Crime and Punishment in Genoa

Even the grand statesmen of the West assembled in Genoa on 20July would not have liked the images of conflict that their summit left in its wake, the media that they cannot do without, had a satisfying day with some help from the city's carabiniere. Carlo Giuliani, a young political activist (see pic.), was shot dead at the venue of the G-8 summit, hundreds were injured. The worldwide audience of television news— onlookers since three years ago in Seattle, and then successively in Prague and Gothenburg—could not but be bemused at how this gathering of the cultured representatives of the trans-Atlantic ruling class, assembled to discuss ways and means of reducing poverty, had provoked such vehement opposition, leaving one dead, still others mutinous, and people across the globe derisive of the pomp and circumstance that accompanied the summit.

The protesters with the grassroots trade unions (SLAI-Cobas) were in a combative mood and well-prepared to make the 20 July "rebellion in Genoa" a success. Among those present in the ancient mercantilist capital were delegations from Yugoslavia, Mexico, Turkey, Greece, Sardinia and elsewhere. As expected, the demonstrators represented various views and orientations— unions, political activists (including anarchists and communists), development ngos, religious and humanitarian groups, human right activists and a whole lot of others attracted to Genoa by the assembly of Big Men. The slogans ranged from the demand to withdraw NATO from Yugoslavia and the Balkans, to the dissolution of the Hague 'inquisition', to support for the Palestinian Intifada, and opposition to the embargo against Iraq and Cuba. However, the general theme that cut across the disparate groups was in the arena of global economics and politics—the need for "globalisation from below", a reduction of the current Third World debt burden, and the control of international capital flows by "civil society" rather than by the international corporations and the governments at their beck and call.