G-8 Protesters Say They Were Beaten, Deprived of Rights by Police in Italy
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV and IAN JOHNSON Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Just before midnight on July 21, Miriam Heigl, a political-science student from Munich, was figuring out a way to get home after three days protesting the Group of Eight summit in the Italian city of Genoa.
As she scanned train schedules posted in the Armando Diaz school complex, some 70 members of an Italian SWAT team smashed through the front door, wielding truncheons and shields, their faces covered with blue and red handkerchiefs. Ms. Heigl and about 30 others were arrested and taken to a police barracks, where the 25-year-old says she was made to strip, humiliated and deprived of basic civil liberties.
Hospital records show that 61 others in the school fared worse -- they ended up requiring treatment for injuries. "All I remember is being hit on the head with a truncheon right away," says Melanie Jonasch, a 28-year-old archeology student from Berlin, "and then I woke up here" -- in a Genoese hospital, where she has had surgery for a broken mastoid bone behind her left ear.
To millions world-wide, the Genoa G-8 summit two weeks ago will be remembered as the most violent in a series of international protests against "globalization," a rallying cry first popularized during clashes at a 1999 trade meeting in Seattle. As the leaders of eight leading industrialized countries met in Italy, TV viewers around the world watched police fight citywide battles with anarchist militants who set dozens of cars, banks and storefronts afire.
But out of the TV cameras' gaze, another scene of violence was unfolding -- on the part of the police. Now, as details of the school raid emerge sketchily, it is turning into a political crisis for the government of Silvio Berlusconi, the pro-American media mogul who ran on a law-and-order platform.
Initially, his government firmly defended police behavior. Mr. Berlusconi said the school raid simply proved "collusion" between the anarchists and mainstream demonstrators. Communications Minister Maurizio Gasparri said it was "a detail" whether "a cop used his truncheon four times instead of just three." The police, in a report a few hours after the raid, said that the school was a "refuge of the extreme fringe of the Black Block," and all those inside were members of that violent, anarchist group.
More recently, however, the government said something may have gone wrong. The judiciary has launched an inquiry into the use of violence during the raid and the treatment of those detained. Parliament has formed a separate commission of inquiry. Interior Minister Claudio Scajola promised last Wednesday that "if some untoward behavior will emerge, and it looks like it is emerging, then it will be severely reprimanded." Shortly thereafter, he removed three top police officials, saying this would make it easier to investigate.
Part of the pressure on the government is coming from abroad, especially Germany. After first helping gather information on 39 Germans arrested in the sweep at Diaz, Berlin is calling for a fuller accounting. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer delivered that demand to his Italian counterpart in a telephone call last week.
The official inquiries are just beginning, but interviews with numerous participants and witnesses offer the most complete account yet of the events at the Diaz school. The accounts of 19 Diaz detainees, who were interviewed in five countries, and those of doctors, local officials and neighborhood witnesses indicate that heavy force was used to arrest demonstrators who, for the most part, hadn't been organizing the preceding days' violence but had been peacefully protesting. After being denied contact with lawyers and families for anywhere from one to four days, most of the people detained at Diaz were brought before judges, who released all but one and found that the overwhelming majority of the arrests were "illegitimate."
A complete response from the police wasn't possible because the raid is under investigation. In an interview, Francesco Gratteri, head of the national police Central Operative Service, partly defended the raid. "One must take into account that the raid was very energetic because it was met with an equally energetic resistance," said Mr. Gratteri, who stood in the school's courtyard when the police charged in. But he added that "evidently something abnormal happened there, which is why there is an investigation."
For Ms. Heigl, the events began around 11 p.m. on Saturday, July 21. She and her boyfriend, Tobias Hubner, were heading over to the Pertini middle school, part of a group of junior and senior high schools known as the Diaz school complex.
Ms. Heigl was feeling a sense of relief. On Friday, a militant had been shot dead by police. On Saturday afternoon, tear gas had been used to disperse a crowd estimated by the interior ministry at 200,000. As rumors circulated that the police would raid places where the demonstrators camped, such as the stadium where she and Mr. Hubner had been sleeping, they decided they wanted a safer place. They headed for the school, also open to the demonstrators, because it was just across the street from the headquarters and press center for the mainstream organizers.
Eager to Get Home
Back in Munich, Ms. Heigl had been engaged in fighting radical right-wing groups and won a prestigious national award for her work. But this was the first big demonstration she had attended, and she was exhausted from the crowds and flood of information. "Everyone was unsettled and we just wanted to get home," Ms. Heigl says.
After checking train schedules near a computer area on the ground floor, she and Mr. Hubner walked upstairs to visit a friend. Suddenly, panic broke loose. From downstairs she heard cries of "Police! Police!" as the front door crashed open. Then she heard screams and the sounds of police yelling and smashing things. "We had total fear," she says.
Panicked, she and her boyfriend looked for an escape. The school was under renovation, and scaffolding lined the outer walls. They climbed onto it and waited.
Downstairs at the computers, Ms. Jonasch stayed put, figuring that her fluency in Italian would help her explain that she wasn't a violent militant. She says she had been working as a volunteer at the headquarters and hadn't been out to the protests. But she says a group of riot police wearing helmets and body armor charged around the corner, truncheons flying. She says that besides the initial blow to her head, which knocked her out, she was hit on the shoulder and buttocks.
The hospital that treated her received dozens of similar cases. Among patients still there last week was Daniel Albrecht, a 21-year-old cello student from Berlin, who has undergone brain surgery to treat cerebral bleeding and says he hears metallic sounds when he speaks.
Another patient was Lena Zuhlke, a 24-year-old student of Indian culture at the University of Hamburg, who says she was beaten, thrown down two flights of stairs and dragged by the hair. "I didn't see any faces. Throughout all this, I couldn't see anything at all above the knees," says Ms. Zuhlke, her hand on a jar attached to her chest to catch fluid draining from her lungs.
Police, while asserting that all those inside the school were anarchist militants, also have said that any protesters who were hospitalized were extremists injured during earlier street battles. That's an explanation that doctors say doesn't mesh with the cases they saw. "There is no doubt that these wounds were fresh. We had to sew up many of them on the spot," says Roberto Papparo, head of the emergency department at Ospedale San Martino, Genoa's biggest hospital. It dealt with more than 50 injured youths from the Diaz school shortly after the raid, Dr. Papparo says, adding: "If these people weren't brought to the hospital, there is no doubt that some of them wouldn't be alive anymore."
A visit to the school several hours after the raid showed pools of blood on the floor and walls and several teeth strewn around.
Apart from a handful who escaped, all the demonstrators at Diaz who weren't hospitalized -- 32 people -- were rounded up. Ms. Heigl says that after she heard the screaming and saw police beating students unconscious, she and Mr. Hubner feared they would be in worse danger if caught clinging to scaffolding. They climbed into the room, knelt on the floor and put their hands on their heads. That didn't prevent Mr. Hubner from receiving a few blows to the back and head with a truncheon, and a dozen others interviewed say they too were hit while in a submissive position.
Ms. Heigl says she wasn't hit. She was taken to the Bolzaneto police barracks, which had been turned into a holding center for the G-8 summit. Situated inside a vast park-like complex of the national police VI Mobile Division, the center had a series of unfurnished cells that could hold 20 to 30 people each.
Detainees say they had to stand spread-eagle against the wall for two to three hours. They add that police walked up and down the line, beating those whose hands slipped and whose heads weren't bent down. "They kept cursing us and calling us names that I couldn't understand," Ms. Heigl says.
The man next to Ms. Heigl was pulled from the wall and sprayed directly in the face with tear gas, say Ms. Heigl and a protester interviewed separately. He collapsed and was dragged away to be showered. He came back later, shivering, saying he had been stripped naked and left under the water for half an hour. The group was then sent to their cells, and the man had nothing to clothe himself with except a plastic shower curtain, according to Ms. Heigl and the other person, who both say they received just one cookie each to eat on Sunday. At night, they say, they slept on a concrete floor and had just three blankets for 30 or so people.
"We had this feeling that everything was completely arbitrary and that they had lost their minds," Ms. Heigl says. "But now I see that it was all done extremely professionally. They wanted to disorient us and break us, as though they were dealing with a gang of hardened terrorists."
The prisoners were registered on Monday, and their numbers at Bolzaneto police barracks grew as many initially hospitalized were sent over. Among them was Sherman Sparks, a 23-year-old from Oregon spending a year in Europe. He said in a sworn affidavit that he had been kicked in the head and groin during the raid.
He, too, said he had to stand spread-eagle for two hours. He said in his affidavit, which he sent to the U.S. Consulate in Milan, that people standing next to him had broken arms and legs and that one man collapsed, shaking uncontrollably. That incident is related by others as well. WhenMr. Sparks couldn't understand commands in Italian, his affidavit alleges, he was slapped or beaten or his head was rammed into the wall.
Detainees held in different cells and not known to each other paint a common picture of the one to three days they spent in the detention center: Strip searches were common. Men and women alike were forced to use the toilet with police officers, usually men, in attendance. Women were denied sanitary napkins, and requests for medical attention were often refused. Roll calls went on day and night. Detainees were asked to sign documents in Italian that they couldn't understand and then sent back to the cell. Some signed, while others refused. Phone calls and contact with attorneys weren't permitted.
A Little Better
Relief for Ms. Heigl came on Tuesday, July 24, when she was one of the last to be transferred to a normal prison. Before leaving, she says, she was ordered to strip naked again while a man in a blue polo shirt inspected her. Some others say the same thing happened to them. Then they were allowed to dress and eyeglasses taken from some detainees were returned. But rings, earrings and money that had been confiscated were not returned, Ms. Heigl and some other detainees assert.
Many detainees say they felt relieved when they got to the regular prison. There, they had cots with sheets, and three meals a day. Ms. Heigl received a message from her parents.
They had been contacted by German authorities one day after the raid. Her father, Wunibald Heigl, a high-school history teacher in Munich, says the German authorities hadn't called to provide help but to find out as much as possible about his daughter. "We called the German consulate in Milan and were coldly told that everything was going according to procedures," Mr. Heigl says. The German foreign ministry had no comment on the raid, saying it was a subject of bilateral talks.
Detainees say they were given consular access for the first time on Wednesday or Thursday, except for U.S. citizens, whose diplomats visited them hours after the school raid. The detainees were also taken before judges but not allowed to speak to an attorney beforehand.
All were charged with "aggravated resistance to arrest" and "membership in an armed conspiracy to cause destruction." The raid confirmed this membership, the police say. According to their report, youths inside tried to block the entry gate and "engaged in scuffles" with the agents. One allegedly tried to stab a policeman. At a news conference, police displayed a small knife and a half-pierced protective jacket but couldn't name the attacker.
Many protesters interviewed agree that some Black Block militants may have been hiding inside the school. But they say that if present, these militants were a minority and didn't advertise their affiliation.
Possible Motive
Local government officials say the center of the Black Block was elsewhere. According to Marta Vincenzi, governor of the Genoa province, 200 to 300 militants had kicked nonviolent demonstrators out of a province-owned gym next to the Martin Luther King High School in theevening of July 19, breaking school furniture inside to fashion weapons. Ms. Vincenzi and other provincial officials say they repeatedly called police with requests to intervene, to no avail. Ms. Vincenzi theorizes that in their raid at Diaz, "police tried to offset their initial excess of tolerance with an excess of vendetta" at the school.
Material seized in the raid suggests the police missed their mark. The police report said the school "was a place dedicated to the strategic planning and material manufacturing, by all persons present inside, of instruments to attack police forces." The chief evidence was two wine bottles filled with flammable liquid plus hammers and nails taken from the construction site on school premises. In addition, the police say they confiscated 17 cameras, 13 swimming goggles, 10 Swiss army knives, four spent tear-gas shells, three cellular phones, two thermos bottles and a bottle of suntan lotion. The charges were presented to a team of judges who decided to free all but one detainee.
Ms. Heigl was released on Wednesday evening. The police initially decreed that she and the other 77 foreign detainees would be expelled from Italy and barred for five years, but Italy later said the ban didn't apply to EU citizens. Ms. Heigl's parents, who had driven to Genoa to find their daughter, followed the police truck that carried her and about 30 others to the Austrian border. There, those released were put on a train to Munich.
Ms. Heigl now will resume work on her master's degree. Earlier this year, she visited Peru to collect material for a thesis on the collapse of democracy under Alberto Fujimori. She says her experience in Genoa has given her a new appreciation of the fragility of civil liberties: "I realize now I didn't have to go all the way to Peru to do my studies."
-- Alessandra Pugliese contributed to this article.