Madam President, the G8 meeting in Genoa gave nothing of substance to the poor people of the developing world: that is the truth. Worst of all, it laughed at the request by Kofi Annan for the allocation of a sum that would have been at all adequate and not just alms for the fight against AIDS. The pretensions of Western leaders to lead the world and their agencies for managing the world economy along free-enterprise lines have, since Seattle, been the object of criticism and active protest from a movement of thousands of associations and millions of people and even some States – I am thinking of South Africa – who are asking for an alternative, democratic model of globalisation oriented towards satisfying the often tragic needs of communities, especially in the developing world. In Genoa, then, the Genoa Social Forum – that is, a thousand or so organisations, all of them peaceful and non-violent, half of them Italian – called on 300 000 people to come together and express their dissent and their alternative goals. You have all seen the pictures and film footage of what happened in Genoa in the media. That is proof, Mr Ferri! I have read the newspapers and watched television. A few hundred hooligans, then, between 600 and 800 according to the Italian police themselves, were left to run riot in Genoa, even though it was known where they were staying, to destroy businesses, banks and public property, while the full strength of the police was most brutally unleashed against the peaceful demonstrators. They broke into the residences where they were sleeping and beat them; hundreds of young men and women were arrested, and in the police barracks they were beaten up, insulted, tortured, forced to stand for hours with their arms against a wall and their legs apart, forced to sing fascist anthems and praise Mussolini; and the girls were even threatened with rape. I was in Genoa over those days and I was a direct witness of the police jeeps driven at full speed and the police charges against peaceful marches, as well as the hundreds of tear-gas grenades thrown at thousands of defenceless people, amongst whom were children and disabled persons. I then went to the prisons where hundreds of young people had been transferred – Italians, Spanish, Germans, Austrians, Swedes, Swiss, aged between 18 and 20, and I collected their statements: all of them, I repeat all of them, had been beaten, insulted or tortured, many had stitches in their heads, and all that had happened in the barracks after their arrest. Right-wing authoritarian processes have a history in Europe! Together with the underlying factors, this history includes accidental events, on the one hand, and the complicity or inertia of the moderate, liberal and Catholic right on the other. The attitude emerging here of underestimation by the Council, and also by part of the political groupings represented here in Parliament, of the general trend dramatically revealed in Genoa which is taking hold of Italy, is therefore – if I may say so – irresponsible, not only towards democracy but also towards these groupings themselves. For much less, for Haider’s idle talk, Austria was subjected to surveillance and sanctions by the other 14 Member States of the Union.

Political group: GUE-NGL