The Anarchists' Ball

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Anarchy is supposed to be fun. "If there's no dancing," the 20th century American anarchist Emma Goldman famously said, "count me out." But when 150,000 anticapitalist-if-not-all-quite-anarchist demonstrators greet George W. Bush and seven other leaders of the industrialized world in Genoa, Italy, this week, it will hardly feel like a party. Once the G-8 summit gets under way Friday, Genoa's airport will close. At least 15,000 police will pour onto the streets, armed with tear gas and water cannons. Naval gunships will trawl the Italian port, looking to pick off any suspicious dinghies headed for the European Vision, the cruise liner on which seven leaders are staying. Forget about grabbing a cappuccino: coffee-bar owners have already made plans to seal their windows with steel curtains. The area surrounding the Palazzo Ducale, where the delegates will meet, usually bustles with activity; by the end of the week it will resemble a ghost town. And that's if things go well.

If they don't, Genoa will probably witness a version of the riotous--and of late almost deadly--unrest that has attended every international gabfest since the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization in 1999. The most violent clash yet erupted last month in Goteborg, Sweden, when a demonstration of 25,000 people against a summit of European Union leaders turned into a melee that injured dozens and resulted in hundreds of arrests. Italy's Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini predicts Genoa "will be like Goteborg, or worse." On the websites that summit-hopping protesters use to swap intelligence, the three days of action in Genoa are being hyped as the culmination of Europe's "summer of resistance," an antiglobalapalooza that included bust-ups in Goteborg, Barcelona and Salzburg. A convergence of events--Italy's election of megamogul Silvio Berlusconi as Prime Minister, the shooting of three demonstrators in Goteborg, the presence of Bush--will make Genoa, says Bernard Cassen, founder of the French antiglobalization group ATTAC, the "biggest demonstration against globalization ever."

Most who will participate--a brigade clumsily classified as "antiglobalization" and with agendas that range from saving the earth to defending workers' rights and opposing free trade--don't intend to get violent. They say their aim is to gather peacefully in the streets, to stage a democratic carnival next to a gathering of suits. Only a tiny fraction of the throng at such events turns militant. But authorities say that some of the mayhem at several recent anticapitalist rallies was perpetrated by serial rioters. A top Swedish official investigating the Goteborg disturbance believes a nucleus of 500 European radicals has played a part in more than one violent clash. Says Bengt Landahl, a chief prosecutor on the case: "We're dealing with an organized network of troublemakers." Yet authorities say they have little power to crack down on such groups before they act up. "We don't consider them terrorists," says a spokesman for Europol, the Continent's transnational police agency. "They are rioters." Even Landahl concedes, "We're not yet sure how to even label them."

Everyone is sure, however, that the now inevitable demonstrations have become combustible. At last September's IMF-World Bank summit in Prague, demonstrators put 20 policemen in the hospital and injured 103 more. The Goteborg melee ended with three people shot, the first time live ammunition has been used against antiglobalization demonstrators in the Western world--an incident that has radicalized many of them. (A 19-year-old Goteborg protester who was shot in the stomach remains hospitalized.) "Things are coming to a head," says Shaun Dey, an activist in the London-based outfit Globalize Resistance. "The way things are going, somebody is going to get killed."

The radical surge presents a moral dilemma for those mainstream organizations that make up the core of the sprawling antiglobalization movement. With the lives of people on both sides of police lines in greater peril, some groups are grasping for a new strategy. The environmental activist group Friends of the Earth announced last week that it will stay away from Genoa. "We're not going because we've received no guarantees it will be peaceful," says Duncan McLaren, a spokesman. Others may yet pull out. Says Fleur Anderson, head of campaigns for the Roman Catholic relief charity CAFOD: "We'll be monitoring the situation the whole time we're in Genoa."

Intelligence officials from the G-8 countries have spent weeks exchanging ideas for containing the mayhem. The police have divided the city into a "yellow zone," where people will be free to roam but not demonstrate, and a "red zone," which will encircle the summit venue and be heavily barricaded. A shields-to-fists confrontation seems inevitable on Friday, when protesters will attempt to breach the red zone. "In Italy the police can't fire on the protesters," says a security official. "The problem comes if one of the protesters fires on the police."