Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

We arrived in Genoa a few days before the demonstrations were due to start, to help set up the Indymedia Center. I traveled in a tiny camper van with my friend Maria from Germany. The border caused no problem?we told the border guards we were holidaying on the coast, giving each other a little knowing look. When we arrived in Genoa, the heavy police presence was immediately apparent.

The convergence center for the Genoa protests was being set up down near the beach. At the stadium just a hundred yards away, there was a huge police headquarters. After wandering around for a while, we camped for the night parked out of sight beside one of the big tents of the half-finished convergence center. In the morning, after meeting up with other groups, we made our way to the Indymedia Center situated in the Diaz School.

We found a place to stay in the Indymedia Center. The video room was fiill of technical equipment, but none of it seemed to be available for pubUc use. Fortunately, two computers were "requisitioned" from other rooms and the needed video-editing software installed?although predictably one of the computers soon broke, never to work again.

Maria and I took to the streets to make the first report from the convergence center. It wasn't long before we were stopped and detained by a group of undercover police while filming. We were outside the main police accommodation stadium, which mysteriously happened to be right next to the convergence center. We were held for a few hours while more undercover police arrived, imtil there were ten or twelve police and two cars around us. They asked me for the tape in the camera, and I refused. They took down all our details and checked our passports?it became a bit nerve-racking. However, I secretly filmed some of the secret police.

Maria recalls, "It was the first time I was in a big protest event like this, so I was rather naive about what to expect ... It felt like being suddenly inside a movie. Luckily, I found people explaining to me in detail what to expect from police during the day of

action, how to deal with tear gas, and so on ... in that sense, the Indymedia Center was a somewhat casual but rather helpful and warm place to be."

We continued to dodge around the streets, trying to film the barrier being constructed that would surround the G-8 leaders. We were stopped and detained twice, for an hour the first time and nearly four hours the second time. Arguing with the police and attempting to exercise any civil rights proved fruitless. This was the first nagging Or-wellian feeling that was reinforced over the week of demonstrations. The police were a State in themselves, and there was obviously no respect for the role of any other law in their actions. Fear was starting to stalk the streets, encircling the meeting of the cabal of world power. All the same, we kept filming, to record the historic event.

FoUowdng a heavy day of rioting and police brutaHty, in which demonstiator Carlo Giuliani was shot and killed, I headed back to the Indymedia Center. Afl:er the shooting, the tension was rising, along with paranoia about police repression. People began to leave both the Indymedia Center and Genoa. There was much discussion of what to do, but no firm consensus was reached. Many people made the decision to leave indepen-dentiy, to such an extent that at the Indymedia Center our numbers were cut in half as the night wore on. More reports of potice movements came in. Some protesters threw stones at a police car outside the IMC, which only heightened the tension and paranoia. We held a meeting to try to decide what to do with the video material and ourselves if the police did raid, which came to no conclusion. So Maria and I decided on our ovra emergency plan: to hide out on the roof in a water tower.

At midnight, there were shouts that police were coming. I looked out the window and was unable to see anything, but people started running around grabbing things and barricading doors. I ran to find Maria, and reminded her about the hiding place on the roof I had checked out earlier. She grabbed the tapes and equipment and headed off to the hiding place. Looking out a vdndow, I could not see any police around the

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front door, so I shouted this information to the people blockading the door, trying to calm the situation.