Fear in Florence

To some, the 36-hour burst of street violence at last July’s Group of Eight meeting in Genoa seemed likely to define the decade. The scenic Italian port city became a war zone as antiglobalization protesters clashed with police. More than 200 were injured, dozens arrested, and the police shot to death Carlo Giuliani, a 23-year-old Italian demonstrator. It was the worst antiglobalization violence since the makeshift movement’s birth in Seattle in 1999, and it even led some cloistered world leaders to consider rethinking those lavish international summits.

Just seven weeks later, Sept. 11 made the Genoa G-8 meeting seem almost beside the point. But while much of the rest of the world has been caught up in the war on terrorism, the globalization debate has raged on in Italy. As the country sorts out the debris left behind in Genoa — including investigations into alleged police brutality — another date with the “popolo di Seattle” is looming. From Wednesday through Sunday, Florence will host the inaugural meeting of the European Social Forum, a version of the worldwide gathering of opponents of unbridled free-market capitalism held each of the last two years in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Two weeks ago, Italian police sounded an alarm similar to the one heard before Genoa. Self-styled anarchists from across Europe will descend on a city too fragile to manage their bad intentions. “The information we have now counts 12,000 coming from abroad, those same groups from France, Austria, Germany, Spain and Greece that disrupted Genoa,” says Filippo Ascierto, a former Carabinieri paramilitary police officer and current Member of Parliament who followed much of last summer’s G-8 from a police command bunker. After debating whether to move or postpone the event, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s cabinet decided that the meeting would go on as scheduled, largely because a cancellation might provoke even greater trouble. The no-global movement has always been a grab bag of different, sometimes conflicting, interest groups, and now it is morphing into and merging with the European antiwar movement that’s rising in opposition to the threatened U.S. assault against Iraq. So authorities are focusing on an antiwar protest planned for Saturday that could draw 200,000 people. But there are also reports that some demonstrators may try to enter a nearby U.S. military base earlier in the week.

Already ambivalent about the city’s decision last April to host the event, Florentines have been sent into a panic. Of particular concern are the city’s cultural treasures — and yet no plans have been made to close museums or shield monuments from potential vandals. Still, there is a new urgency to the debate over the past 16 months about how to manage the volatile protest movement. Like most other downtown merchants, Roberto Maiani, who owns a leather shoe-and-accessory store near the Tuscan capital’s historic Ponte Vecchio, has decided to close for the four days of the summit. “The movement has the right to demonstrate and I have the right to work, but I can’t work,” he says. “Where is the freedom in that?”

But there is reason to believe that Florence won’t be another Genoa. Above all, supporters of the Social Forum note that the gathering — unlike the G-8 in Genoa or the World Trade Organization that drew protesters to Seattle — is the antiglobalization forces’ own affair. The summiteers and protesters are on the same side. “At the G8, there was something to challenge,” says Florence mayor Leonardo Domenici, who is getting heat for giving the green light for the summit. “I don’t see what there is to challenge here.” His critics say the anarchists are sure to find something. Brushing off such talk, as well as the alarmism” of the national government, the center-left city leader says he’s more concerned about infringement of the right to protest and other civil liberties in the aftermath of Sept. 11. “These rights are what make our democracy superior,” Domenici says. “We must not fall into the trap of our enemies.”

The organizers of the Social Forum acknowledge that Sept. 11 has changed the dynamic of the movement, but say their priorities are the same. “We reject the idea that terrorism is the new emergency,” says summit spokesman Claudio Jampaglia. “The emergencies remain hunger and poverty and racism.”

Event organizers shrug off suggestions that they must contain the violent elements that may arrive at their protests. The bloodshed at Genoa, they insist, was provoked by police with the silent assent of the center-right government. That’s an argument that gained wider acceptance in Italy in the aftermath of the summit, when episodes of police brutality on the streets of Genoa were broadcast — many videotaped by protesters themselves — and authorities were unable to justify the storming of a school where demonstrators were sleeping, and the subsequent beating of several of them. Opposition politicians this month made their latest call for a sweeping parliamentary investigation after it emerged that several Molotov cocktails had been planted at the school by police as a way of justifying the raid.

Jampaglia says he doesn’t expect violence in Florence, but “nothing could surprise” him after police actions in Genoa. Still, he says, the protest movement — particularly in Italy — must move on: “We need to overcome the mourning.” The first step is for the summit in Florence to offer no new reasons to mourn.