A Chicago Italian American recalls her experiences in Genoa working with Indymedia.
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July 20, 2002
Reflections and Flashbacks: Genoa, One Year Later
by June C. Terpstra
Wearing a Genoa Social Forum T-shirt, I write this "reflection with flash-backs," an article in memory of Carlo and all of us who manifested in the streets last year. I had planned to be back with my brothers and sisters in Genova today, but things just did not work out that way. Senta la tua mancanza il mio fratelli e la mia sorelle.
I remember how hot it was last year in Genova and how the polizia and carabinieri had us on the run all over Genova on Saturday and then again on Sunday. I remember how at GSF meetings during the week before the protests, organizers spoke openly about the "direct actions" that were expected after the migrants march and all and sundry debated the non-violence vs violence question (quite the diversion, that trope). In the first hour of the Saturday manifestation (called protest in the USA) I walked openly through a whole section of folks who were breaking up boards and cement with big mallets and steel rods, turning over dumpsters to block access to streets, stock-piling rocks to throw and preparing molotovs. I was "covering" direct actions, and I noticed that the pigs tear-gassed the non-violent groups who were several blocks away from where the direct action was happening. Hmmm...cui bono?
Later in the after noon, the tear-gas seeping into the Diaz school and burning my eyes while I was there filing a report for Chicago Indymedia. It was then that those of us in the dispatch room heard the news that two people had been killed. That was the first way we heard it over the wires, that there were two people killed, and then, within minutes only one death was confirmed. To this day I believe the other one reported dead was the young girl they found later.
Flashback: Friday in Genova. Sitting next to Sky, a hard working Indymedia dispatcher, skinny dude from the UK, funny and sarcastic. When we were introduced days ago, he looked at me like I was some kind of aging hippie who was immediately suspect for coming from the USA (I couldn't blame him for that). Later, he came to appreciate the food, coffee and smokes for which I was willing to make runs into scary-ass Genoa streets.
I work with one of my new friends from Tutte Bianche writing a report together for Indymedia about what we have seen and heard in the streets this morning. We are talking about the Black Bloc, police infiltration and the GSF. He makes me laugh and our analysis is filled with gallows humor. He wants to get back out on the streets. It is here, in a classroom on the third floor we learn the news about the murder of a boy, Carlo Giuliani, folks breaking into tears and sobs as the news is confirmed; we providing rapid words of comfort to each other and then get back to telling the world what has happened here. We work for hours into the night and I cannot leave the school, too much madness from the pigs in the streets, no buses running to get me back to my cousins house where I am staying. No taxi is going to come here.
I have no choice but to sleep in the school like many of my comrades have been doing all week long. My young friend goes to find me a blanket. There is too much happening on the Indymedia floor and I find an unused class-room on the second floor. My friend has not come with a blanket so I take a stack of new GSF T-shirts to make a bed for myself on cold tiles. I check an exit on the second floor to see if I can get out in case of a police raid; it is locked. I do not like this situation but my sixth sense is, that if the police come, it will not be tonight. This intuition is stregheria (Italian ancestral magic) which kicks back in the following afternoon and gets me out of Diaz before the raid where Sky and many others gets badly beaten by the polizia. In the classroom in which I have staked a claim several young foks from Act Up want help with their English translation on a statement about AIDS, the UN and G-8 decisions. I help them, tired but glad for the diversion and comaraderie. When they leave, I am alone in the classroom again and I write to comrades in the states to let them know what is happening and eventually, I lay down on that cold floor and drift off to sleep to the sound of military helicopters and the loud noises of folks coming and going. By the middle of the night there are five others sleeping on the classroom floor in which I have camped. In the morning when I wake the place stinks of too many people without showers for too many days. It is one of the young men from Act- Up who gives me a ride later in the day taking me back to my cousins home and away from La Scula Diaz. Grazie Marco, grazie!
It was an exhilerating, powerful and painful experience in Genova last year. Even at 49 years old, I still believed taking it to the streets was one of many effective ways to fight back. Last year I passionately believed that if "we" kept up the Genova type actions, as one of many strategies, "we" could shake the imperialist shit loose! An article written just after the protests put it this way:
From this point forth everyone must be much more clear about the kind of coalitions, voluntary or not, that they engage in. I want to be precise here. In Genoa, there was a target for the destruction: banks and corporate headquarters. At least some of the street fighters were acting politically, in their way...Anyone honest has to admit that the generalized violence originated not only from the consciously agent provocateurs and not only from the consciously anticapitalist anarchists who have been part of the movement from the start, but also from the disaffected youth, apolitical gangs, Basques and other nationalists, and even a few Nazi skins looking for a good time...Can the violence be kept on target, when the movement against capitalist globalization rises to the mass scale that it must reach?...It's time for everyone, not to pull back from the movement...but to think a lot more about what their targets really are and how to reach them.
Brian Holmes, Violence in Genoa: the target and the turning point. Italy.Indymedia, July 24, 2001
It's a year later and the 9/11 "hit" has dramatically upped the ante in the hegemony game. Not surprisingly, the G-8 terrorists have decided to use it for carte blanche and declare open season on "we, the people". After protesting in New York in January, its looking to me like protests here in the USA, and probably everywhere, are now a major mechanism for the agents and informants to get us all in one place, take our names and photos for future criminalization and still keep some illusion of "democracy" going. Maybe this has been true for a longer time than I care to admit.
In a comment a while back on Indy someone wrote: "we" is not "them", "us" is not the "USA". We are those who must become the effective mortal enemies of that entity. Naming ourselves and IT are an essential prerequisite for the project to end facism and emperialism. Anything less is inconsistent with the drive towards actual liberation/ destruction of the System and the oppression and exploitation for which it kills. Forget about protest, form your groups and pick a target. The war is now.
Not long after Genoa I said that what keeps me doing all the forms of work ( reform, rejection and revolution) I have done for the past 30 years, is a longing for justice as evidenced in everyday recognition of our human "conectedness." The need to keep connected to humanity is what gives me the strength to keep moving in this world. This "connectedness" keeps me from going insane. This "connectedness" reaches for, and steadies me, when I am feeling lost. This "connectedness" reminds me that I have allies in the fight against facism across all the barriers, including class and country. This "connectedness" keeps me from slitting my wrist when I am reminded that I am an "American." "Connectedness keeps me in touch with my ancestors. And yet, this "connectedness" doesn't cause me to hesitate in doing the things I must do. In fact, it is because of this connection to "the people" and the planet, that I am able to act. It's a choice to honor our humanity with a warrior's sense of stewardship and I rejoice to be connected. I was alive and taking a stand in Genoa, doing our work of taking it to the streets. What will that work be now?
In solidarity,
June Scorza Terpstra
