The
story from across the street in the school was that when police arrived they
grabbed the first people they could outside and beat them heavily. One of the
first to be beaten was a UK reporter who was smashed repeatedly by a
group of them. One held him by his neck while the others beat him with clubs.
Unconscious he was left in the street in a pool of blood (later when we were
allowed out of the building the blood had been cleaned off the pavement).
Issues of development and democracy that demonstrators have long identified
as deadly serious are now more obviously so. And the dismissals of religious,
labor, farm and student campaigners for economic and environmental justice by
powerful political and business elites sound all the more crude and desperate.
