FWD: Who provokes whom?

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

More about jbor's "unprovoked acts" you can read here...

State terrorism in Genoa -- International action appeal
Von  : Genoa GSF media centre
Ort  : 
Datum: 22.07.2001


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 In!
 dymedia (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 de!
 monstration 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, all over the city, which were clearly provoked 
by the police. The forms of provocation were diverse: the television showed 
images of a group of people dressed in black going out of a police van and 
breaking windows, and the black block was visibly infiltrated throughout 
these days. We respectfully ask our friends from the black block to reflect 
on the meaning of this fact, not just for them but for everybody else. This 
request is not meant to imply that they should not be present in large 
collective actions, but merely that we encourage them to rethink their role 
and choices in them. One possible way would be to play a role focused on 
solidar!
 ity and defense of other groups, similar to the one so successfully ca


rried out by the black block in A16. 
 
People who are taken to the hospitals are arrested immediately after 
receiving first aid, unless they are in an extremely bad condition. One 
person, a member of a nonviolent group, who was horribly beaten up while 
sitting on the floor with his hands up, went through that experience. In the 
police station he was repeatedly tortured like everyone else there. The 
police was hitting the already wounded areas of his body and battering him 
for no reason. Another person who was arrested and released says that they 
were beating everybody and forcing them to scream 'viva il duce', which means 
long live Mussolini. 
 
The police terrorism started well before the actions. The last weeks were 
characterised by police searches all over Italy, followed by what everybody 
here considers to be a reproduction of the strategy of tension used by the 
Italian state in the 70s to crash social movements. Letter bombs were sent 
(by whom?) to policemen, the police exploded a car in the centre of Genova 
because it was parked in the same place for several days, and they alleged in 
the media that bombs had been planted in several places (including one of the 
accommodation spaces of the GSF) - all of these in order to create an 
atmosphere of paranoia, fears about demonstrators and social terror. They 
also arrested several people before the actions, including a particularly 
brutal case of a young woman who was kept in isolation for four days for 
having a van (which they claimed would be used to break into the red zone) 
where she kept a hatchet for camping purposes. The people who were arrested 
with her report !
 that they were also tortured physically and psychologically, including 
forced exposure to a succession of three posters: a pornographic one, 
followed by one of Mussolini and then one of the Nazi Army in action. 
 
We know that many solidarity and denounciation actions have already taken 
place all over the world and that many more are being planned (see 
http://italy.indymedia.org). We encourage all the groups that have not 
planned actions yet to do so, and to prepare for sustained actions to 
continue until those responsible for these outrageous human rights abuses pay 
the full price for their actions. We suggest to these groups that their 
minimum demand would be the resignation of the Berlusconi government. There 
is a list of Italian embassies at 
http://www.ethoseurope.org/ethos/embassies.nsf/ (go down to the link 
Embassies of Italy). 
 
We think that we need to turn this situation into a serious international 
problem for the Berlusconi and the other G8 governements, not just due to a 
basic sense of justice but also because we feel that the survival of the 
movement and of many of us might depend on it. This brutality shows the 
actual panic with which the rich and powerful are reacting to the clear fact 
that the world is beginning to listen to us. Seeing that they can no longer 
write us off as a marginal, temporary phenomenon, they are now removing all 
masks of ostensible democracy and showing their real face - one of 
oppression, violence and terrorism. 
 
Por todos nuestros muertos, ni un minuto de silencio. Toda una vida de lucha. 
To honor our dead, not a minute of silence. A whole life of struggle.

*** nadir-aktuell-abo -- Aboliste mit Nachrichten von http://www.nadir.org
*** Beitraege: nadir-aktuell at nadir.org / Redaktion: 
nadir-aktuell-red at nadir.org
*** Unsubscribe: majordomo at nadir.org mit unsubscribe nadir-aktuell-abo im body


Kurt-Werner Pörtner