[spectre] Update on Genoa Court Case: 225 years of jail asked for 25 protestors

Wed Oct 24 21:49:15 CEST 2007

Genoa court case are not ending tomorrow, but they are drawing to a close, 
an people seems to have forgotten what Genoa meant and how big part of 
history we have been when we decided to take the streets in those days of 
july 2001. While the court cases against police officiers for the tortures 
in Bolzaneto and for the raid in the Diaz school move slowly forward (one 
will be ending by the end of the year and the other around summer 2008) 
towards meak convictions and satute of limitations after the first court 
sentence, the court case against 25 protestors has seen this last weeks the 
prosecutors final speech.

In their speech the prosecutors Anna Canepa and Andrea Canciani frontally 
attacked the protest in Genoa, asking 225 years of jail for the 25 people 
accused of devastating and sacking the city on july 20th and 21st. The 
speech of the prosecutors asks people to call Genoa events for what they 
were: devastation, sacking, arson. They stated that at the same time the 
massacres and the abuses of police should be prosecuted but never did 
themselves open an investigation on the facts, and insisted that they 
should be kept out of the court case against 25 protestors. The prosecutors 
actually said that people decided to resist and that this fact should be 
sanctioned, since they should have dispersed and eventually file a complain 
for the violence the police enacted.
In their speech the prosecutors tried to explain the judge that all of 
those who were present in Genoa are equally responsible of the allegations, 
since "moral responsability is even more crucial than material 
responsability for Genoa events: if I inspire 20 people to throw a stone I 
should be hold more responsible of devastation than if I threw five of 
them". This brings back criminal codes to the middle age, where you were 
not supposed to actually have done anything to be convicted. This is why 
some of the accused where asked to be convicted to 6 years only because 
they are seen around the scenes of the riots (not doing anything particular 
or in a lot of cases just putting some trash bin in the streets to slow 
down police charges).

But this is not the worst part of the prosecutors speech, since they have 
been reinterpreting Genoa to provide history with a clean and one-sided 
version of the events: Police acted correctly and protestors are oversizing 
the abuses, but the Truth is that they should have gone home and let the 
Summit be. The prosecutor have been stating that the charge in via 
Tolemaide against the Tute Bianche demo was fairly quick and not 
particularly violent, so it's not understandable how protestors would 
complain constantly of "fearing for their own life"; they have been saying 
that Carabinieri armored transport only charged at full speed twice and 
that the barricades were made before this, so protestors should not "fuss" 
about it being the reason for the vehicle attack. They even came to 
minimize Carlo Giuliani's death, saying that there could have been worse 
situation if the Carabinieri inside the soon-to-be-burned van were not 
rescued by their colleagues.

Our history is being raped by two prosecutors who desperately want to show 
that 4 years of enquiry were useful (even if to justify their lies they 
misuse only statements of the defense's witness) and that someone is 
responsible for what happened in Genoa. They want to show off in the "trial 
that will change many a ways to do court cases in Italy", at the expenses 
of 25 protestors like all of us. If the judges will acknoledge the point of 
view of the prosecutors, and convict 25 people to 6-16 years of jail, each 
one of us could be the next culprit. Think of how many insults you have 
shouted during the g8 in genoa, think of how many stones you have thrown, 
think of how much rage you felt while you and your friends were beaten.

We agree only on one point with the prosecutor. Let's call Genoa 2001 for 
what it was: it was a revolt and it was history and it was us. And that's 
why they are scared and why they want to avoid that anybody will try again 
to take away power from where it usually stands.

- -- 
 (_ http://jaromil.dyne.org _)

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