August 2001
On July 20, 2001, at the G8 meeting in Genoa, the Italian police shot a twenty-three-year-old protester, Carlo Giuliani, at close range in the head and backed over his body in a jeep. This is an excerpt from a speech given in Reggio Emilia, Italy, one month later at the Festival dell’Unità.
I have been covering this wave of protest for five years. And I have watched with horror as the police have moved from pepper spray to mass tear gas; from tear gas to rubber bullets; rubber bullets to live ammunition. Just this summer, we have seen an escalation from severe injuries of protesters in Gothenburg, Sweden, to, in Genoa, a protester shot dead, then backed over by a police jeep. Nearby, activists sleeping in a school were woken and beaten bloody, their teeth scattered on the ground.
How did this happen so quickly? I have to conclude, with much regret, that it happened because we let it happen, and by “we” I mean all the good left liberals in media, academia and the arts who tell themselves they believe in civil liberties. In Canada, when we first started seeing police pepper-spray and strip-search young activists a few years ago, there was a public outcry. It was front-page news. We asked questions and demanded answers, accountability from the police. People said, those are our kids, idealists, future leaders. But you rarely hear those sorts of sentiments expressed in the face of police violence against protesters these days. The lack of investigation by journalists, the lack of outrage from left parties, from academics, from NGOs that exist to protect freedom of expression, has been scandalous.
Young activists have faced enormous public scrutiny for their actions; their motivations and their tactics have all been questioned. If the police had faced one-tenth of the scrutiny that this movement has, maybe the brutality that we saw last month in Genoa wouldn’t have happened. I say this because the last time I was in Italy was in June, more than a month before the protests. At that time, it was already clear that the police were running out of control, getting their excuses ready for a major civil liberties crackdown and setting the stage for extreme violence. Before a single activist had taken to the streets, a pre-emptive state of emergency had been essentially declared: airports were closed and much of the city was cordoned off. Yet when I was last in Italy, all the public discussions focused not on these violations of civil liberties but on the alleged threat posed by activists.
Police brutality feeds off public indifference, slipping into social crevices that we have long ignored. Newsweek described Carlo Giuliani’s death as the movement’s “first blood.” But that conveniently erases the blood that is so often spilled when protests against corporate power take place in poor countries, or impoverished parts of rich countries, when those resisting are not white.
Two weeks before the G8 came to Genoa, three students were killed in Papua New Guinea protesting a World Bank privatization scheme. It barely made the news, yet it was the very same issue that has brought thousands to the streets during so-called anti-globalization protests.
It is not a coincidence that police violence always thrives in marginalized communities, whether the guns are pointed at Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico, or at indigenous communities in peaceful Canada, when First Nations activists decide to use direct action to defend their land.
The police take their cue from us: when we walk away, they walk in. The real ammunition is not rubber bullets and tear gas. It is our silence.