The terror excuse
Arthur Neslen | 18.05.2007 15:33 | Globalisation | Social Struggles
The terror excuse
by Arthur Neslen
May 18, 2007 4:00 PM
It's terror time again. Last week, German police arrested 18 people in raids on two social centres that were to have been used as convergence spaces for protesters against the G8 summit in Heiligendamm next month. The so36.net alternative internet server which contains the websites, mailing lists and mail addresses of various anti-G8 groups and individuals was also raided, as were more than 40 other premises suspected of involvement in a terror plot.
The newspaper reports were credulous but the only information they provided about the dastardly plan was that it involved a new "terror organisation" called Militant Group which had hitherto been known by activists as the Black Block.
If the raid was intended to defuse the threat of violence, statements put out afterwards by radical German groups indicate it was counter-productive. Other measures to guarantee the G8 freedom of assembly - such as banning protests and putting activists in "preventive custody" - seem guaranteed to ramp up tensions even further.
Yet, arguably the biggest public order threat at the summit remains a march by the neo-Nazi NPD which the German authorities do not seem to be treating with anything like the same level of hyper-vigilance. The NPD, after all, have not been classified as terrorists, perhaps because they only threaten public safety, and not that of the G8. But the only evidence in the public domain linking Militant Group to terror is a claim that individuals associated with it were "planning arson attacks and other actions".
Certainly, fire-raising on demonstrations is a dramatic and sometimes frightening way of getting your point across, but it's a moot point whether it qualifies as terrorism. In 1989, poll tax demonstrators in London set the South African embassy ablaze. In 2003, US flags were regularly torched by anti-Iraq war protesters. Last month, Israeli students burned tyres to block roads in a tuition fees protest. Were all these people terrorists?
It's an important question because there is a precedent for conflating terrorism with global justice protests stretching back even further than the use of the Terrorism Act against anti-nuclear campaigners at Fairford. At the protest against the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001, Italy's elite national anti-terrorism unit was deployed after claims of an al-Qaida plot to assassinate George Bush (that never materialised) and the sending of two letter bombs (for which no group ever claimed responsibility).
In practice, the unit was used in an onslaught against protesters who were sleeping in a convergence centre, with horrifying consequences. Last month, I was called to testify in the Genoa trial of 28 officers facing charges of brutality and perjury arising from the raid, including Francesco Gratteri, the current chief of Italy's national anti-terrorism unit and Giovanni Luperi, the head of an EU taskforce on Islamist terrorism. In major rioting the day before, police had shot one 23-year-old activist dead. Hundreds more demonstrators and police had been injured and although the 300,000 or so protesters were by then mostly leaving town, emotions were still running high.
At midnight, with no warning or provocation, around 200 riot police invaded the two schools that made up the convergence space. In one, they set about attacking sleeping activists and of 93 people arrested 62 needed hospital treatment. Around 20 were carried out on stretchers. By the time journalists were able to enter the building, we found blood on the walls, floors and radiators.
I had gone to Genoa to cover the protests and my main point of contact was a friend, Mark "Sky" Covell, who was also editing Genoa's Indymedia web operation in the Diaz school opposite. As the police raided, Mark had been outside in the street. He was grabbed, bludgeoned into a coma and left lying in a pool of blood. He suffered eight cracked ribs, a punctured lung, two broken bones, 16 lost teeth and spinal injuries.
Those arrested fared little better. One anonymous officer told La Repubblica newspaper: "They (the police) lined them up against the wall. They urinated on one person. They beat people up if they didn't sing Facetta Nera (a fascist song). One girl was vomiting blood but the chief of the squad just looked on. They threatened to rape girls with their batons."
The police's case had been that they believed members of the Black Block were staying in the convergence centre and that weapons of arson such as Molotov cocktails had been found during the raid. It later emerged that the petrol bombs had been planted by police and they subsequently disappeared.
But it does seem that officers really had been led to believe that they were there to fight violent anarchists, presumably as a result of press reports and briefings by their superiors. Before he lost consciousness, Mark maintains that one of his attackers told him: "You are Black Block and we are going to kill Black Block." In fact, they nearly killed Mark.
Certainly, the actions of the Black Block on July 21 had been mindless, thuggish and morally criminal. For hours, drunken riot tourists burned cars, smashed shop windows and vandalised bus stops in what was anyway a poor neighbourhood. But terrorism by most definitions involves political violence directed against non-combatants. The Black Block's violence may conceivably have qualified as "political" but unlike the violence of the anti-terror police on July 22, it was not targeted at non-combatants.
To its credit, the Italian judicial system is fairly trying to deal with the crimes that took place in Genoa, but it is a tortuous and painful process. It is ironic that even as the court cases grind on, the same blurring of terrorism with protest which made that awful night of July 22 possible seems to be being repeated in Heiligendamm.
by Arthur Neslen
May 18, 2007 4:00 PM
It's terror time again. Last week, German police arrested 18 people in raids on two social centres that were to have been used as convergence spaces for protesters against the G8 summit in Heiligendamm next month. The so36.net alternative internet server which contains the websites, mailing lists and mail addresses of various anti-G8 groups and individuals was also raided, as were more than 40 other premises suspected of involvement in a terror plot.
The newspaper reports were credulous but the only information they provided about the dastardly plan was that it involved a new "terror organisation" called Militant Group which had hitherto been known by activists as the Black Block.
If the raid was intended to defuse the threat of violence, statements put out afterwards by radical German groups indicate it was counter-productive. Other measures to guarantee the G8 freedom of assembly - such as banning protests and putting activists in "preventive custody" - seem guaranteed to ramp up tensions even further.
Yet, arguably the biggest public order threat at the summit remains a march by the neo-Nazi NPD which the German authorities do not seem to be treating with anything like the same level of hyper-vigilance. The NPD, after all, have not been classified as terrorists, perhaps because they only threaten public safety, and not that of the G8. But the only evidence in the public domain linking Militant Group to terror is a claim that individuals associated with it were "planning arson attacks and other actions".
Certainly, fire-raising on demonstrations is a dramatic and sometimes frightening way of getting your point across, but it's a moot point whether it qualifies as terrorism. In 1989, poll tax demonstrators in London set the South African embassy ablaze. In 2003, US flags were regularly torched by anti-Iraq war protesters. Last month, Israeli students burned tyres to block roads in a tuition fees protest. Were all these people terrorists?
It's an important question because there is a precedent for conflating terrorism with global justice protests stretching back even further than the use of the Terrorism Act against anti-nuclear campaigners at Fairford. At the protest against the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001, Italy's elite national anti-terrorism unit was deployed after claims of an al-Qaida plot to assassinate George Bush (that never materialised) and the sending of two letter bombs (for which no group ever claimed responsibility).
In practice, the unit was used in an onslaught against protesters who were sleeping in a convergence centre, with horrifying consequences. Last month, I was called to testify in the Genoa trial of 28 officers facing charges of brutality and perjury arising from the raid, including Francesco Gratteri, the current chief of Italy's national anti-terrorism unit and Giovanni Luperi, the head of an EU taskforce on Islamist terrorism. In major rioting the day before, police had shot one 23-year-old activist dead. Hundreds more demonstrators and police had been injured and although the 300,000 or so protesters were by then mostly leaving town, emotions were still running high.
At midnight, with no warning or provocation, around 200 riot police invaded the two schools that made up the convergence space. In one, they set about attacking sleeping activists and of 93 people arrested 62 needed hospital treatment. Around 20 were carried out on stretchers. By the time journalists were able to enter the building, we found blood on the walls, floors and radiators.
I had gone to Genoa to cover the protests and my main point of contact was a friend, Mark "Sky" Covell, who was also editing Genoa's Indymedia web operation in the Diaz school opposite. As the police raided, Mark had been outside in the street. He was grabbed, bludgeoned into a coma and left lying in a pool of blood. He suffered eight cracked ribs, a punctured lung, two broken bones, 16 lost teeth and spinal injuries.
Those arrested fared little better. One anonymous officer told La Repubblica newspaper: "They (the police) lined them up against the wall. They urinated on one person. They beat people up if they didn't sing Facetta Nera (a fascist song). One girl was vomiting blood but the chief of the squad just looked on. They threatened to rape girls with their batons."
The police's case had been that they believed members of the Black Block were staying in the convergence centre and that weapons of arson such as Molotov cocktails had been found during the raid. It later emerged that the petrol bombs had been planted by police and they subsequently disappeared.
But it does seem that officers really had been led to believe that they were there to fight violent anarchists, presumably as a result of press reports and briefings by their superiors. Before he lost consciousness, Mark maintains that one of his attackers told him: "You are Black Block and we are going to kill Black Block." In fact, they nearly killed Mark.
Certainly, the actions of the Black Block on July 21 had been mindless, thuggish and morally criminal. For hours, drunken riot tourists burned cars, smashed shop windows and vandalised bus stops in what was anyway a poor neighbourhood. But terrorism by most definitions involves political violence directed against non-combatants. The Black Block's violence may conceivably have qualified as "political" but unlike the violence of the anti-terror police on July 22, it was not targeted at non-combatants.
To its credit, the Italian judicial system is fairly trying to deal with the crimes that took place in Genoa, but it is a tortuous and painful process. It is ironic that even as the court cases grind on, the same blurring of terrorism with protest which made that awful night of July 22 possible seems to be being repeated in Heiligendamm.
Arthur Neslen