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20 Jul 2001 Carlo Giuliani, a 23-year-old Italian working class history student and activist, was shot in the face at point blank range and run over by police during protests against thet 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, in Genoa while defending his community.
Making his the first death during an anti-globalization demonstration since the movement's rise from the 1999 Seattle WTO protests and the student became icon for the left, who saw his murder as a state execution.
In the weeks before the summit, public demonstrations and leafleting were banned, and downtown residents had to pass through security checks daily. Italy also withdrew from the European Union’s Open Border Treaty, arresting and blacklisting many activists trying to enter the country. Authorities raided political squats, conducted “sweeps” of immigrants in Genoa, transported hundreds of inmates to make room for protestors, and declared that 200 extra body bags were ordered.
To protect the meeting of the G8 economic powers which comprises of the heads of state of the most powerful nations in the world: Germany, Canada, the United States, France, Japan, Italy, Russia, and the United Kingdom. who convene yearly to coordinate global economic policy, discuss geopolitical concerns, and pose for photos from the nuisance of interruption, Italian police deployed 14-foot high barricades of iron and concrete, bolted to the streets and walls of downtown Genoa. They dubbed the area inside the fences the “Red Zone.” Eighteen thousand Carabinieri (Italian paramilitary police), and unknown numbers of Guardia de Finanza, military, and foreign secret service were enlisted to ensure that no demonstrators breached the zone.
On July 19th, 50,000 people flooded the streets to demand the recognition of immigrant rights. The march was sponsored by the Genoa Social Forum (GSF), the main umbrella group organizing the weekend’s demonstrations. The event was colorful, spirited, and joyful. Everyone present respected the immigrants’ wishes that tranquility be maintained to ensure police had no excuse to make arrests. Police still drove close by in armored personnel carriers, decked out in riot gear, and brandishing the latest in crowd control weaponry. Demonstrators exercised tactical self-control, and the march concluded as a grand success.
On July 20th 2001 there was a palpable tension in the air of the historic port city of Genova in Northern Italy. July 20th was the “Day of Direct Action” against the G8. Clusters of protestors set out to either disrupt business as usual in Genoa, or attempt to breach the Red Zone itself in a show of defiance. Pacifists, Greens, and others formed non-violent blockades just outside of the Red Zone. Meanwhile, the disruptive communist group Ya Basta, unionists, and the international Black Bloc separately tried to enter the Red Zone. As each group neared the Red Zone, they were beaten back by clubs, tear gas, and water cannons. Riot police unloaded hundreds of rounds of tear gas on demonstrators of all stripes, and appeared to be randomly charging and beating protestors, bystanders and journalists alike. Consequently, street fights and rioting erupted all over the downtown area. From nearly all points of the city, plumes of smoke from burning cars, banks, and dumpsters were visible, and the sting of tear gas lay thick in the air.
Carlo Giuliani was one of the rebels in the crowd that day who fought back when the Italian and International police forces violently cracked down on the Global resistance movement. Eyewitness accounts by residents of Genova described the scene as a war zone and detailed how the military and police units savagely attacked anyone who was on the streets indiscriminately, launching themselves at demonstrators, truncheons flying.
One young man on his way to the beach was beaten to the ground by riot police in a cloud of tear gas. Old women and shopkeepers were attacked on their city streets just for being there. This was the New World Order showing its most ugly and violent of faces to send a signal to those of us who believe that another world is possible!, as George Bush, Silvio Berlusconi, Tony Blair and the others smirked over fine wines and a fancy lunch.
Carlo Giuliani was young and idealistic and happy to add his voice and muscle to the growing international movement for a world that values human dignity and the integrity of our natural environment over corporate profits and capitalist plunder. His father Giuliano was a leader of the communist trade Union CGIL and he came from a family rooted in struggle for the rights of working people with a deep respect for real democracy and humanity, and was raised with knowledge of Gramsci, Marx, Malatesta, Sacco and Vanzetti.
Photographs showed Giuliani, 23-years-old and living in a squat in Genoa, throwing a fire extinguisher towards the van, a pistol firing a shot in return from the van, and Giuliani's body having been run over by the van, then saw police attacking people who went to his aid.
Charges against the officer were initially dropped without trial as a judge ruled that the ricocheted bullet was fired in self-defense, but the incident became a point of public scrutiny. Eight years after the incident, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the Italian forces had acted within their limits, but awarded damages for the state's procedural handling of the case. Appeals upheld the ruling, and Giuliani's family later filed a civil suit.
Carlo Giuliani was not the only victim that day. There was a well coordinated, systematic and full fledged attack led by the Italian police forces to repress this demonstration at all costs. Later that evening two schools that were housing activists from the Genoa Social Forum (GSF), a coalition of activist groups that was using a local school as a convergence and media centre, and as accommodation for protesters were raided by police forces who proceeded to torture and beat people that were sleeping on the floors. Three people were left in comas, one suffered brain damage and hundreds were injured. People reported being spat and urinated upon by the police, as well as repeatedly beaten in the G8’s first condoned use of torture, setting precedence for the terror wars in post 9-11 Afghanistan and Iraq.
The violence, however, couldn’t quash the spirit of solidarity and resistance that emerged from Genoa. That spirit continued into the following weeks, months, and years: in the campaign to free the activists who had been arrested in the raid on the GSF, and in the anti-war movement that was built following the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington that provided the pretext for the US and its allies to launch the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
There has been nothing like the anti-G8 protests in Genoa. They were a high point in the struggle for global justice. A total of half a million people participated (subtracting any overlap) in the July 19 rally for immigrant rights, the July 20 day of civil disobedience, the awesome international march of July 21, the Italian-wide demonstrations against state violence a few days later and the 250 worldwide solidarity protests.
Besides the massive numbers, there was also an increase in militancy and self-organisation. The protests were politically more radical than previous ones. There was a strong working-class component to the revolt, tens of thousands of workers attending, many not through official trade union contingents. All these factors made the protests a major escalation and consolidation of the anti-corporate and anti-capitalist movement.
The ending of Carlo Gialiani life was largely the determining factor that angers thousands of young people around the world that were seeing themselves in the face of the twenty-three year-old fighter.
It is true that the Italian state did everything to wipe away Giulani’s rememberance and bury the massive crackdown that was enforced in Genove those three days in July 2001, nevertheless Giuliani was memorialized in music tributes and public monuments, and is remembered as a symbol of the 2001 G8 protests. The 2002 documentary Carlo Giuliani, Boy, recounts the incident.
There were no flowers at the non-religious ceremony for Carlo Gialiani at a cemetery in Staglieno on the outskirts of Genoa. Giuliani's coffin was adorned with green ferns and draped with an AS Roma football club flag, of whom Giuliani was an ardent supporter.
Friends carried the coffin through a 500-strong crowd of mourners who broke into a minute-long applause, some shouting Giuliani's name and shaking their fists in despair. Giuliani, Carlo's father, addressed the crowd, saying: "In his short life, Carlo has given us many things. Let us try, in Carlo's name, to be united, to refuse violence. "Carlo taught me you shouldn't judge a person by his crumpled t-shirt, ripped trousers, body piercings or dreadlocks because under those dreadlocks may be a head which thinks, a person hungry for justice," he added in a shaking voice. "Carlo, you'll always be in our heart," one mourner shouted as the coffin was lowered into the grave. Friends read poetry at the graveside, which was attended by around 1,000 people, including left-wing local politicians, Never forget nor forgive. Rest in peace Carlo or discontent.
Conflict - Carlo Giuliani
Lynched - Carlo Giuliani
