One No, Many Yeses Read online

  And I wonder, as I say my farewells to Gustavo and walk back to my hotel under a rising moon, whether this represents a new kind of politics. Could this really be the scattering of seeds that will grow into a new political idea: one that sees power as something to be exercised from the bottom, not the top; something which views all ideologies, all ‘isms’, with suspicion? Something that rejects all grand schemes, all big ideas, in favour of constructing something anew? Something that can’t yet be pinned down by either left or right? A politics not of vanguards but, at last, of people?

  I know I need to go and find out, and suddenly even leaving Chiapas seems worth it, because I am going to follow this idea, and the movement it colours, around the world, and find out what it means. I am going to look for the nos and the yeses, for the people who say and do them, from the ground up, and I am going to tell their stories. Gustavo could be wrong about all this; so could Marcos. But if they are right, what does it mean? Can the world be changed by a massing of diverse interests with a common grievance but no common programme?

  ‘The problem of power,’ Gustavo had said to me, over dinner, ‘is not somewhere up there, to be taken. It is in everybody’s hands – the hands of the people. The Zapatistas realise that. They took their power and they are using it to do something that no one would have thought they could do. This seems to me to be a lesson.’

  The question for me, now, is how far that lesson is being learned. I know there is a global movement out there; I have seen at least part of it with my own eyes. But is this what unites it: this idea of diversity versus monoculture; one no, and many yeses? Is this increasingly global tide of defiance built upon an idea that, in the words of Marcos, explains what change really means?

  ‘It is not necessary to conquer the world. It is sufficient to make it new.’

  PART 1

  one no

  ‘If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters . . . Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.’

  FREDERICK DOUGLASS, EX-SLAVE AND ABOLITIONIST, 1857

  2

  the belly of the beast

  ‘The protesters are winning. They are winning on the streets. Before too long they will be winning the arguments. Globalisation is fast becoming a cause without credible champions.’

  PHILIP STEPHENS, FINANCIAL TIMES, 17 AUGUST 2001

  ‘You can’t have a trade summit these days without tear-gas. It would be like having a cheeseburger without cheese.’

  US GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL, SUMMIT OF THE AMERICAS, APRIL 2001

  The weather is no harbinger of what is about to happen. The sky is a pure, cloudless blue and the white sun floods the domes and battlements of this most beautiful of Italian cities with a purity of light that only a Mediterranean summer can produce. It is July 2001 and here in the ancient port city of Genoa, 300,000 people have gathered to stake a claim to the future.

  By the end of the day, everything will have changed. We don’t know it yet, but we are about to undergo a baptism of fire. Fire and tear-gas and blood and bullets. And one of us is about to die.

  Right now it is mid-morning, and we have no idea what’s coming. A giant car park on the coast has been converted into an activists’ ‘convergence centre’ in which vast crowds are gathering. The atmosphere is more like a festival than a revolution. A pink fairy with gauze wings is struggling with a bottle of factor-six suntan lotion. An old man in a green robe, silver shades and white beard is parading around in front of a red Fiat ‘peace car’ with a badly rendered plastic dove on its roof. A ‘radical emancipative transformation dragon’ with six pairs of human legs is stumbling over a dog carrying a revolutionary banner in its teeth. Streamers of rainbow balloons vie for airspace with Trotskyist placards denouncing the ‘imperialism of capital’ and heart-shaped signs that say, optimistically, ‘love, respect and share the world’.

  A unicycling clown playing an accordion weaves past a throng of twenty-somethings in Zapatista T-shirts: Todos Somos Marcos, reads one. They are adjusting their red bandanas and grinning at passing photographers. Behind a group of Riverdancing cheerleaders, putting themselves through a final practice routine, headscarves and dreadlocks, nose-rings and unfortunate beards gather round a notice board fluttering with A3 sheets of scribble and brown duct tape. ‘Friday, July 20’, says one; ‘Siege of the Summit’. ‘WANTED’, says another – ‘write down what you have to give, and what you need’. The ‘what you need’ section is long but straightforward. ‘Gas masks,’ it says. ‘Gas masks, gas masks, gas masks, gas masks . . .’

  Then, from the pure blue of the sky, comes a sharp noise. Thousands of heads tilt upwards to see a steel-coloured aeroplane, a prominent stars and stripes bombasted across its tailfin, pass low overhead, the white ocean sunlight crackling across its wings. It is 11:20 A.M., George W. Bush is due to touch down at the city airport in ten minutes’ time, for a get-together with his representatives on Earth.

  ‘It’s Air Force One!’ someone shouts. A roar ripples through the crowd; a cheer, a jeer and a yell of defiance rolled into one. Hundreds of middle fingers shoot upwards in a mass salute. ‘Hey, fuckwit!’ a voice rings out. ‘Welcome to Genoa!’

  Barely a mile away, ringed with steel fences, armed police, soldiers, armoured cars and crates of tear-gas, the leaders of the eight most powerful countries in the world will soon be meeting, in closed session, to discuss everything from AIDS drugs to privatisation, climate change to biotechnology. The outcome of their private discussions will determine, to a great extent, the future of the global economy. In the medieval Ducal Palace, Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin, Silvio Berlusconi, Jean Chrétien, Gerhard Schröder, Jacques Chirac and Junichiro Koizumi are gathering for what their official agenda cosily terms a ‘fireside chat’. It is the annual meeting of the G8. It will not be allowed to chat in peace.

  To ensure that none of their people get anywhere near them, the world’s leading democracies have built themselves a one-day police state. Twenty thousand soldiers and police have been deployed, armed with live ammunition, rubber bullets, tear-gas launchers, water cannon and armoured personnel carriers. The city’s airport has been fitted with surface-to-air missile launchers. ‘Anti-terrorist scuba divers’ patrol the harbour.

  Meanwhile, the whole of the city centre has been designated a Zona Rossa – a ‘Red Zone’ – which only residents, journalists and politicos are allowed to enter. A ten-kilometre-long security fence, five metres high, has been installed, shops have been boarded up and manhole covers welded down. Trains and planes into Genoa have been cancelled and motorways are being patrolled. Italy has temporarily suspended its membership of the Schengen Agreement, which grants free movement to all EU citizens across national boundaries, and has turned a reported 2,000 people away at the border. The cost of all this to the city has been reckoned by the authorities at 250 billion lire – about $110 million. For all this, nobody knows quite what is going to happen, or who will be doing it. We are about to find out.

  Big international anti-summit demonstrations like this, whether they are against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Summit of the Americas, Asian Development Bank or G8, have only been around in their current form for a few years, but already they have developed common ways of organising. Genoa is no different. The makeup of the participants is hugely diverse: unions, environmentalists, church representatives, middle-aged anti-debt campaigners, teenage anarchists, party politicians and many thousands upon thousands of non-aligned but passionate people. No one person or organisation is ‘in charge’ of this sea of humanity; it will move as it sees fit. Nevertheless, there is a shape to it.

  Most people have got themselves into small ‘affinity groups’ with like-minded others, for security and solidarity. Those gro
ups then join up with larger groups that activists have divided themselves up into according to their beliefs and tactics. Some groups will be committed pacifists, to the extent of refusing even to defend themselves against police aggression. Others will be seeking non-violent but determined confrontation with the authorities. Others will be happy to instigate property damage; a few will even be prepared to attack the police. Some groups will try to scale the fence into the Red Zone, others won’t want to take the risk. Some will dance around the streets, others march in formation with banners and leaders. Some groups will dress up, others won’t; some will be silly, others serious; some single-issue, most multi-layered in their concerns. Nobody will tell anybody else what to do.

  In Genoa, as in Seattle and Prague before, many of the groups are colour-coded: black, white, pink, green and more. The plan is for different groups to surround the Red Zone fences at various strategic points. What happens then depends on the approach of each group. And on luck.

  I don’t have an affinity group, but I do have a friend: Robin, a long-haired, affable English anarchist who I have bumped into a couple of times over the last few days. He has lost his friends in the heaving crowd and I am here alone, so for today, we’re together, and together we’ve decided to join the pink-and-silver group. Pink fairies, pink dragons, tinselled cheerleaders in silver wigs and fishnets, blonde women with pink umbrellas, stubbly men in silver lamé trousers: the pink-and-silvers are deeply committed to what they call ‘tactical frivolity’ – a ‘confrontational carnival’, which aims to get through the fence if it can, but to do it in a way that will leave no one injured, and which people might even enjoy.

  At about midday we break free of the car park, moving in a slow shuffle out of the convergence centre and into the streets. We’re going to find the Red Zone. Police helicopters buzz overhead and a samba band strikes up. To shouts and waves from residents’ rooftops we wind our way through the streets. The sun is still shining. Robin has a full pack of rolling tobacco. It looks like being a good day.

  It’s when we reach a huge central avenue that runs from the sea to the edge of the Red Zone that things start to get confusing. Other groups are moving in from side streets and mingling with us. The streets are throbbing with thousands of people. Robin and I are sidetracked by French cultural icon José Bové and his group of chanting cheese farmers, carrying a long banner, waving their fists and shouting ‘No G8!’ through their magnificent Asterix moustaches. When we try and find the pink-and-silvers again we’re not sure which direction they’ve gone in.

  We’re standing in the middle of the road swapping tobacco and tossing coins to decide which street to head down when, from three or four side streets, masked figures in black begin flooding into the boulevard. Some of them have iron bars and none of them look pretty.

  ‘Bollocks,’ I say. ‘It’s the Black Bloc.’

  The Black Bloc are a hardcore anarchist contingent. Their philosophy is fairly straightforward. They want to smash capitalism. They want to do it by smashing the symbols of capitalism. That means banks, McDonald’s, Starbucks and anything else that looks big and filthy rich and exploitative and, well, symbolic. Or, in their own words: ‘We believe private property is theft, state property is a tool for the protection of corporate interests and that both must be destroyed for the creation of a society based on mutual aid and individual liberty.’1 And, though opinions are divided on the matter, plenty of Black Bloc-ers are also happy to smash police heads (‘Since the police are the violent face of capitalism, in other words, the guard dogs for the rich, they are on the frontlines when the anarchists come to pursue our class war against the rich’2). You either love or hate the Black Bloc, but whichever it is, it’s a bad idea to be in their way when they start getting down to work.

  We head up the street, hastily. A few of our black-clad colleagues have already broken the windows of a bank and are joyfully lobbing the computer terminals on to the streets, to raucous cheers. There is a familiar whoosh, and a line of tear-gas canisters thuds on to the asphalt ten yards away, harmonised by the sound of shattering glass and boots on cobbles. The black of the riot police melds with the black of the anarchists through a yellow mist of tear-gas. Iron bars vie with nasty-looking truncheons. Definitely time to go; but not before I have a photo of the moment. The Black Bloc, much to their chagrin, are very photogenic.

  If I’d thought about it, I would have realised that it was a stupid thing to do. As I raise my camera, a masked figure crashes in from the left and shoves me violently in the back. I stagger a few feet down the kerb. He rams an iron bar up about three inches from my nose.

  ‘No photos!’ he says. ‘Fuck off!’

  I fuck off.

  Eventually, we catch up with the pink-and-silvers. They reach the fence around the Red Zone at the same time as a group of Italian pacifists arrives. The fence is high and huge, jammed across the tiny medieval street like a counter-revolutionary barricade. A line of very tooled-up riot cops faces us on both sides of the fence, twitching in anticipation. Robin and I exchange looks. Then everybody sits down.

  For almost an hour, they remain sitting; a mass of bodies, singing songs, performing the odd bit of radical theatre and occasionally approaching the fence, where they are driven back by the humourless police. It’s overwhelmingly good-natured; from the activist side at least. But I can’t see us getting over the fence. Eventually, Robin approaches me with a guilty look on his face.

  ‘I don’t know about you,’ he says, ‘but I’m a bit . . . well, bored. I want to see some action. Look at that fence. We could easily get over that.’

  ‘Go on then. I dare you!’

  ‘I just don’t really want to sing songs all day. I don’t even know the words.’

  I have to agree. It’s time to see what is happening in the rest of the city. Later on, we will wish we’d stayed where we were.

  Down the hill, at the Brignole train station, the White Overalls are arriving from the giant, open-air athletics stadium where many activists have been sleeping. The White Overalls – Tute Bianche, in Italian – are a world away from both the Black Bloc and the pink-and-silvers. Vehemently ‘anti-ideological’, the White Overalls, an Italian movement which emerged from a network of squatted ‘social centres’ in the 1990s, oppose neoliberalism as they oppose the dogmatic alternatives to it proposed by the traditional left. Some of them are members of a network of similarly dressed activists known as Ya Basta!, which comprises a number of Zapatista support groups dedicated to solidarity with the EZLN and their message both inside and outside Chiapas. Their presence here is just the most obvious sign of the influence of the ski masks of Mexico on the hundreds of thousands on the streets of Italy.

  The White Overalls have evolved a tactic for events like this known as ‘violent non-violence’. Rejecting both the Black Bloc approach (smash the place up, attack the police) and the pacifist opposite (refuse to participate in any physical confrontation), the White Overalls are dressed in defensive body suits made of old life-jackets, plastic bottles and foam rubber bed rolls. They carry plastic shields and wear old bike helmets on their heads. They are about to engage in their favourite tactic – bouncing through the police lines, truncheon blows bouncing back off them. They refuse to return the blows, but they are determined to push back, or break through, the police lines. Watching them confront the police gives a very clear picture of where the real violence comes from – and that’s the idea.

  But today it’s not working. The White Overalls have been infiltrated from both sides; the police are attacking them, viciously, and some violent protesters are using their ranks as cover. Cobblestones and tear-gas canisters are flying; the air is thick, heavy and acrid. A running battle is raging, and it’s getting uglier by the minute. Meanwhile, around the corner from the Brignole station, extreme elements of the Black Bloc have set fire to litter bins and cars, filling the air with filthy black smoke. Shops and garages are being trashed and looted, off-licences are being raided. Whoever i
s under those masks, they’re not here for the politics. A whole street is burning and the police are doing nothing about it; they’re here, at the station, laying into the White Overalls.

  Robin pulls a scarf he’s been wearing round his neck up on to his face, to form a mask. From his pocket he pulls a pair of swimming goggles.

  ‘Right,’ he says.

  ‘Where did you get those?’ I ask, jealously.

  ‘It was really hard to find them,’ he says. ‘Sorry, man, I would have got you some, but it was the last pair they had. All the fancy dress shops are closed. I reckon it’s Berlusconi’s orders. Got to be.’ He pulls the goggles on. They have pink plastic mermaids on them.

  ‘They’re kids’ size,’ he explains. ‘It was all they had. I look fucking stupid, I know.’ Not as stupid as me, though. I don’t even have a bandana, let alone a gas mask.

  ‘Come on then,’ says Robin. We advance into the mêlée. Within ten seconds a cloud of gas thicker than mud envelops us. I can’t see a thing, my eyes are on fire and my face is ballooning. I stagger down a side street and collapse on a wall with my head in my hands. Robin doesn’t last much longer.

  ‘These goggles are shit!’ he exclaims, emerging from the yellow cloud. ‘I look stupid and they’re shit. I want my money back!’ I’m too busy trying to find my eyes to respond. Robin takes charge.

  ‘Don’t rub your eyes,’ he says, ‘it makes it worse. Here, put your head back.’ There’s a sound like the unscrewing of a bottle, then liquid cascades down my face.

  ‘Fuck!’

  ‘Keep your eyes open, man.’

  ‘What the hell is it? It’s as bad as the gas.’