Giving Voice to Silence: A Study of State Violence in Bolzaneto Prison during the Genoa G8 Summit - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 180

or destroying banks, shops, and the city prison. For the whole day, the dynamics
of events followed this pattern: after the Black Bloc raids, the police replied
indiscriminately, attacking the crowd of peaceful demonstrators, including doctors,
photographers, and journalists. Against the police charge, groups of demonstrators
reacted by throwing stones and raising barricades. The city became a war zone, and
the symbolic framework of protest was transformed into a terror zone. Ethnographic
accounts referred to events as the “battle of Genoa” (Juris 2005 ). Police officers
used tanks, and during one clash, at around 5:25 pm in Piazza Alimonda, a
jeep of carabinieri (a policelike Italian corps) and its occupants were attacked
by demonstrators. One of the carabinieri inside opened fire, killing 23-year-old
Carlo Giuliani. On Saturday, 21 July, the day of the great concluding march
organized by the Gsf, the script continued: small groups intruded among the pacific
demonstrators provoking clashes and devastation. The police officers charged the
demonstrators. There were beatings, numerous episodes of police “hunting down
the man” (Zamperini and Menegatto 2011 ). Just before midnight, a special unit of
the Italian police, composed of 300 agents, broke into the Diaz School, where the
Gsf, the media center for journalists, and a dormitory for demonstrators had been
set up, searching for weapons and bombs.
The behavior of the police was particularly brutal. An English journalist, Mark
Covell, who at that moment was in front of the school gate, was overwhelmed
by the platoon of police. He was subjected to a violent beating and was almost
killed. Inside the school, where most of the people were sleeping, the police attacked
furiously, treating the unarmed people with ferocity and destroying computers. The
final result of the “bloody” operation was around 69 injured, 3 of them critically, 1 in
a coma, and 93 arrested, accused of criminal behavior, resisting arrest, and unlawful
possession of firearms. Among the arrested, 75 were taken to the Bolzaneto prison.
In the days following the events, various eyewitnesses spoke of demonstrators'
maltreatment in the Bolzaneto prison, a center that had been set up for identifying
the arrested protesters. Most would claim that they were abused and maltreated.
The approximate results of 2 days of clashes are revealed by some statistics:
253 arrested, 606 injured, 6,200 tear gas bombs fired by police, 20 pistol shots, 50
billion lire of damage, and 1 death ( Parlamento Italiano ). According to Amnesty
International in Genoa, during the G8 there occurred the most serious abuse of
human rights in a Western country since the Second World War.
The main trials involved the Diaz School and the Bolzaneto prison. Those
carrying out the trials have been systematically blocked by the Italian authorities,
and public institutions have in fact isolated the public prosecutors charged with
conducting the investigations. If on the one hand the behavior of the public
institutions has contributed to making even more precarious the compact of trust
between citizens and the state, on the other hand the trials have had the benefit
of being the only place where communication between the concerned parties is
providing a forum for revealing an incontrovertible truth. This is especially true
in the case of Bolzaneto prison. In fact, while there is an abundance of visual
and audio materials documenting what happened in the streets of Genoa and at
the Diaz School at the hands of the police, with respect to Bolzaneto prison there