Wednesday July 25 12:51 PM ET

Funeral Held for Italy G8 Protester

By ALESSANDRA RIZZO, Associated Press Writer

GENOA, Italy (AP) - His coffin draped in the red-and-gold banner of his beloved soccer team, the young protester shot by police during last week's riots at the Group of Eight summit was laid to rest Wednesday by thousands of mourners.

Carlo Giuliani, 23, was the first person killed in an anti-globalization protest since the movement began two years ago and the first to die in an Italian protest in 25 years.

``In his short life, Carlo has given us many things,'' his father, Giuliano Giuliani, said in a shaking voice. ``Let's try, in Carlo's name, to be united, to refuse violence.''

At the family's request, there were no banners and virtually no flowers at the hour-long secular ceremony at the Staglieno cemetery on the outskirts of Genoa.

A few people attending wore T-shirts reading: ``The killer's car: CC AE 217,'' the license plate of the Carabinieri vehicle that ran over Giuliani's dead body after a policeman shot him Friday.

As the coffin was carried by friends through the crowd, applause erupted. Some people thrust forward their fists, others shouted Giuliani's name.

During the ceremony, one friend played guitar and another read a poem Giuliani liked. Mourners put bottles of beer and a black hood on the coffin that was covered by the flag of the Rome soccer team Giuliani supported, AS Roma.

Friends and relatives described Giuliani, who was born in Rome, as a generous, goodhearted man with a rebel spirit, tormented by the injustice he saw in the world.

Most called him ``Carletto,'' a nickname referring to his small size.

``In the end, we all want the same thing: A better world, or, at least a less disgusting one,'' said the victim's father, an official with Italy's largest union. ``But it takes time, patience and caution.''

``Carlo, you'll always be in out heart,'' shouted one mourner as the body was buried at the cemetery.

``It shouldn't have happened, it's crazy to die like this,'' said a tearful Elisabetta Boccia, a 19-year-old student who didn't know Giuliani but came to mourn him.

Giuliani was killed Friday. Photos showed him, hooded and approaching a jeep of the Carabinieri paramilitary police with a fire extinguisher lifted in his arms, and an officer inside pointing a gun in his direction. Subsequent pictures showed him prone on the ground, his body beneath the jeep.

Hours after the shooting, a makeshift shrine was created at the site. The name of the square, Piazza Gaetano Alimonda, was crossed off and now the sign reads, ``Piazza Carlo Giuliani, a boy,'' written in blue marker.

The gate of a church overlooking the square has been covered with flags, banners and T-shirts. Handwritten notes, bottles of beer, cigarettes, gas masks, candles and hundreds of other items are still scattered on the ground.

``It doesn't matter who he was. He was killed,'' read one banner, while a white T-shirt on the gate read: ``They have killed a boy in the square where I was born.''

The interior minister, Claudio Scajola, has said the policeman fired the shots in self-defense, without aiming, to protect himself from an attack ``which was becoming a lynching.'' The opposition has called for Scajola's resignation.

The policeman faces a possible manslaughter charge. Wounded during the attack on his vehicle, he was released from a Genoa hospital on Tuesday.

About 500 people were injured and more than 200 arrested during the weekend riots at the G-8 summit. Damage to property has been estimated at million.

Published on Wednesday, July 25, 2001 in the San Francisco Chronicle

Anti-Globalization Effort Scores Points

Protesters' Influence Grows Despite Violence

by Robert Collier



From Genoa, Italy, to the Bay Area, these are heady yet bewildering times for the growing throngs of people who are taking to the streets to denounce free trade.

Last weekend's Group of Eight summit was yet more proof that the anti- globalization movement has become the biggest left-of-center force for social protest in decades.

But many worry that the movement's newfound influence could be jeopardized by the hooligans who turned Genoa and other protest venues into battlegrounds.

Those thoughts were going through Kevin Danaher's mind as he wandered past block after block of burned cars and gutted buildings in Genoa.

"I've never seen anything like this," said Danaher, co-founder of Global Exchange, a San Francisco human rights group that has been a key organizer in the anti-globalization movement. Speaking by telephone, he added: "The violence by police and by a minority of protesters have managed to wipe our issues off the table."

"We've advanced to the point where we have to show people that (reform) can be done without disorder," Danaher said.

Despite the chaos, some global leaders -- including French President Jacques Chirac and United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan -- have partially endorsed the protesters' demands that trade be linked to human rights and the environment and that poor nations' foreign debt be forgiven.

But Chirac said he and his G-8 counterparts were "traumatized" by the Genoa violence, which left one protester dead, more than 400 people injured and roughly million in damages.

The anti-globalization movement's growing influence can also be seen on Capitol Hill, where Republicans this week are fighting an uphill battle to renew "fast track" authority, which would enable President Bush to negotiate international trade pacts and force Congress to vote on them without amendments.

Bush needs fast track to persuade foreign leaders to make concessions in talks at the World Trade Organization and negotiations to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement to the entire Western Hemisphere. Both initiatives are stalled because of numerous commercial disputes.

The change in attitudes is personified by Rep. Robert Matsui, D-Sacramento, a staunch free trader who now opposes the Bush fast-track plan. "I don't agree with the protesters in Genoa, but there are fundamental problems we need to resolve about free trade," Matsui said.

"For example, what kind of controls are we going to allow about food safety, like on beef hormones or genetically altered food? Or if the Europeans turn down American companies' mergers and acquisitions, should that be part of trade discussions? These are legitimate issues that this White House hasn't even begun to think or talk about."



U.S. LAWS AT RISK

Like Matsui, many free-trade advocates now say that protections for labor rights and the environment must be included in trade pacts. Many business and farm groups also oppose low-price competition brought by such pacts and express fears that U.S. laws -- ranging from anti-dumping tariffs to health regulations and agricultural subsidies -- could be successfully challenged by other nations as trade barriers.

"What's interesting is the array of people who now are working for common ground," said Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco.

"There's a realization that the environment and workers' rights are directly related to trade and must be at the core of any new agreements."

The switch among congressional free traders began at the World Trade Organization's summit in Seattle in 1999, which collapsed amid the same sort of huge, chaotic demonstrations as occurred in Genoa.

After Seattle came protests at annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, the Republican convention in Philadelphia, the Democratic convention in Los Angeles, the Americas summit in Quebec and a half-dozen events in Europe.

Protesters say their next target comes in late September, when the World Bank and IMF hold another meeting in Washington.

"We're at a very volatile moment of large policy debates fought under the cloud of increasingly loud protests, and opinions are starting to shift and break loose from old habits in all sorts of surprising ways," said Daniel Seligman, trade policy director of the Sierra Club, which has been a key organizer of anti-globalization protests.



SECOND THOUGHTS ON FREE TRADE

Referring to the coming fast-track vote, Seligman added: "People who were staunch free traders are now promising to vote against a trade bill for the first time in their careers."

Even some business leaders say it's time to compromise.

"What's happened in Genoa has terrible relevance," said Joseph Harrison, president of the California Council for International Trade, a corporate lobbying group.

"When we get to another conference here (in the United States), the protesters will be front and center and ready for battle, like Seattle and Quebec. In the halls of government, people have come to realize these are important issues."

All this would be great, from the activists' point of view, except for those pesky radicals who keep muddying the message. Frustrated, many in the movement are espousing the once-heretical view that a little law and order isn't so bad.

"We have to figure out ways of disciplining the movement," Danaher said. "If we don't police ourselves, the police will do it for us."

Others see such attitudes as a sell-out to the establishment.

NOT TURNING THE OTHER CHEEK

"At a certain point, when you see your friends beaten and tear gassed, you decide not to turn the other cheek or back down from the police when they get violent," said David Solnit, a leading Bay Area activist who was expelled from Canada when he tried to join anti-NAFTA protests -- apparently because he was on an international police watch list.

Solnit is a puppeteer with Art and Revolution, a San Francisco group that has provided the oversize puppets that have adorned the protests since Seattle.

"A lot of us view (the police violence) in Genoa as being similar to the way governments of the North have been treating people of the global South . . . or what police do here in Bay Area with people of color, acting like an occupying army," Solnit said.

Seligman and other mainstream activists say that's bunk.

"The protest movement has to either evolve or die," Seligman said. "We had been moving in the direction of making a pragmatic list of demands before the craziness in Genoa, and what happened there will only confirm that trend."

©2001 San Francisco Chronicle

Wednesday, 25 July, 2001, 22:02 GMT 23:02 UK

Five G8 Britons freed

All five Britons arrested after street fighting at the Genoa summit have been released in Italy, amid allegations of police brutality and mistreatment.

Jonathan Blair, 38, from Newport, Daniel MacQuillan, 35, and Richard Moth, 32, from north London, left the police station in Pavia, northern Italy, where they were being held.

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I have never seen something like that in my professional life

Gilberto Paganni

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Mr Moth's girlfriend, Nicola Doherty, 27, also left the centre in Voghera where she was staying, but Mark Covell, 33, from London is still in hospital being treated for internal bleeding and broken ribs, although he is no longer under arrest.

The Foreign Office says none has been charged with any offence

Mr McQuillan was among a group of protesters who were detained during an allegedly brutal police raid on Saturday night.

An Italian judge had ruled the arrests of 90 protesters illegal after no one had been allowed to contact their families, lawyers or consular officials, Mr McQuillan's lawyer Gilberto Paganni said.

Mr Paganni said he was "astonished" at Mr MacQuillan's treatment by officers who refused to allow him to make a single phone call while in custody.

"I have never seen something like that in my professional life," he said.

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They probably were in a state where they could not be publicly presented without it becoming obvious to their families and the press what had been done

Jonathan Neale

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Mr Paganni called the incident "a suspension of constitutional guarantees in our country".

There were complaints from relatives and campaigners when four of the demonstrators were not allowed to see consular staff or lawyers after they were seized in a raid on the headquarters of a major protest group.

There are also allegations police used excessive force during the arrests.

Diplomats were finally granted access earlier on Wednesday after the five had been seen by an examining magistrate.

UK authorities criticised

The anti-capitalist group to which the protesters belonged has claimed the UK authorities have been ignoring the five to keep them out of the public eye.

Two other Britons arrested during the summit, Lawrence Miles, 25, and John Colin Blair, 19, originally from Ballymena, Northern Ireland, had earlier been freed by police.

Campaigners for Miss Doherty and Mr Moth had complained they were being held under conditions that breached their human rights.

'From the top'

Jonathan Neale, of Globalise Resistance, the anti-capitalist group to which the pair belonged, said they had been further beaten while in police custody and that pressure was being exerted "from on top" to keep them out of the public eye.

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Mr Neale's claims of further beatings would be investigated.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "If there are allegations of assault they of course need to be investigated."

Mr Neale also claimed the orders to leave the couple in limbo had come from Prime Minister Tony Blair in a bid to back his own stance on the riots.

The Foreign Office dismissed the claim as "rubbish".

Miss Doherty's parents have supported allegations by the solicitor for their daughter and Mr Moth that they had been assaulted by police and denied consular access.

However, Italian authorities have defended the actions of the police, who, they said, were faced by a section of protesters intent on provocation.

The couple were arrested with 88 other people when police swooped on the Genoa Social Forum (GSF) on Saturday night after two days of anti-G8 summit rioting.