Maryam Namazie
Published in WPI Briefing
July 2001

State violence on tens of thousands of demonstrators protesting against the Group of Eight (G-8) summit of world leaders in Genoa, Italy, has left hundreds injured and Carlo Guiliani dead. Paramilitary police shot 23-year-old Guiliani and then reversed their jeep over his body once he fell to the ground. In addition to this murder, they brutally assaulted protestors, carried out bloody raids, and arrested hundreds.

From the start, the state and media criminalized the protestors in an attempt to justify the violence. Guiliani was called a ‘beggar with a criminal record’ who was murdered in ‘self-defence’ and protestors were blamed for planning and carrying out ‘attacks on property and violent clashes with police.’ Yet in Genoa, as elsewhere, it was the bourgeois state, which was the source of violence, which deployed 20,000 police, paramilitary police and soldiers, and used live ammunition, truncheons, tear gas and water cannons. It was the state, which refused entry to nearly 1,000 people before the three-day summit and closed Christopher Columbus international airport, set up barricades, seized documents, arrested hundreds, denied those arrested access to lawyers and their relatives, killed Guiliani…

Organised violence is a fundamental characteristic of the capitalist class and its state, which commits mass murder, crimes against humanity and extreme and systematic violence every single day. It is they who are responsible for Hiroshima, Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, Israel, the Taliban and the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is they who are responsible for the violence in Genoa, Gothenburg and Seattle. Clearly, they and not the protestors must be condemned.