by Wu Ming

Mr. Colucci inter­ro­ga­tion by the par­lia­men­tary com­mitte inves­ti­gat­ing vio­lence in Genoa casts new light upon nazi infiltrations

From Il Sec­olo XIX (Genoa daily paper)

EX-CHIEF OF POLICE COLUCCI SAYS: 600 NAZI INFILTRATORS WERE IN GENOA

He con­firmed the same news he had denied one month ago.

Cam­ou­flaged neo-nazis among the peace­ful pro­test­ers of the Genoa Social Forum. Yet another resound­ing rev­e­la­tion, includ­ing even a pre­cise fig­ure: six-hundred infil­tra­tors. The for­mer Que­store [local chief of police] Colucci (whom the Min­istry of Inter­nal Affairs sacked after the July 20–21 riots) stated this dur­ing the 7-hour long inter­view in front of the Par­lia­men­tary Com­mit­tee inves­ti­gat­ing G8-related events. This offi­cialy con­firms the pres­ence of groups of far-rightist provo­ca­teurs. The GSF had given the alarm in the days of the demon­stra­tions. Even ten days before the sum­mit, Il Sec­olo XIX had pub­lished con­fi­den­tial police files on poten­tial infiltrations.

For the first time Colucci was explicit about neon­azis. He answered a ques­tion by PRC [com­mu­nist] con­gress­woman Gra­ziella Mas­cia: You received intel­li­gence reports on ultra-right groups plan­ning to join the demon­stra­tions, why did you not stop them?. The for­mer chief of police said: As far as I know the six-hundred ultra-right infil­tra­tors did not take part to vio­lent action on the ter­ri­tory. Those few words, six hun­dred ultra-right infil­tra­tors, open our eyes to a wider land­scape. The pre­vi­ous report on the movement’s street action, which Colucci him­self deliv­ered to the offi­cers in charge, con­tained no such ref­er­ence. The report is dated July 12th, and the Com­mit­tee has cited it sev­eral times. Not only it pro­vided the police with the exact num­ber of Black Bloc activists com­ing to town (there is a ref­er­ence to 500 Britons): it also went: Some Turin mem­bers of Forza Nuova [the most pop­u­lar Ital­ian Neo-fascist party, t.n.] will form groups of 25–30 trust­wor­thy mil­i­tants in order to infil­trate the so-called White Over­alls. These groups will attack the police with cold steel and dis­credit the left-wing.

Never the less, on July 25th Colucci him­self turned down dozens of eye-witness accounts on the pres­ence of nazis, right-wing skin­heads and hooli­gans. He said: There is absolutely no evi­dence that far-rightists infil­trated the demon­stra­tions. That report was prior to the G8 sum­mit and was about _potential_ risks such as infil­tra­tions. Noth­ing like that actu­ally took place.

Offi­cial denials were sent out by ultra-right groups Forza Nuova and Fronte Nazionale. And yet Bia­gio Cac­ci­ola, leader of neo-fascist FUAN, had admit­ted that 300 of our boys were in the streets of Genoa. And yet free-lance jour­nal­ist Mauro Bocci had inter­viewed and pho­tographed a young British nazi in the Black Bloc, nick­named Doggy, who told him: I don’t give a shit about the G8, our Ital­ian broth­ers invited us and we came!. More­over, dur­ing the demon­stra­tions a social worker from Emilia-Romagna told Vit­to­rio Agno­letto [spokesper­son of the GSF, t.n.] she had seen some of the peo­ple she assisted (belong­ing to neo-fascist groups) on two coaches along with their fel­lows. Accord­ing to the GSF, sixty of them camped at Val­bis­agno (where most Black Bloc­sters camped too). Some WWF mem­bers spot­ted a group of AC Inter tifosi approach­ing a demo. They wore fas­cist orna­ments on their jack­ets, such as swastikas, celtic crosses etc.

How­ever, the most incred­i­ble news came from the Bolzaneto police sta­tion: the pho­to­cam­eras of two Ger­man men under arrest, who were charged with being part of the Black Bloc and are still in jail, con­tained films with pic­tures of the Genoa riots and... pic­tures of Nazi ral­lies recently occurred in Germany.

Gra­ziella Mas­cia said: I asked Colucci why he did not warned the GSF about the pres­ence of nazi infil­tra­tors. He replied that that was not his duty. Now it is clear that he cer­tainly under­es­ti­mated the dan­ger, either pur­pose­fully or not. Nobody was inter­ested in pro­tect­ing the cit­i­zens who were going to demon­strate. They only thought of the Red Zone.