BY SEAN HEALY
If you've gotten used to the feel of the velvet glove around your throat, then get ready to kiss it good-bye — because if events in Gothenburg, Sweden, are anything to go by, the steel fist is making a comeback.
The shootings of three unarmed anti-capitalist demonstrators by riot police in the Scandinavian port city, during 25,000-strong protests against a June 15-16 European Union summit, are an unprecedented escalation of repression against the new global movement.
While the use of tear gas, batons, razor wire and water cannon have become common at major anti-globalisation demonstrations in the First World since Seattle in November 1999, the Gothenburg shootings were the first time that live ammunition has been used on them.
They were also the first time that live ammunition has been used on protesters in Sweden since possibly as far back as 1931. That the shootings occurred in Sweden of all places — long regarded as the symbol of a tolerant, placid, peaceful liberal democracy — says a lot about how determined the capitalist ruling class is to crush the new movement against corporate tyranny.
Before Gothenburg, government tactics against the growing anti-corporate movement were designed primarily for "containment" — to keep demonstrators away from the venues of summits of the capitalist elite so that they could proceed unhindered.
After Gothenburg, the likely shape of government tactics will be primarily aimed at active suppression — to prevent demonstrators from taking action at all, and sweeping them from the streets if they should do so.
Escalating use of force
The official account of what happened in Gothenburg is that police opened fire when they were trapped and cornered by rioting protesters; they used live ammunition because they had no other option available to them.
But this official version is contradicted by eyewitness reports from protesters. The shootings happened during an otherwise peaceable "Reclaim the City" street party held on the evening of June 15, after a day of street marches.
One eyewitness recounted, "there were a lot of kids gathered and two big trucks were rented and some DJs were playing music and kids were dancing". A brief skirmish broke out between protesters and a gang of fascists.
"Shortly thereafter the real fascists entered the scene, the Swedish police. They surrounded the park, in full riot gear and with horses...
"Somewhere the fight between activists and police broke out and people started to run from the cops who were riding and swinging their clubs. The more militant activists responded by throwing stones at the police...
"All of a sudden I heard a sharp bang, and another one. I don't know how many bangs I heard. But I looked at the police and I saw one of the police officers holding his gun aiming it at the activists. And I was hearing screams about somebody being shot."
This story is supported by video footage of one of the shootings on Swedish television. The footage shows a line of half a dozen riot police in no great danger. One protester comes forward, to within 20 metres of police, picks up a rock and throws it. As he is retreating, he is shot in the side. He walks 10 metres then collapses, his liver and kidney pierced by the bullet.
The claim that police had no option but to use live ammunition is also difficult to believe. Swedish authorities have known about, and been planning for, these protests for months and would have consulted widely with other, more experienced European police agencies for advice on how to deal with the protests.
The escalating repression in Gothenburg therefore seems to have been the result of a calculated decision by either Swedish or European leaders as a whole.
Before the protests, Swedish PM Goran Persson had made much of the "Gothenburg model" of police-protester consultation, even meeting with protest organisers personally. But this had already been abandoned by June 14, the day before the protests were to begin, when, in a clear provocation, police raided and closed one of the schools leased to protest groups as an accommodation and convergence space.
Riot police laid siege to the Hvitfeldtska secondary school for a full day, sealing it off with large shipping containers, blocking all entrances but one and then searching each person as they left the building. Some were detained inside police cars for up to 12 hours.
Having already enraged protesters, from that point on Swedish riot police steadily and deliberately escalated the use of force: first baton charges, then dogs and horses, then finally the shootings.
Protesters' actions, including property damage and stone throwing, were in nearly all cases a response to police operations; some eyewitnesses even claim that police started the stone throwing themselves.
'Pre-emptive state of emergency'
The Gothenburg events do not seem to be a one-off. Already, police forces around Europe are planning drastically up-scaled repressive efforts for future protests during the European "Summer of Resistance".
Already, newly elected Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi has promised to put the northern port city of Genoa under virtual martial law during the scheduled July 20-22 summit of the G8, the Group of Eight leading industrialised countries.
G8 meetings are a special target of protester ire, as they are arguably the most critical of all the annual summits — at the same time both the most influential, affecting all areas of global policy, and the most exclusive. Large protests have occurred at the last three G8 summits, in Birmingham in England, Cologne in Germany and Okinawa in Japan.
One hundred thousand people are expected to protest in Genoa against the G8, coming mainly from Italy's strong social movements, including trade unionists, environmentalists, Communists, anarchists and autonomists.
Protest organisers' plans for Genoa include an alternative summit, a day of non-violent direct action and an eight- to 10-km march on the city centre.
Party of Communist Refoundation leader Fausto Bertinotti has led a charge since Gothenburg to have the G8 summit cancelled altogether; Communist deputies waved banners reading "Throw the G8 into the sea" when Berlusconi addressed the Italian Senate on June 18.
The Greens have backed a call for at least its postponement, one of the party's MPs describing the security plan as "unbelievable madness".
Berlusconi, however, has other ideas, announcing that the summit will go ahead, but with unprecedented security measures which resemble, according to at least one protest group, a "pre-emptive state of emergency".
The whole city of Genoa will be shut down for four days from July 18 to 22. The airport, main train stations and key motorway junctions will all be closed. Access will be limited to a small number of checkpoints, run by Italy's elite national police force, the carabinieri.
The centre of the city, where the summit itself is to be held, will be designated a "red zone" with no-one allowed in or out. Those employed within the zone are being instructed to stay at home.
Berlusconi plans to deploy 20,000 police officers (as against 2000 in Gothenburg), 15 helicopters, four planes, seven naval boats, rooftop squads, hidden cameras, satellite surveillance, a 500 square metre refrigerated room for use as a morgue and 200 body bags.
The Italian PM and media magnate has assured citizens that there will be spaces where people can protest, but how they are even supposed to get access to the city has been left unclear.
The intent, however, seems clear enough: not just to prevent the protests "turning violent" but to prevent them from going ahead at all.
There is even speculation in the European press and diplomatic circles that the summit won't even be held in the city itself, but rather in a medieval castle or in its modern-day equivalent, a US warship parked off the coast surrounded by frogmen, police motorboats and choppers.
Authorities in the Austrian town of Salzburg have simply banned outright demonstrations planned for July 1-3 against a World Economic Forum summit, the same elite body which was the subject of the Melbourne S11 protests and actions in the Swiss ski resort town of Davos in January.
The Austrian government has also announced that it will temporarily pull out of the Schengen agreement on open intra-European borders and close the Austrian frontier from June 25 to July 3.
Shaken by the protests, the European Union has announced that Gothenburg will be the last of its traditionally rotating summits. From now on, such summits will be held in the EU headquarters in Brussels, where riot police know exactly what they're doing.
"If a bunch of pensioners start to protest against cruelty to cats [the Belgian police] move in with the razor wire and Black Marias [police vans]", one unnamed EU official told the London Times with obvious glee.
Both the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation have chosen to avoid such measures altogether, by organising conferences in places immune to protest.
The World Bank has cancelled its planned June 25-27 conference on globalisation in Barcelona — it will be held in cyberspace instead — while the WTO is planning its next ministerial meeting in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, where there has never been a protest.
That option is growing more popular in some elite circles. The conservative London Times, for example, argued after Gothenburg that if "summits continue in their present form, perhaps all meetings of leaders will have to be held in Alcatraz or Devil's Island. That will signify the physical exile of leadership". Instead, it says that such summits should simply be cancelled altogether.
Strategic failure
The shift in ruling-class tactics — from containment to suppression — is not a sign of strength, however, but of weakness. It is the desperate ploy of an elite on the run.
The tactical change is the result of a strategic failure. Since being shocked by the size and militancy of the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation, governments and corporations have followed a line of co-option, both of individual protest groups and of the issues they're protesting about.
Global leaders have made a great show of "listening" and of making (rather minor) concessions to the new global movement, in the hope of splitting moderates from radicals and of confusing public opinion.
The use of police force at the summits has been presented as purely defensive: "We support your right to protest, in return for your respect for our right to free speech". This strategy has largely failed.
While the distinction between liberal reformists and radicals within the movement remains strong, the global elite has had little success splitting the two apart.
Elite admissions that capitalist globalisation has failed much of the world's people have only confirmed the beliefs of both radicals and moderates, and spurred them to redouble their efforts.
Liberal reformist forces, like Jubilee 2000 (now Drop the Debt) or Oxfam, have largely not been satisfied by so-far measly concessions and have continued their campaigns. The breadth of opposition to a new round of World Trade Organisation talks, for example, is even wider than it was before Seattle.
As for the radicals, not only have they not been isolated or nullified, but their influence within the movement has strengthened dramatically.
Governments' use of repressive force, meanwhile, has had to escalate, as ruling elite has found that the new global movement is not easy to intimidate.
That escalation — the giant wall around the venue of the April Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, Canada, or the use of near-lethal force in Gothenburg — has in turn only strengthened the movement's commitment to mass direct action and deepened its public support, at least within a sizeable minority of the population, if not among working people as a whole.
The turn to outright suppression has no greater guarantee of success than the previous strategy, however, and carries considerable risks for the global elite. It certainly makes clear one of the protesters' main claims: that capitalist "democracy" is little more than a PR-obscured dictatorship of the wealthy, based on the ability and willingness of the state to violently repress popular opposition to the corporate elite's self-serving, wealth-concentrating globalisation agenda.