COMMUNITIES AGAINST CAPITALISM
 

Running battles in Genoa streets as G8 leaders meet
Agence France Presse 

GENOA, Italy, July 20 (AFP) - Pitched battles between anti-globalisation protesters and police turned Genoa in a war zone Friday as Group of Eight leaders met behind a ring of steel to talk up the world economy. Several police and protesters were injured as radical anti-capitalists stormed the steel gates with which the police have sealed off the palatial summit venue close to the Mediterranean city's old port.

Italy's worst fears of violence were confirmed as a march by at least 15,000 demonstrators disintegrated into mayhem as rioters torched vehicles, ransacked a bank and smashed windows as they decended on the city centre. Police fired tear gas and water cannon to disperse the marchers, many of them militants who threatened to pull down the barricades delimiting the so-called "red zone", a no-go area around the Palazzo Ducale, the historic seat of Genoa's dukes where the leaders were meeting.

Thick black smoke coiled over the city centre as pre-summit calls for restraint evaporated even before Saturday's main protest grouping the whole panoply of anti-globalisation groups, expected to draw 100,000 demonstrators. Friday's protests drowned out the main business of the weekend almost as soon as it had begun -- the meeting of the leaders of the seven most industrialised countries and Russia.

Barely some 500 metres (yards) away at a round table in a vaulted hall of palace, the leaders of Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States pledged to open up a new round of world trade talks and said they were committed to ensuring that poor countries would get better access to global markets. They were to be joined by Russian President Vladimir Putin later in the afternoon when the summit would move away from economic discussions to global political issues and become the Group of Eight.

And UN Secretary General Kofi Annan too was due to join the leaders to announce a "Global AIDS and Health Fund" to fight the disease. Also expected were the leaders of several developing countries, including South Africa, Mali, Bangladesh, and Algeria, for an "outreach" meeting designed to answer criticism that the summit is nothing more than a rich man's club.

The violence will be an embarrassment to the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, which had deployed 20,000 riot police backed by naval patrol boats, anti-missile batteries and helicopters to ensure a trouble-free summit after violence wrecked the European Union summit in Gothenburg last month. But ironically it will add momentum to his call Thursday that such gatherings of world might, now constantly assailed by ever more determined anti-globalists, should be "re-thought".

"This one could be the last," he told trade union leaders. He said the next G8 meeting, "if there is another G8", should be more open and provide the chance for meetings with trade unions and other social groups. Berlusconi's declaration was received triumphantly in Genoa, where tens of thousands of anti-globalisation demonstrators have been gathering since Tuesday.

"We have already won, because Berlusconi said there would never be another G8 summit," said 29-year-old Arturo Beretti outside a sports stadium where many anarchists and leftists were staying. Though not on the official agenda, the matter is likely to be discussed during the summit, which ends on Sunday. European Commission chief Romano Prodi, another invitee at the summit, called earlier this week for a return to the intimacy and discretion of the first such summits, in the mid-1970s.