Protesters prepare for battle in Genoa
She’s done it so many times, it takes Chiara Cassurino only a few minutes to get ready.
She’ll strap on makeshift body armour fashioned from a cut-up foam mattress, don a gas mask and goggles, top it off with a construction worker’s hard hat and hit the streets.
Tens of thousands of protesters planned to stage mass demonstrations in the Italian port city of Genoa from today, the eve of a three-day summit by the world’s big industrialised powers that is the latest international gathering to be targeted by demonstrators loosely grouped under the banner of the anti-globalisation movement.
Most of the marchers say they want to make a point - peacefully - about forgiving Third World debt, reining in giant corporations, promoting immigrants’ rights, or another issue in the constellation of left-leaning causes associated with the movement.
However, Cassurino’s group - an anarchy-minded Italian bloc called Tute Bianche, or White Overalls, for their trademark jumpsuits - could be headed for a real confrontation with the formidable security force guarding the summit sites.
Police and soldiers - about 20,000 in all - have sealed off Genoa’s medieval city centre and parts of its old port, creating a restricted-access area known as the Red Zone.
At the heart of it is the ornate 14th- century Palazzo Ducale, where the leaders of the Group of Eight, or G-8 - the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada, plus Russia - will meet.
Tute Bianche says it’s determined to break into the Red Zone on Friday, the summit’s opening day, by forming human chains and overcoming police resistance through sheer numbers.
The group’s rank and file say they’re steeled for whatever kind of melee breaks out.
‘‘If it’s violent, that’s up to the police,’’ said Cassurino, a 23-year-old who is a veteran of half a dozen such protests, including a clash at the World Bank-International Monetary Fund’s annual meeting in Prague last year that left hundreds injured.
With the international airport to be closed from today and regular rail service suspended, protesters poured into the city aboard chartered trains.
The Genoa Social Forum, an umbrella group that is organising demonstrations by hundreds of separate groups, said it expects up to 30,000 people to arrive in the next day aboard some 25 trains.
Last night, young protesters whooped and whistled as their train pulled into the Brignole station near the heart of the city then bent to struggle with bulky knapsacks and bedrolls.
For the past 19 months, gatherings of organisations like the Group of Eight, the European Union and the World Bank IMF have attracted a crowd of international summit-hoppers who gravitate from one protest to the next.
But Italy also has a well-established home grown anarchist movement, which prides itself on a long history and is out in force for this summit.
Cassurino is a case in point. Born and raised in Genoa, she says she was deeply influenced by a grandfather who fought against Italy’s Fascists, and an anarchist high-school philosophy teacher who introduced her to radical social thinkers.
She took a break from her international diplomacy studies at the University of Genoa to volunteer full time for Tute Bianche.
Even if anarchy is a guiding principle, someone’s got to do the organizing. Tute Bianche’s staging ground is a soccer and rugby station east of the city centre, where hundreds of protesters are camping out in tent dormitories.
‘‘Welcome, Disobedient Ones!’’ says a sign at the gates, where volunteers man a desk to register arrivals and take contact telephone numbers.
The stadium was adorned with eight big plastic pig heads, said by protesters to represent the G-8 governments.
‘‘The governments of this world are deeply unjust,’’ said Peppe de Cristofaro, a 30-year-old demonstrator from the Young Communist group.
Multinational corporations that are traditionally targets of anti-globalisation protests braced for trouble. McDonald’s boarded up its four restaurants in Genoa for the duration of the summit.
Two small parcel bombs exploded yesterday in the offices of the Italian clothing giant Benetton in Treviso, near Venice.
Nearly 700 people have been denied entry to Italy in the days leading up to the summit, a measure made possible by a provision of the 1985 Schengen Treaty.
It allows for free movement in western Europe, but says any member of the 11 nation bloc can suspend that for security reasons.
Germany and France also stepped up controls in an effort to prevent known hooligans from reaching Genoa.
