Bliar's backing of fascist thugs

It was just before midnight when the first police officer hit Mark Covell, swiping his truncheon down on his left shoulder. Covell did his best to yell out in Italian that he was a journalist but, within seconds, he was surrounded by riot-squad officers thrashing him with their sticks. For a while, he managed to stay on his feet but then a baton blow to the knee sent him crashing to the pavement.

Lying on his face in the dark, bruised and scared, he was aware of police all around him, massing to attack the Diaz Pertini school building where 93 young demonstrators were bedding down on the floor for the night. Covell's best hope was that they would break through the chain around the front gates without paying him any more attention. If that happened, he could get up and limp across the street to the safety of the Indymedia centre, where he had spent the past three days filing reports on the G8 summit and on its violent policing.

It was at that moment that a police officer sauntered over to him and kicked him in the chest with such force that the entire lefthand side of his rib cage caved in, breaking half-a-dozen ribs whose splintered ends then shredded the membrane of his left lung. Covell, who is 5ft 8in and weighs less than eight stone, was lifted off the pavement and sent flying into the street. He heard the policeman laugh. The thought formed in Covell's mind: "I'm not going to make it."

The riot squad were still struggling with the gate, so a group of officers occupied the time by strolling over to use Covell as a football. This bout of kicking broke his left hand and damaged his spine. From somewhere behind him, Covell heard an officer shout that this was enough - "Basta! Basta!" - and he felt his body being dragged back on to the pavement.

Now, an armoured police van broke through the school gates and 150 police officers, most wearing crash helmets and carrying truncheons and shields, poured into the defenceless building. Two officers stopped to deal with Covell: one cracked him round the head with his baton; the other kicked him several times in the mouth, knocking out a dozen teeth. Covell passed out.

There are several good reasons why we should not forget what happened to Covell, then aged 33, that night in Genoa. The first is that he was only the beginning. By midnight on July 21 2001, those police officers were swarming through all four floors of the Diaz Pertini building, dispensing their special kind of discipline to its occupants, reducing the makeshift dormitories to what one officer later described as "a Mexican butcher's shop". They and their colleagues then illegally incarcerated their victims in a detention centre, which became a place of dark terror.

The second is that, seven years later, Covell and his fellow victims are still waiting for justice. On Monday, 15 police, prison guards and prison medics finally were convicted for their part in the violence - although it emerged yesterday that none of them would actually serve prison terms. In Italy, defendants don't go to jail until they have exhausted the appeals process; and in this case, the convictions and sentences will be wiped out by a statute of limitations next year. Meanwhile, the politicians who were responsible for the police, prison guards and prison medics have never had to explain themselves. Fundamental questions about why this happened remain unanswered - and they hint at the third and most important reason for remembering Genoa. This is not simply the story of law officers running riot, but of something uglier and more worrying beneath the surface.

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The outside world was treated to some severely distorted accounts of all this. Lying in San Martino hospital the day after his beating, Covell came round to find his shoulder being shaken by a woman who, he understood, was from the British embassy. It was only when the man with her started taking photographs that he realised she was a reporter, from the Daily Mail. Its front page the next day ran an entirely false report describing him as having helped mastermind the riots. (Four long years later, the Mail eventually apologised and paid Covell damages for invasion of privacy.)

While his citizens were being beaten and tormented in illegal detention, spokesmen for the then prime minister, Tony Blair, declared: "The Italian police had a difficult job to do. The prime minister believes that they did that job."

Read more: The Guardian