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Genova Manifestation Surrounded and Gassed

Two hundred thousand demonstrators under tear gas attacks and surrounded right now. 5th in a series of eyewitness reports by Chicago activist June C. Terpstra.
I have just returned from the front lines where 200 thousand demonstrators are blocked along the harbor by carabinieri all around. I can tell you waht I saw and what I have heard.

Within the first half hour of leaving the Piazza Kennedy area (200 thousand were already marching the streets before I left the school) as I marched along the harbor I saw carbiniera in droves down one of the side streets and then along a cliff over looking the harbor. Marchers quickly notived the heat on the hill, poised with machine guns and tear gas and we began yelling assissini (assassins). These paramilitary boys were up on a cliff, none of us could get to them and no one was throwing anything at them that I could see and I saw one of them raise his arms and shoot tear gas into the crowd. My teeth clenched, my body tightened and I just started yelling "assissini" with the crowd, and again, another tear gas into a chanting crowd of 200 thousand. As we made our way back towards Piazza Kennedy, several young men mooned the paramilitary boys and the crowd cheered.

As we moved closer towards the piazza Kennedy I decided to go up onto the balcony by the huge church on the Harbor to photograph the march and from there I saw the beginning and ongoing, like right now as I write this story, tear gas exploding right in front of the Piazza, followed by smoke from a bank beginning to burn. Simultaneously in in the crowed before me and to my left there were outbreaks of fights among boys in black and demonstrators attempting to contain them. This is what I saw in the midst of a huge colorful but tense 200 thousand manifestation of committed demonstrators who had the courage to stand again today in spite of the knowledge that those who had Carlo killed yesterday and enable the starving and torture of two thirds of the world stood right in front of them.

What I have heard since coming in to write this account and to help with IMC dispatch is that the march is divided, split into two groups with the boys in black in between smashing and molotov-ing it up. The paramilitary has the harbor surrounded and we have yet to see what will unfold for those being gassed and beaten in the streets today.

Again, I say, the war is here and here to stay. We must, by any means necessary, turn this oppression upside down until we banish it for good.
 
 

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