Why the Diaz massacre is now more relevant than ever
The recurring anniversary of the 2001 carnage sets a worrying precedent, as the new Italian government seems likely to bring forth a hardening in police conduct
[🇮🇹 Click here to read this article in Italian]
It is now 17 years since the 2001 G8 summit was held in Genoa, a coastal city in the north-west of Italy. The event is sadly remembered because of the turmoil and protests that accompanied it, which mainly took place between the 19th and the 22nd of July and shocked the world for how brutally Italian law enforcement dealt with them: Amnesty International has defined the episode as «a human rights violation with a magnitude never seen before in recent European history». While the events that led to the death of the 23-year-old no-global demonstrator Carlo Giuliani are still not entirely clear, what happened at the Armando Diaz high school during the night of the 21st is well documented.
The facts are known: shortly before midnight over 300 mobile brigades officers broke into the building, which was being used as headquarters for the ‘Genoa Social Forum’, a group of movements and associations among the main organizers of the protests. Tensions ran high: clashes with the demonstrators had been going on for days, Giuliani had been killed just the day before, and many of the policemen were on the verge of losing control.
And lose control they did. The school occupants – some were already asleep – were assailed and furiously hit with kicks, punches and batons. One of the first victims was British journalist Mark Covell, whose injuries included fractured ribs, a punctured lung and a damaged spine. He stayed in a coma for fourteen hours, and the experience scarred him for life.
He was not the only one who suffered the beatings of the Italian police: the savagery was such that at a later stage an officer famously described the scene as resembling a “Mexican butchery”. At the end of the raid the injured were 82, out of the 93 people who were in the compound at the moment of the break-in. Apart from Covell, three other were in critical conditions, and many had to be taken to a hospital. Those with lesser injuries were brought to a detention center about five miles from the Diaz compound, in the Bolzaneto district. Here the violence continued overnight, with prisoners being beaten, threatened and humiliated in various ways.
For a more thorough account of that night’s horrors, I strongly recommend Nick Davies’s reportage for The Guardian, as well as the gut-wrenching Diaz - Don’t clean up this blood, a 2012 film directed by Daniele Vicari.
During the following days reports (more or less truthful) of what had happened at the Diaz started to seize more and more space on newspapers and newscasts, both Italian and foreign. Foreseeing the media attention, however, the police had cautiously seen to safeguard themselves, providing a plausible justification for their actions. That is, they had planted fake evidence inside the school premises: crowbars, hammers, knives and two Molotov cocktails – all found in other parts of the city – which were used to spin the idea that the building was sheltering armed, dangerous extremists. A perfect alibi.
Nevertheless, the chief of Italian police Gianni De Gennaro presented his resignation to Interior Minister Claudio Scajola, who in turn rejected it. Scajola, who has repeatedly denied his responsibility in the bloodbath, was a member of the second Berlusconi cabinet, that had taken office forty days before the G8 summit and would go on to become the longest-lasting administration in the history of the Italian Republic. To this day, that centre-right government has not been held accountable for the events of those days. The parliamentary opposition was denied the chance to establish an investigative committee and the Senate stroke down a motion of no confidence against Minister Scajola, while Prime Minister Berlusconi claimed his government had done «a good job» in «avoiding a national embarrassment» and blamed the poor organization of the summit on the previous administration.
As for the responsibilities of Italian law enforcement, dozens of investigations and trials began in the following months. The search for justice was an uphill road for judges and prosecution, mainly due to the obstruction by parts of the law enforcement establishment and its attempts to divert the inquiries. Also the Italian legal system was an obstacle, proving to be completely inadequate: policemen were not required to wear an identification number, which meant the majority of the officers involved remained unknown; besides, the Italian penal code did not include a law against torture, making it nearly impossible to effectively prosecute those responsible for the Diaz and Bolzaneto violence.
Those who were found guilty received sentences ranging between two and five years, but none of them ever served a prison sentence, also because of the statute of limitations, which made some of their crimes unprosecutable. Most of them were reinstated after their suspension, and some even made career advancements in the following years: the most blatant case is that of Gilberto Caldarozzi, condemned for fabricated evidence, who was named vice director of the Anti-Mafia Investigation Directorate in 2017.
Caldarozzi’s appointment was allegedly decided by former Interior Minister Marco Minniti, member of the centre-left Democratic Party, and it shows how it has always been a bipartisan objective to play down and forget what happened at the Diaz. After all, even the leftist governments have not done much to avoid the recurrence of violence and abuses by public order corps. Officers are still not required to wear identification numbers, while a law against torture was finally approved just a year ago, in July 2017, after Italy had been condemned by the European Court of Human Rights for the absence of such crime in its penal code.
Carlo Giuliani’s death and the Diaz violence have not remained a one-off case: Marcello Lonzi, Federico Aldrovandi, Gabriele Sandri, Stefano Cucchi are only some names of young men killed at the hands of law enforcement after 2001, and in a number of instances their families are still waiting for truth and justice. The best-known facts are those concerning Cucchi’s death, occurred in 2009 under unclear circumstances, but with all clues pointing towards a heavy involvement by some Carabinieri officers, who according to the prosecution abused their powers, beating the boy and inflicting him severe injuries, that allegedly led to his demise. Almost nine years later Cucchi’s murderers have not been brought to justice yet, despite his family’s – especially his sister Ilaria’s – efforts to discover the truth.
The very same Ilaria Cucchi was harshly criticized, in the past, by the new Italian Interior Minister – and leader of the right-wing party Lega – Matteo Salvini, who in 2016 declared «Cucchi’s sister should be ashamed, as far as I am concerned», adding «I’ll always stand with Police and Carabinieri». As a matter of fact, the Lega secretary has always displayed his support for law enforcement personnel, to the extent of wearing Police uniform more than once at his rallies. Now that, as minister, Salvini is responsible for coordinating the police force, we shall see if he will comply with his campaign promises: during a rally last September, he announced he would give «free rein to the men and women of law enforcement, in order to protect us and bring security, honesty and cleanliness back to our cities».
What is certain is that giving “a free hand” to those who over the years have been responsible for so many cases of abuse of power means giving them a pass, bringing forth a climate of general impunity that would result in the opposite of the security and honesty invoked by Salvini. If we also consider the further militarization of the Italian cities wanted by the Lega leader and his hard-line opposition to the law against torture – «the police force must have absolute freedom of action: if a criminal scrapes his knee or breaks his leg, that’s his own business» – it is easy to understand how the new “Government of Change” will not lose sleep over potential law enforcement abuses, but rather is likely to encourage them. Therefore, today more than ever let us remember the events of the Diaz not only as a simple historical fact, but as a warning of what can happen when the State does not properly monitor the conduct of its police forces.
