January 22, 2005 - 2:53pm -- jim
Rachel Shabi and John Hooper write:
"Genoa: Now, The Reckoning"
Rachel Shabi and John Hooper, The Guardian
[In the summer of 2001, Italian police launched a brutal raid on protesters at the G8 summit in Genoa after they had returned to their sleeping quarters. Among 62 injured were various Britons, some of whom have still not recovered. Finally, more than 60 officers are being called to account in court. Rachel Shabi and John Hooper report.]
On Saturday night, July 21 2001, Richard Moth and his girlfriend Nicola Doherty left their friends in a Genoa bar because she was feeling tired and wanted an early night. The two London care workers were among vast numbers of people demonstrating at that year's G8 summit. Protesters against corporate globalisation had been following the leaders of the world's major industrial nations to their annual meetings in different parts of the globe since 1998. But this was a gathering on a scale unlike anything that had preceded it. The organisers put the numbers at 200,000; the police said there were 100,000. And it had turned ugly. Even though — or perhaps because — there were 20,000 police in Genoa, including reinforcements drawn from all over Italy, the summit protests became a bloody battleground.
