Librarians protest Murder of protestor in Genoa!

Information for Social Change (ISC) è stata una rivista di biblioteconomia politica edita in UK dal 1994 al 2021. Tra i suoi animatori Shiraz Durrani, Martyn Lowe, John Pateman…la rivista di affaccia a più riprese alle istanze dei movimenti globali contro le politiche neoliberiste rappresentate da FMI e Banca mondiale, con affondi sull’impatto in ambito bibliotecario degli accordi maturati in ambito WTO (GATT, GATS e TRIPS) in quella fase.

Alle 17.27 del 20 luglio 2001 a Genova un carabiniere spara due colpi di pistola contro il giovane Carlo Giuliani. Il defender da cui estrae la pistola passerà due volte sopra il corpo di Carlo prima di lasciare Piazza Alimonda. Nessuna giustizia è stata fatta per Carlo, mentre nei 24 anni successivi la giustizia ha perseguitato tante e tanti manifestanti accorsi in quei giorni a Genova in occasione del meeeting degli otto autoproclamati grandi della terra.

SupportoLegale nasce come progetto nel 2004 per sostenere la difesa di tutti gli imputati dei processi genovesi ai manifestanti e per aiutare la segreteria legale del Genoa Legal Forum nella gestione dell’enorme mole di materiale documentale legata ai processi relativi ai fatti del luglio 2001 in occasione delle mobilitazioni contro il G8 di Genova.

SupportoLegale è formato da persone di provenienze molto diverse (ma che hanno attraversato l’esperienza di Indymedia Italia insieme) accomunate dal rifiuto delle divisioni manichee tra buoni e cattivi che dominano il discorso post Genova. “Difendere tutti e tutte” e trasformare la solidarietà in azione politica per non lasciare indietro nessuno sono le pietre angolari del progetto.

Quest’anno Supporto Legale ha pubblicato la versione reloaded di un volume uscito nel 2021 dal titolo Nessun rimorso.

Sfogliando ISC ho trovato il comunicato successivo alla scomparsa di Carlo a firma Mark Rosenzweig, che mi pareva importante riproporvi in questi giorni. Se avrete possibilità e piacere, ci vediamo il prossimo 17 luglio a Monza e 18 luglio a Milano per la presentazione di Nessun rimorso reloaded.

Open letter fron librarians
Against the murder of people exercising the right to protest against corporate globalisation at the Genoa conference, july 2001

The undersigned Librarians, library employees, library professors & teachers of library and information sciences, information professionals, paraprofessionals and service providers, wish to express their horror at the escalating anti-civilian military mobilizations and the planned and entirely disproportionate violence exercised against fundamentally peaceful, certainly unarmed, protests of the meetings of the G7+, the WTO, the IMF/World Bank and all other gatherings of the proponents and agencies of a transnational corporate world order.

We reject (and hold responsible the entire chain of command behind it) the orchestrated, planned violence of the armed-to-the-teeth defenders of the global elite against the all-to-visible political manifestations of popular, international rejection of the agendas of the institutions perceived as imposing poliies and practices which, rather than alleviating the problems they claim to be confronting (hunger-famine on an unimaginable scale; dislocations of entire populations; marginalizations of whole sectors (class strata, nations, peoples, ethnic groups), poverty of a degree and scale which has been -and continues to be (for most people) unthinkable; rampant epidemics of fatal disease; massive environmental despouation in the overwhelming majority of the world, and increasing attacks even on the social & economic gains of most people in the so-called developed world with its welfare state protections and pubuc sectors being scrapped and shredded, including in the self-proclaimed economic ‘super-powers’) are merely interested in creating a stabilized global regime in which the attempted globalized monopolization of effective wealth and power in the hands of actors not responsible to any democratic control is imposed, while containing the disruptions created by the inevitable resistance of the masses of people affected by poucies over which they have no control.

We protest, vehemently, the murder of an anti-corporate protestor in genoa, shot and ruthlessly run-over by a military vehicle, and also the growing number of those protestors being beaten, gassed, shot at, trampled, jailed and subjected to both personal brutality and high-tech crowd control techniques for the purposes of discouraging their protests – and all such protests – and preventing them from having any impact on those world nleaders” who are presently meeting in a fortified compound in the free city of genoa.

We call on the global economic elite meeting in genoa- and ready to meet in further fortified locations over the next months as they have since the WTO debacle in seattle – to abandon the entire anti-democratic framework of their deliberations, to drop the anti-popular programs and poucies which they are pursuing and to enter into free, open dialogue, transparent and unimpeded, with representatives of civil society and of organized mass-democratic forces and movements.

Let this murder in genoa not be in vain! the escalation of this
confrontation with popular interests and representatives of the needs of the ordinary people of the world should come to a halt here and now.

The cynicism of bush who tells the world that the protests only hurt the cause of “the poor” (as if “the poor” were some category of humans apart from his own species) must be rejected wit the contempt it deserves.

We call on our fellow professionals and workers, educators, cultural activists, all those engaged in the social and cultural service sector, to reject privatization, the destruction of the public sector where it exists and its discouragement where it has yet to be significantly developed, the substitution of anti-democratic supra-national decision-making of secret bodies representing elite interests for existing democratic structures however weak.

Progressive librarians and information workers say no to corporate globalization; no to murderous violence against legitimate militant, mass anti-globalization protest; no to the erosion of democratic institutions; no to the crushing of the claims of national sovereignty and the equal rights of minorities; no to the creation of a new economic order based on the burdening of the poor nations with increasing debt!

July 21st 2001

Mark Rosenzweig, editor Progressive librarian