So what really happened in Genoa? Were there riots ? Sure. Was there destruction? Sure. Did the police go mad ? You bet they did. With authority from on high. And we don't mean the pope.

The first march, around 40,000 people, went off peacefully on Thursday. Police were persuaded to back off and put down their guns. They did so. All the various groups marched. There was no trouble and of course, no coverage in the media.

Friday was different. We arrived in town as the so-called Black Bloc had cut a swathe through the city. They had been burning cars. They had been attacking shops, most of which represented some form of power, mainly banks. But they also attacked and burnt the cars of very ordinary people. Fiat 126s lay upside down, unlikely to have ever been in the hands of an oppressor. There were also pet shops, grocery stores and smaller outlets whose repressive power was negligible. It wasn't a great sight.+

Firstly the Bloc were out on their own. They weren't heading for the fence to attack the summit and they weren't even heading for the police. Their attacks lacked symbolism. The average age of the attendees was very young, mainly Italian and German. They seem to have accepted a view of `anarchy` that, amazingly, is the one put forward by the people they claim to hate, people like Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi. Both the bloc and the leaders seem to have a view of anarchy that it is based on chaos and destruction rather than a well thought out political ideology defined by compassion and self-governance.

But enough criticism. The Bloc were unopposed by the police. The police had allowed them to set up barricades, burn and loot. Why? It is difficult to fathom because when the peaceful marchers turned up the police reaction was very different. As the so called Tutti Bianche, the White Overalls, marched down the road around 20,000 strong they were stuck in a side road. They were preparing to come out into the main road towards the so-called Red Zone, the area contained behind the steel mesh fences 20 foot high. The Tutti Binache, by the way, are a direct action group, but opposed to violence. They pad and mask themselves to avoid attack by the police. But as they prepared to turn the corner police opened fire with rounds of tear gas. Everyone, including ourselves were overcome by the gas. Forced to flee blind and choking with thousands of others. It was a wonder no one died there and then.

But then the police got their reaction. The crowds fought them back. However, unlike the Black Bloc this was reactive rather than pre-meditated. Vans and lines of Carabinieri, the para-miliatry police came under attack from stones, sticks and anything else to hand. Fighting was fierce. Police drove their armoured vans through the crowds, the majority of whom were still escaping at forty or fifty miles an hour. How no one died then and there is still beyond us. And of course all the time there was tear gas. Round after round of tear gas.

After a while of being gassed you became immune. The panic dropped. The eight inch long canisters were pumped through the air with such regularity that you could watch them coming and run accordingly. They made a high pitched whirring sound and when they hit the floor they fizzed thick white clouds. Burning like power burns in the nostrils of the `leaders` encamped on their luxury cruise liner just a couple of miles away.

No one was immune. Journalists, locals, men and women were all subject to fierce beatings from the police. One woman we found, her head dripping in rapidly congealing blood, had been attacked by seven officers. Obviously very hard men. The fact that she was a journalist had made no difference. Italian TV too showed picture after picture of police attacking indiscriminately. A local woman, (almost certainly not even involved in the protests), by any other means a chubby fifty year old Italian Mama being beaten to the ground by four well armed Carabinieri.

Then there was Carlo Giulliani. A police landrover was attacked. Not surrounded, the pictures taken by Dylan Martinez of Reuters confirmed this to be a lie. Nor was he hit by a rock as the police first claimed. He was shot in the head by live ammunition from a frightened 20 year old conscript policeman whilst his more experienced comrades-in-gas watched mere yards away. After they shot him they reversed the landrover over him, then they gassed him just to be sure. But they got it right first time. He was dead and they had upped the stakes.

So to the Saturday. An enormous peaceful march of 150,000 people. A teaming sea of bodies of all descriptions. The march went along the seafront towards a line of police but then took a right turn. A selection of the organizers went to the police line near the Red Zone. They were almost immediately gassed. The police also fired a canister into the restaurant area reserved for protestors by the sea side.

Around two minutes later the police opened fire with around fifteen canisters, filling the air with smoke. Clouds of it wafted over into nearby residences, loads of it blew back into the faces of the police. For around ten minutes the police, seemingly without any aim or reason, fired canister after canister into the crowd. A crowd that was not even heading towards them. Until then.

People were raising their hands in the air. Asking the police to stop and be restrained like they were on Thursday. But to no avail. Soon protestors were throwing the tear gas back at the police. The gas that was being fired, seemingly indiscriminately, at the restaurant area was being taken and thrown in the sea. Soon the scenario that appeared to be the one desired by the Carabinieri came true. Those most angry with the gassing moved to the front and began to fight back. Litter bins were set alight, the acrid smell of burning plastic mixed with the tingle of the gas. Later the BBC would claim on the BBC World service that "a group of protestors broke away and attacked the police with rocks". This was pure fantasy. On Saturday the police demanded war and they didn't get it so they did the next best thing.

Instead, in the end, they chased thousands of innocent people back down the sea front. The front of the crowd fought them back, the rest were the tail end of the peaceful demo. One man told us his story. "We were trying to hold up the old boys. You know the ones at the back of the protest. But they were trying to hold their wives. No one could see, they were all choking on the gas. We were shouting at them, `go with the crowd, go with the crowd. Keep walking.` Then they (the police) started firing these amazing tear gas bombs. Like doodlebugs. With fins and wings and stuff. They were eighteen inches, two foot long but they had no control over them. One ended up in the sea the others were flying all over the place, right over the heads of the people fighting the police at the front. It was like…what the fuck are they doing?"

After the debacle on the sea front we walked back down. There were literally hundereds of tear gas containers littering the street. It stuck to every pore of your body. It surrounded you just like they surrounded the Genoa Social Forum later that night. The Genoa Social Forum, if you missed it, was a building set up by a coalition of various groups to let the independent media get access to the Internet and phones. It was the place where the heads of the various groups held press conferences. There was a medical centre and a floor for the Indymedia people. On Saturday night police raided the building saying it was home to the, by now, much mentioned Black Bloc. It wasn't.

What the police wanted was revenge and they took it. Twelve demonstrators were taken out on stretchers. The walls and floors were coated in blood. Lawyers were attacked. Women were attacked. Some in their sleep. One woman had her wrist broken whilst she was sleeping. Documents, films and computer equipment were taken away.

We were staying in the Novotel. It was media central. The papers, the TV crews, the radio people, they were all there. To many corporate media journalists it was the first time they had seen the brutality of the police at first hand. One, who had been near the killing of Giulliani, had been severly beaten by them. He had a stitched head and a broken wrist. He pulled up his T-shirt to show us his official G8 accreditation pass, it was filled with blood, his own. He was too scared for us to photograph him. "Please, please understand me," he said.

We did. Because he had good reason. On the Sunday morning after the raid we awoke to find the Novotel surrounded by Carabinieri vans. Were they there to protect us? Doubtful since they had not been there on the two previous days during the troubles. Were they there to make sure we left town. Well, we thought we would ask someone who knows.

Because there was a member of the BBC's World Service Spanish division staying at the hotel. He had been around a few years. He said he recognized the patterns. Demonize, attack, demonize, attack. All the time backed up by a faithful right wing/liberal support cast of local officials, politicians and the media. "I know this," he said "I know this well, it was like this before, in Chile, under Pinochet."

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