shout that this was
enough – "Basta! Basta!" – and he felt his body being dragged back on
to the pavement.
Now, an armoured police van broke through the
school gates and 150 police officers, most wearing crash helmets and
carrying truncheons and shields, poured into the defenceless building.
Two officers stopped to deal with Covell: one cracked him round the
head with his baton; the other kicked him several times in the mouth,
knocking out a dozen teeth. Covell passed out.
There are several
good reasons why we should not forget what happened to Covell, then
aged 33, that night in Genoa. The first is that he was only the
beginning. By midnight on July 21 2001, those police officers were
swarming through all four floors of the Diaz Pertini building,
dispensing their special kind of discipline to its occupants, reducing
the makeshift dormitories to what one officer later described as "a
Mexican butcher’s shop". They and their colleagues then illegally
incarcerated their victims in a detention centre, which became a place
of dark terror.
The second is that, seven years later, Covell and
his fellow victims are still waiting for justice. On Monday, 15 police,
prison guards and prison medics finally were convicted for their part
in the violence – although it emerged yesterday that none of them would
actually serve prison terms. In Italy, defendants don’t go to jail
until they have exhausted the appeals process; and in this case, the
convictions and sentences will be wiped out by a statute of limitations
next year. Meanwhile, the politicians who were responsible for the
police, prison guards and prison medics have never had to explain
themselves. Fundamental questions about why this happened remain
unanswered – and they hint at the third and most important reason for
remembering Genoa. This is not simply the story of law officers running
riot, but of something uglier and more worrying beneath the surface.
The
fact that this story can be told at all is testament to seven years of
hard work, led by a dedicated and courageous public prosecutor, Emilio
Zucca. Helped by Covell as well as his own staff, Zucca has gathered
hundreds of witness statements and analysed 5,000 hours of video as
well as thousands of photographs. Pieced together, they tell an
irrefutable tale, which began to unfold as Covell lay bleeding on the
ground.
The police poured into the Diaz Pertini school. Some of
them were shouting "Black Bloc! We’re going to kill you," but if they
genuinely believed they were confronting the notorious Black Bloc of
anarchists who had caused violent mayhem in parts of the city during
demonstrations earlier in the day, they were mistaken. The school had
been provided by the Genoa city council as a base for demonstrators who
had nothing to do with the anarchists: they had even posted guards to
make sure that none of them came in.
One of the first to see the
riot squad bursting in was Michael Gieser, a 35-year-old Belgian
economist, who subsequently described how he had just changed into his
pyjamas and was queuing for the bathroom with his toothbrush in his
hand when the raid began. Gieser believes in the power of dialogue and,
at first, he walked towards them saying, "We need to talk." He saw the
padded jackets, the riot clubs, the helmets and the bandanas concealing
the policemen’s faces, changed his mind and ran up the stairs to escape.
Others
were slower. They were still in their sleeping bags. A group of 10
Spanish friends in the middle of the hall woke up to find themselves
being battered with truncheons. They raised their hands in surrender.
More officers piled in to beat their heads, cutting and bruising and
breaking limbs, including the arm of a 65-year-old woman. At the side
of the room, several young people were sitting at computers, sending
emails home. One of them was Melanie Jonasch, a 28-year-old archaeology
student from Berlin, who had volunteered to help out in the building
and had not even been on a demonstration.
She still cannot
remember what happened. But numerous other witnesses have described how
officers set upon her, beating her head so hard with their sticks that
she rapidly lost consciousness. When she fell to the ground, officers
circled her, beating and kicking her limp body, banging her head
against a near-by cupboard, leaving her finally in a pool of blood.
Katherina Ottoway, who saw this happen, recalled: "She was trembling
all over. Her eyes were open but upturned. I thought she was dying,
that she could not survive this."
None of those who stayed on the
ground floor escaped injury. As Zucca later put it in his prosecution
report: "In the space of a few minutes, all the occupants on the ground
floor had been reduced to complete helplessness, the groans of the
wounded mingling with the sound of calls for an ambulance." In their
fear, some victims lost control of their bowels. Then the officers of
the law moved up the stairs. In the first-floor corridor they found a
small group, including Gieser, still clutching his toothbrush: "Someone
suggested lying down, to show there was no resistance. So I did. The
police arrived and began beating us, one by one. I protected my head
with my hands. I thought, ‚I must survive.‘ People were shouting,
‚Please stop.‘ I said the same thing … It made me think of a pork
butchery. We were being treated like animals, like pigs."
Officers
broke down doors to the rooms leading off the corridors. In one, they
found Dan McQuillan and Norman Blair, who had flown in from Stansted to
show their support for, as McQuillan put it, "a free and equal society
with people living in harmony with each other". The two Englishmen and
their friend from New Zealand, Sam Buchanan, had heard the police
attack on the ground floor and had tried to hide their bags and
themselves under some tables in the corner of the dark room. A dozen
officers broke in, caught them in a spotlight and, even as McQuillan
stood up with his hands raised saying, "Take it easy, take it easy,"
they battered them into submission, inflicting numerous cuts and
bruises and breaking McQuillan’s wrist. Norman Blair recalled: "I could
feel the venom and hatred from them."
Gieser was out in the
corridor: "The scene around me was covered in blood, everywhere. A
policeman shouted ‚Basta!‘. This word was like a window of hope. I
understood it meant ‚enough‘. And yet they didn’t stop. They continued
with pleasure. In the end, they did stop, but it was like taking a toy
away from a child, against their will."
By now, there were police
officers on all four floors of the building, kicking and battering.
Several victims describe a sort of system to the violence, with each
officer beating each person he came across, then moving on to the next
victim while his colleague moved up to continue beating the first. It
seemed important that everybody must be hurt. Nicola Doherty, 26, a
care worker from London, later described how her partner, Richard Moth,
lay across her to protect her: "I could just hear blow after blow on
his body. The police were also leaning over Rich so they could hit the
parts of my body which were exposed." She tried to cover her head with
her arm: they broke her wrist.
In one corridor, they ordered a
group of young men and women to kneel, the easier to batter them around
the head and shoulders. This was where Daniel Albrecht, a 21-year-old
cello student from Berlin, had his head beaten so badly that he needed
surgery to stop bleeding in his brain. Around the building, officers
flipped their batons around, gripping the far end and using the
right-angled handle as a hammer.
And in among this relentless
violence, there were moments when the police preferred humiliation: the
officer who stood spread-legged in front of a kneeling and injured
woman, grabbed his groin and thrust it into her face before turning to
do the same to Daniel Albrecht kneeling beside her; the officer who
paused amid the beatings and took a knife to cut off hair from his
victims, including Nicola Doherty; the constant shouting of insults;
the officer who asked a group if they were OK and who reacted to the
one who said "No" by handing out an extra beating.
A few escaped,
at least for a while. Karl Boro made it up on to the roof but then made
the mistake of coming back into the building, where he was treated to
heavy bruising to his arms and legs, a fractured skull, and bleeding in
his chest cavity. Jaraslaw Engel, from Poland, managed to use builders‘
scaffolding to get out of the school, but he was caught in the street
by some police drivers who smashed him over the head, laid him on the
ground and stood over him smoking while his blood ran out across the
Tarmac.
Two of the last to be caught were a pair of German
students, Lena Zuhlke, 24, and her partner Niels Martensen. They had
hidden in a cleaners‘ cupboard on the top floor. They heard the police
approaching, drumming their batons against the walls of the stairs. The
cupboard door came open, Martensen was dragged out and beaten by a
dozen officers standing in a semicircle around him. Zuhlke ran across
the corridor and hid in the loo. Police officers saw her and followed
her and dragged her out by her dreadlocks.
In the corridor, they
set about her like dogs on a rabbit. She was beaten around the head
then kicked from all sides on the floor, where she felt her rib cage
collapsing. She was hauled up against the wall where one officer kneed
her in the groin while others carried on lashing her with their batons.
She slid down the wall and they hit her more on the ground: "They
seemed to be enjoying themselves and, when I cried out in pain, it
seemed to give them even more pleasure."
Police officers found a
fire extinguisher and squirted its foam into Martensen’s wounds. His
partner was dragged by her hair and tossed down the stairs head-first.
Eventually, they dragged Zuhlke into the ground-floor hall, where they
had gathered dozens of prisoners from all over the building in a mess
of blood and excrement. They threw her on top of two other people. They
were not moving, and Zuhlke drowsily asked them if they were alive.
They did not reply, and she lay there on her back, unable to move her
right arm, unable to stop her left arm and her legs twitching, blood
seeping out of her head wounds. A group of police officers walked by,
and each one lifted the bandana which concealed his identity, leaned
down and spat on her face.
Why would law officers behave with
such contempt for the law? The simple answer may be the one which was
soon being chanted outside the school building by sympathetic
demonstrators who chose a word which they knew the police would
understand: "Bastardi! Bastardi!" But something else was happening here
– something that emerged more clearly over the next few days.
Covell
and dozens of other victims of the raid were taken to the San Martino
hospital, where police officers walked up and down the corridors,
slapping their clubs into the palms of their hands, ordering the
injured not to move around or look out of the window, keeping handcuffs
on many of them and then, often with injuries still untended, shipping
them across the city to join scores of others, from the Diaz school and
from the street demonstrations, detained at the detention centre in the
city’s Bolzaneto district.
The signs of something uglier here
were apparent first in superficial ways. Some officers had traditional
fascist songs as ringtones on their mobile phones and talked
enthusiastically about Mussolini and Pinochet. Repeatedly, they ordered
prisoners to say "Viva il duce." Sometimes, they used threats to force
them to sing fascist songs: "Un, due, tre. Viva Pinochet!"
The
222 people who were held at Bolzaneto were treated to a regime later
described by public prosecutors as torture. On arrival, they were
marked with felt-tip crosses on each cheek, and many were forced to
walk between two parallel lines of officers who kicked and beat them.
Most were herded into large cells, holding up to 30 people. Here, they
were forced to stand for long periods, facing the wall with their hands
up high and their legs spread. Those who failed to hold the position
were shouted at, slapped and beaten. Mohammed Tabach has an artificial
leg and, unable to hold the stress position, collapsed and was rewarded
with two bursts of pepper spray in his face and, later, a particularly
savage beating. Norman Blair later recalled standing like this and a
guard asking him "Who is your government?" "The person before me had
answered ‚Polizei‘, so I said the same. I was afraid of being beaten."
Stefan
Bauer dared to answer back: when a German-speaking guard asked where he
was from, he said he was from the European Union and he had the right
to go where he wanted. He was hauled out, beaten, given a face full of
pepper spray, stripped naked and put under a cold shower. His clothes
were taken away and he was returned to the freezing cell wearing only a
flimsy hospital gown.
Shivering on the cold marble floors of the
cells, the detainees were given few or no blankets, kept awake by
guards, given little or no food and denied their statutory right to
make phone calls and see a lawyer. They could hear crying and screaming
from other cells.
Men and women with dreadlocks had their hair
roughly cut off to the scalp. Marco Bistacchia was taken to an office,
stripped naked, made to get down on all fours and told to bark like a
dog and to shout "Viva la polizia Italiana!" He was sobbing too much to
obey. An unnamed officer told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that
he had seen brother officers urinating on prisoners and beating them
for refusing to sing Faccetta Nera, a Mussolini-era fascist song.
Ester
Percivati, a young Turkish woman, recalled guards calling her a whore
as she was marched to the toilet, where a woman officer forced her head
down into the bowl and a male jeered "Nice arse! Would you like a
truncheon up it?" Several women reported threats of rape, anal and
vaginal.
Even the infirmary was dangerous. Richard Moth, covered
in cuts and bruises after lying on top of his partner, was given
stitches in his head and legs without anaesthetic – "an extremely
painful and disturbing experience. I had to be held down." Prison
medical staff were among those convicted of abuse on Monday.
All
agree that this was not an attempt to get the detainees to talk, simply
an exercise in creating fear. And it worked. In statements, prisoners
later described their feeling of helplessness, of being cut off from
the rest of the world in a place where there was no law and no rules.
Indeed, the police forced their captives to sign statements, waiving
all their legal rights. One man, David Larroquelle, testified that he
refused and had three of his ribs broken. Percivati also refused and
her face was slammed into the office wall, breaking her glasses and
making her nose bleed.
The outside world was treated to some
severely distorted accounts of all this. Lying in San Martino hospital
the day after his beating, Covell came round to find his shoulder being
shaken by a woman who, he understood, was from the British embassy. It
was only when the man with her started taking photographs that he
realised she was a reporter, from the Daily Mail. Its front page the
next day ran an entirely false report describing him as having helped
mastermind the riots. (Four long years later, the Mail eventually
apologised and paid Covell damages for invasion of privacy.)
While
his citizens were being beaten and tormented in illegal detention,
spokesmen for the then prime minister, Tony Blair, declared: "The
Italian police had a difficult job to do. The prime minister believes
that they did that job."
The Italian police themselves fed the
media with a rich diet of falsehood. Even as the bloody bodies were
being carried out of the Diaz Pertini building on stretchers, police
were telling reporters that the ambulances lined up in the street were
nothing to do with the raid, and/or that the very obviously fresh
injuries were old, and that the building had been full of violent
extremists who had attacked officers.
The next day, senior
officers held a press conference at which they announced that everybody
in the building would be charged with aggressive resistance to arrest
and conspiracy to cause destruction. In the event, the Italian courts
dismissed every single attempted charge against every single person.
That included Covell. Police attempts to charge him with a string of
very serious offences were described by the public prosecutor, Enrico
Zucca, as "grotesque".
At the same press conference, police
displayed an array of what they described as weaponry. This included
crowbars, hammers and nails which they themselves had taken from a
builder’s store next to the school; aluminium rucksack frames, which
they presented as offensive weapons; 17 cameras; 13 pairs of swimming
goggles; 10 pen-knives; and a bottle of sun-tan lotion. They also
displayed two Molotov cocktails which, Zucca later concluded, had been
found by police earlier in the day in another part of the city and
planted in the Diaz Pertini building as the raid ended.
This
public dishonesty was part of a wider effort to cover up what had
happened. On the night of the raid, a force of 59 police entered the
building opposite the Diaz Pertini, where Covell and others had been
running their Indymedia centre and where, crucially, a group of lawyers
had been based, gathering evidence about police attacks on the earlier
demonstrations. Officers went into the lawyers‘ room, threatened the
occupants, smashed their computers and seized hard drives. They also
removed anything containing photographs or video tape.
With the
courts refusing to charge the detainees, the police secured an order to
deport all of them from the country, banning them from returning for
five years. Thus, the witnesses were removed from the scene. Like the
attempted charges, all the deportation orders were subsequently
dismissed as illegal by the courts.
Zucca then fought his way
through years of denial and obfuscation. In his formal report, he
recorded that all the senior officers involved were denying playing any
part: "Not a single official has confessed to holding a substantial
command role in any aspects of the operation." One senior officer who
was videoed at the scene explained that he was off duty and had just
turned up to make sure his men were not being injured. Police
statements were themselves changeable and contradictory, and were
overwhelmingly contradicted by the evidence of victims and numerous
videos: "Not a single one of the 150 officers reportedly present has
provided precise information regarding an individual episode."
Without
Zucca, without the robust stance of the Italian courts, without
Covell’s intensive work assembling video records of the Diaz raid, the
police might well have evaded responsibility and secured false charges
and prison sentences against scores of their victims. Apart from the
Bolzaneto trial which finished on Monday, 28 other officers, some very
senior, are on trial for their part in the Diaz raid. And yet, justice
has been compromised.
No Italian politician has been brought to
book, in spite of the strong suggestion that the police acted as though
somebody had promised them impunity. One minister visited Bolzaneto
while the detainees were being mistreated and apparently saw nothing
or, at least, saw nothing he thought he should stop. Another,
Gianfranco Fini, former national secretary of the neo-fascist MSI party
and the then deputy prime minister, was – according to media reports at
the time – in police headquarters. He has never been required to
explain what orders he gave.
Most of the several hundred law
officers involved in Diaz and Bolzaneto have escaped without any
discipline or criminal charge. None has been suspended; some have been
promoted. None of the officers who were tried over Bolzaneto has been
charged with torture – Italian law does not recognise the offence. Some
senior officers who were originally going to be charged over the Diaz
raid escaped trial because Zucca was simply unable to prove that a
chain of command existed. Even now, the trial of the 28 officers who
have been charged is in jeopardy because the prime minister, Silvio
Berlusconi, is pushing through legislation to delay all trials dealing
with events that occurred before June 2002. Nobody has been charged
with the violence inflicted on Covell. And as one of the victims‘
lawyers, Massimo Pastore, put it: "Nobody wants to listen to what this
story has to say."
That is about fascism. There are plenty of
rumours that the police and carabinieri and prison staff belonged to
fascist groups, but no evidence to support that. Pastore argues that
that misses the bigger point: "It is not just a matter of a few drunken
fascists. This is mass behaviour by the police. No one said ‚No.‘ This
is a culture of fascism." At its heart, this involved what Zucca
described in his report as "a situation in which every rule of law
appears to have been suspended."
Fifty-two days after the attack
on the Diaz school, 19 men used planes full of passengers as flying
bombs and shifted the bedrock of assumptions on which western
democracies had based their business. Since then, politicians who would
never describe themselves as fascists have allowed the mass tapping of
telephones and monitoring of emails, detention without trial,
systematic torture, the calibrated drowning of detainees, unlimited
house arrest and the targeted killing of suspects, while the procedure
of extradition has been replaced by "extraordinary rendition". This
isn’t fascism with jack-booted dictators with foam on their lips. It’s
the pragmatism of nicely turned-out politicians. But the result looks
very similar. Genoa tells us that when the state feels threatened, the
rule of law can be suspended. Anywhere.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk
