Italian television repeatedly showed grisly still shots of Mr. Giuliani, his face masked by a balaclava, hurling a fire extinguisher at a police van, then a close-up of a hand inside the van firing a pistol in return. A third photograph showed the man lying on the ground beneath the van, seemingly as if the police vehicle had run over his legs after he fell.
It was not clear today why the riot police were armed with live ammunition. The police in Seattle and in Quebec last spring had been equipped with air-guns that shot a powerful but nonlethal rubber pellet, the size of a large marble. In Genoa, the police used water cannons, riot sticks and tear gas today.
Tonight, after scenes of burning cars and tear gas dominated television images broadcast from the summit meeting, the White House issued a terse statement saying President Bush had been informed of the situation. It quoted Mr. Bush as saying, "the death is tragic," and that the violence was "highly regrettable."
As in previous demonstrations — from Seattle to Gotenberg, where a man was shot and badly wounded by the Swedish police — a small number of more radical youths, bent on battling the police, instigated a form of violence that most demonstrators did not condone.
That rift was clearly evident in Genoa, where demonstrators, who range from Catholic Scouts to Turkish Communists, today fell into three groups, coded by their appetite for confrontation by color.
There were so-called pinks, pacifists who include gay groups, but also many Italian and foreign labor associations, church groups, and other anti-globalization associations. There were "whites," bound by their desire to fight the Group of 8 with "civil disobedience" that they define as defiance and self-defense. Lastly, there were "blacks", anarchists and other fringe rebel groups that have no patience for organized marching. Today, they wore black scarves and masks and broke windows, burned cars and fought with the riot police.
The police responded by chasing demonstrators into a neighborhood cafe where regular customers were waiting out the violence, then tossed a tear gas pellet into the bar area. A demonstrator who tripped when running away was kicked and hit repeatedly with riot sticks before being dragged away for arrest. At least 70 people were detained by the police.
More than 100 people were slightly wounded, including several dozen police officers. At least two people were seriously wounded: a young woman who is in a coma and a police officer who was operated on for an injured eye.
The day began with greater expectations. Late this morning, several thousand "whites" — including groups that included an Italian association called White Overalls, as well as Greek Socialists, British members of the Socialist Workers Party, French Communist youth groups and others — had gathered at a stadium-turned-camping ground, a few miles from the summit meeting area. They pulled on makeshift foam rubber shields, life jackets, bicycle helmets, goggles and soccer shin guards in anticipation of a scuffle with the more than 16,000 police officers deployed to prevent protesters from disrupting the summit meeting. Most had the phone number of a lawyer scratched in ink on one arm.
"Our goal is pretty clear," Michael Probsting, 24, an Austrian, yelled gleefully into a megaphone to fellow members of the Revolutionary Communist International, "We want to stop the summit of the G-8."
The goal of anarchist protesters was different. Bank windows and storefronts were smashed and businesses looted. Two blocks from where Mr. Giuliani was killed, and a few hours earlier, a group of men broke into a car rental agency, smashing windows, scattering credit card forms and burning two cars.
"We disagree with those people who throw bricks and burn cars; we yelled at them to stop," said Manuel Morales, 31, a Spaniard from Grenada who was with a smaller group but left when anarchists began looting next to him. "It's terrible," he said. "They are helping the police. Now the police can say they had a pretext to attack."
Other marchers showed their dismay by turning on the violent demonstrators. When one young man, wearing a mask, kicked in a gas station window that had already been smashed, marchers screamed, "Provocateur!" and chased him into a nearby doorway.
Thousands of marchers who were headed for the so-called red zone — a six-square-mile high-security area — were pinned down and cornered a mile away by the riot police, shooting tear gas and banging riot sticks on their shields. Others fought the police in side streets, hurling stones and firebombs, weeping from tear gas. Asked what group he was with, one young protester about to throw a stone replied, almost indignantly: "I'm an anarchist. I'm not in any group."
But their actions upset organizers who had sought to keep a distance from violent groups.
"This is bad," Christophe Aguiton, a leader of the French anti-globalization group Attac, said as he ducked into a doorway to avoid tear gas. "There are people who want to use this movement to do their own thing, but they are borderline hooligans."
At the same time, around 4 p.m., other demonstrators at the Piazza Dante, about 300 yards from the Ducal Palace, the Renaissance building where the leaders met, shook the steel gates of the barricade sealing off the red zone so hard that they broke. One woman slipped into the red zone, where she was immediately grabbed by heavily armed policemen and carried away. Nearby, Mr. Bush's limousine, with flags and presidential seal, stood parked.
Today's protests were in line with the increasingly violent demonstrations that began at the Seattle trade summit meeting two years ago — a meeting that failed less because of the demonstrators than because of a rebellion by developing nations that believed that another round of free trade negotiations would hurt their workers. With each summit meeting this year, the demonstrations have grown louder, and more violent, and in some ways more effective.
Even before the summit meeting began, both Mr. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain expressed irritation with demonstrators' views of Western capitalism. The agenda inside the Ducal Palace, which included a meeting with the leaders of Nigeria and Bangladesh, was clearly intended to demonstrate that the wealthiest nations were not fixated only on their own slow economic growth in the last year.
But tonight, issues of third world debt and unfettered capitalism were not foremost on many protesters' minds. "I think tens of thousands of us are very angry," Mr. Probsting, the Austrian protester, said as he prepared for Saturday's march. "Tomorrow, we can't be naïve and wait for the police to fire cannons of tear gas. We have to be better prepared to defend ourselves."
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-000059464jul21.story?coll= la%2Dheadlines%2Dfrontpage
>...Another group of protesters ended up near Piazza Dante, a few blocks
from the Ducal Palace where the G-8 leaders were meeting. They raised a
deafening ruckus by rubbing bottles against the security fence and chanting
slogans as a small group of musicians jammed discordant music on the
saxophone, flute, clarinet and drums.
Tensions escalated when protesters began lobbing water bottles, food and water-filled balloons over the fence at riot police, who were deployed in three tiers: in armored cars and vans at the front, behind shields and riot gear several yards back, and on horseback in the rear.
Police reinforced the 2.5-mile-long red zone perimeter with outer walls of shipping containers and wooden barriers. While some protesters reached the inner ring of iron grating, police moved half a mile east from the red zone to stop one of the largest, most aggressive columns moving toward it.
Bush and his counterparts--the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia--never saw or heard the protests.
The issue that has moved people from across three continents to travel here is not whether to globalize, but how to do it in ways that will not leave the majority of people behind.
The protesters are demanding global justice on a wide range of issues, from debt relief for developing nations to lower barriers against immigration from poorer to richer countries.
But while such demands are gaining popular support in the West, the broad movement has had to contend with criticism that its summit-hopping protests are routinely marred by internal divisions and violence that detract from its causes.
Friday's violence was a case in point--a struggle for terrain not only between police and demonstrators, but among diverse factions of the anti-G-8 forces.
There was a "pink" pacifist bloc that did not seek to confront the police at all and a "yellow" civil disobedience bloc of protesters who tried to breach the summit's red zone with its members' bodies but without clubs or other weapons. The Genoa Social Forum, the overall protest organizer, persuaded both blocs to stay out of each other's way and refrain from attacking anything except the security barrier.
But there was also a "black" bloc, hundreds of anarchists, most wearing black face masks, who reject the Forum's authority and rules.
The trouble started about 12:30 p.m. when more than 100 anarchists fell into a larger march by Cobas, an Italian trade union in the pink bloc, near Piazza Tommaseo, about half a mile east of the red zone.
The anarchists started smashing bank windows. The unionists yelled at them to stop, prompting the anarchists to attack the unionists.
The anarchists were Basques, Germans, Austrians, English and others. "They were like a tower of Babel," said Jose Miguel Morales, a 31-year-old meteorologist from Spain. "They even fought among themselves."
Moving a few blocks north, the anarchists smashed up a German rental car office while the clerk on duty, Barbara Tacopucci, 25, cowered in the bathroom. They took the keys to a gray Fiat Bravo, unlocked it and set it afire. A block away, they forced a woman to abandon her car and torched it too.
The burning cars sent black smoke pouring into Via Tolemaide, part of the route of an authorized march by the yellow bloc, and drew riot police to the area.
Two miles farther east, the 3,000-strong yellow bloc was just assembling at its soggy campground for the procession, vowing to break into the G-8 area. It was this march, led by the militant leftist White Overalls group and joined by socialists from all over Europe, that had attracted most of the pre-summit attention.
After months of preparation, many protesters thought they were well equipped for the clash to come. Many wore shinguards, bicycle helmets and gas masks. By 12:45 p.m. they were marching toward the summit in a festive mood.
An hour later, the mood changed and the march stopped. Organizers did not want to move past the smoking car hulks until the anarchists left the area. Federico Mariani, one of the march leaders, berated TV crews for filming the destruction.
"This is not what the protest is about!" he shouted.
At 2:30 p.m., Mariani gave the go-ahead. Four giant plexiglass shields were placed side by side across the road on rollers, in front of the first row of marchers, who resumed the procession.
The strange spectacle of the rolling shields did not last long. It reached the corner of Tolemaide and Corso Torino, where at 3 p.m. a full-scale riot erupted, started by the Carabinieri, blue-clad military police.
Behind shields and gas masks superior to those of the marchers, the police moved against the crowd without warning, firing tear gas. As row after row of Carabinieri poured into Via Tolemaide, anarchists who had infiltrated the yellow bloc broke from the marchers and spilled into side streets for a melee that lasted into evening.
One police van went up in flames during a see-saw battle with rocks and firebombs. It was on one of those side streets near Piazza Alimonda that a protester was killed. Italy's top police official said he was shot, apparently by officers acting in self-defense, but witnesses differed on whether he was shot, beaten or run over by a police vehicle.
The huge shields fell away.
Some anarchists climbed onto a highway bridge above the marchers and threw rocks at the police. Most of the rocks fell on the marchers' heads. By 4:30 p.m. the marchers were in retreat, walking dejectedly back to their camp through streets of broken glass and discarded body padding.
It was a humiliating moment for leaders of the organized protest, who felt confident that their numbers could isolate troublemakers.