GENOA

by Kevin Carey

G21 Staff Writer

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Kevin Carey

KEVIN CAREY says that the journalists covering the Genoa summit betrayed the world's poor even more than the anarchists whose exploits they over-reported.

Both my regular newspapers, the liberal Guardian and centrist Independent reported on their front pages for Saturday 21st July 2001 that the Genoa summit had "been overshadowed" -- the identical phrase -- by street violence. The following day the mantra of overshadowing was repeated, joined by the BBC. On the evening of Sunday 22nd there was an announcement on US/Russian arms talks. The Genoa Communiqué was dealt with in a couple of lines and you had to try very hard to find anything on the economic conference in Zanzibar, to which I will return later.

What gripped the newspapers was the accidental death of an anarchist. But this was no piece of Dario Fo nor did it readily bring to mind Doris Lessing's Good Terrorist. What it did recall for me was a long night as an undergraduate journalist in a pokey, smoky room.

This was 1972 Cambridge when the heroics of 1968's Summer of student protest was still vivid in the memory and not quite pallid in the imitation. It was then the custom to invade university administration buildings in protest against a variety of more or less spurious or selfish causes which were not so much spurious in themselves, embracing dislike of the Greek Colonels, Apartheid South Africa, American troops in Vietnam and the capitalist system in general but rather because it was never clear how emptying a few university filing cabinets was going to help. The chief of the selfish causes in England was dislike of university examinations whereas in America it was much more serous; quite understandably, bright, young, rich things did not particularly want to risk being killed in Vietnam.

The occasion for my long vigil was a planning session for a break-in to the University of Cambridge Senate House (though the authorities were sensible enough on the next day to leave the doors open!) There were some who called themselves Trotskyists, Marxists, anarchists and International Socialists who were openly advocating violence against people and property.

Then there were the student leaders who parroted hostility to the violence but did not mind it to the extent that they would call off the symbolic protest and there were even some in the leadership who covertly wanted the violence.

Then there were the pacifists and decent idealists who were led like lambs to the slaughter, whose very dislike of violence made its outbreak even more disturbing.

There is nothing like an avowed good cause for helping criminals to feel comfortable in what they're doing. Whether we are thinking of violence in Northern Ireland or the heroics at the barricades of Genoa or whether, for that matter, we are thinking of violence in bars and at sports events, it is the same. There is an element of our community which needs -- and perhaps even enjoys -- acts of violence against property and people to which the naive and the unscrupulous lend a flimsy justification.

Liberal newspapers in particular frequently, as on this occasion, fall into a habit of lazy causality:

because the police were armed it provoked the protesters to violence; because the politicians were behind barricades it emphasised how isolated they are from real people.

I can quite understand that a neighbour might feel mild resentment if I snubbed him in the street but that would not justify his smashing in my head with an iron bar. I may commit an immoral act of some sort but it does not justify an immoral reaction.

What made me particularly concerned about the media's Genoa coverage -- apart from moral illiteracy and sloppy allusions to "real people" -- was the idea that somehow the reported "overshadowing" had been brought about by a higher, hidden force over which the journalists had no control.

These un-elected hacks decided that the life of a single white, European anarchist was worth a hundred times more column inches than the fate of millions of brown and black people in Africa and elsewhere.

Admittedly, the proposed Africa health fund of a billion Dollars is nugatory and belated; admittedly, too, the call for enlarged free trade as a way of increasing the prosperity of poor countries is at best disingenuous; but these two assessments by themselves justify a serious debate about the causes of poverty in developing countries.

The 70,000 peaceful protesters at Genoa were cynically betrayed by the violent anarchists, but the treachery of liberal journalists was much greater.

As usual, there were acres of coverage of the process of the conference, the weight of policing, the distance between politicians and people, the banquet menus but hardly anything about the substance or, for that matter, the lack of it. These people are so post-modernist in their outlook that they are incapable of shouting "Humbug!"

Janet Daley, an extreme right wing journalist writing for the Daily Telegraph -- with whom I can't remember ever agreeing before -- put the point best when she said that in the 1960s at least people who went on demos would know when they had won: the troops would be out of Vietnam, a measure of civil rights would be granted, apartheid would cease. How, she asked of the anarchists in Genoa, will these people know that they have won? Do they actually want the whole of international capitalism to collapse? And if they are both anti-corporate and anti-state, what are they to do if the state is the only bulwark against corporate hegemony? Is their point that because international agreements on curbing the power of corporations are likely to be more successful than the nation states acting alone that they oppose international agreements?

Of course, it's terribly easy to make fun of people who drive automobiles and rave about greenhouse gases, about socialists and liberals who like a good glass of claret now and again (or, in my case more often than that) and about anti-capitalists who use international airlines to travel from demo to demo.

For a group of individuals who are so set against globalisation their protests are pretty well organised through capitalist international telecommunications systems; and I bet more of them use wicked Microsoft software rather than the saintly Linux operating system

It is not that I take the anarchist argument seriously -- anarchism is the purest form of selfishness -- but I do take seriously the fact that the liberal press takes it seriously..

How can any organisation or enterprise which places the highest value on social solidarity give any serious intellectual houseroom to people whose only consistent driver is total renunciation of anything collective?

There are two separate but important debates to be had over African poverty: the first is whether economic aid without political reform can ever be effective; the second is whether multi party democracy and free market capitalism are inseparable. At an even more detailed level there are questions about the political and economic future of the three possible motors for the African economy, Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt. The Communiqué from the Zanzibar conference asked pointedly whether the further lifting of trading restrictions would only result in damage to vulnerable economies; and it asked whether any global trade reform package could be fair to Africa if it did not include massive cuts in government support to agriculture in Europe and the United States.

Good questions requiring careful answers; but don't expect the media to help.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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