From: "Rowan Wilson" <wilson_rowan-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: AUT: Italian Embassy demo
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 17:27:31 +0000


Hi all

Just a quick run-down of the demo outside the Italian Embassy in the West 
End of London on Sunday night in response to the tragic killing of Carlo 
Guiliani.

The demo must have only been called on Saturday, but still approx 200 people 
turned up at one of the entrance's to the embassy. Young and old, english 
and european, shouted 'assassin' and 'murderers' at the building (but I 
think that the majority of people there were the London anarcho milieu). 
There were only a couple of riot vans in evidence, and the police seemed 
pretty docile, although there was the usual intimidation via photographing. 
One protestor laid flowers outside the entrance. The demo started about 6pm, 
then at 7pm we all moved round to the other side of the building (which was 
weirdly just off Carlos Place) to be closer to the windows. This panicked 
the police a bit as they weren't expecting any movement.

After about 15 minutes the demo decided to move again, presumably to go back 
to the other entrance. Some guy decided to attack a Mercedes and the police 
went for him, but as far as I could see he was wrestled off the police. Then 
another spat happened further down the road (which I couldn't make out) and 
the police moved fast. A riot van sped down the road, knocking people. (It 
later became apparent that the area was crawling with police - I counted 15 
riot vans that i could see). They used a more concentrated and more quickly 
implemented version of their current favourite tactic. The demonstrators 
were surrounded and kept pinned there while each was released to be 
photographed, searched and questioned, before being pushed away from the 
area. The police certainly have this tactic sussed, and by keeping them 
there for a long time it dissipates the anger of the crowd, and makes people 
bored so they just want to go home.

As well as building up their database, it seemed that the police were 
looking to make arrests, perhaps looking for people from this years May Day 
or perhaps picking the people who'd attacked the car. By about 9:30pm they 
were getting down to the last few people and the police seemed to be 
handling these people particularly roughly. Some were shouting out the 
numbers of the cops who were being very aggressive and others noted them 
down, hopefully to use them against them later. A couple of people were 
arrested and driven off. I reckon the whole thing had pretty much finished 
by about 10pm, although i don't know if there was any attempt to re-group.

Just a couple of concluding remarks:
Why attack a car and encourage the cops to start on you when there is by no 
means no critical mass to offer protection against a large number of police?
How do we deal with this tactic that the police have developed over the past 
couple of years?

Apologies if I've misrepresented anyone or anything that happened - please 
let me know if I've got stuff wrong.

Cheers
Rowan


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