SOLIDARITY IN ITALY
Hammond, Margo
TIlE MORO KIDNAPPING SOLIDARITY IN ITALY "It's difficult not to love this country and its people," wrote H Mani/esto the day after the kidnapping of Christian Democratic leader Aldo Moro and...
...One could imagine that this last decade of violence, political corruption and economic misery could have won over, if not recruits for the Brigate Rosse, at least sympathizers...
...That new majority--in addition to including the Communist Party which represents more than a third of the Italian electorate---is the largest consensus ever gathered by an Italian government in the republic's history...
...TIlE MORO KIDNAPPING SOLIDARITY IN ITALY "It's difficult not to love this country and its people," wrote H Mani/esto the day after the kidnapping of Christian Democratic leader Aldo Moro and the killing of his five bodyguards in broad daylight on a side street in northern Rome...
...In the first two months of 1~I78 fifty new extremist groups appeared claiming responsibility for terrorist acts bringing the total to 28 April 1978:262 66...
...Scandals involving top state officials--from the Lockheed "bustarelle" (bribes) to the Montedison payoffs--have become so frequent that they barely make front-page news anymore...
...What is to be feared is that if the crisis and desperation continue to increase, so will the consensus toward terrorist actions...
...It is, at any rate, a vote for democracy...
...crime is on the rise...
...Already in Italy the Communist Party's move toward the area of government has been accompanied by an increase in political violence...
...If this vote is betrayedDif the presence of the Communist Party in the governmental majority does not serve to end the political stalemate that has lasted three decades~the peninsula's political leaders risk providing the Brigate Rosse and other such terrorist groups with the consensus they now lack...
...The far left daily was referring to the spontaneous reaction of the vast majority of Italians on hearing the news of the latest Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) attack: hundreds of thousands of workers immediately staged a general strike to express their disgust and indignation...
...Perhaps it is true, as Sciascia contends, that these actions are not so much a vote of confidenc: in the State as in the Communist Party whose presence in the government offers to many the only hope left after 30 years of political inaction...
...Other demonstrations were held across Italywthousands demonstrating their solidarity for a party and a man who, for the majority of the demonstrators, are the symbols of Italy's problems for the past three decades...
...Now, however, tens of thousands of Italians have voiced their willingness to defend the Italian state...
...Citizens--- including the general secretary of the Radical Party, Adelaide Aglietta, who was picked at random for jury dutyDhave stepped forward in Turin to form a jury in the Brigate Rosse trial despite threats by that group on their lives...
...For many, he argued, the Italian state is not a state worth defending...
...The people of Beliee in Sicily whose homes were devastated by an earthquake in 1968 are still after 10 years living in shacks while the money that had been collected on their behalf has found its ~vay into politicians' pockets...
...In 1969 in West Germany, in fact, the neo-Nazi party (NPD) rose to nearly 4 percent and during the same period the Baader-Meinhof group first appeared...
...When Carlo Casalegno, vice-director of La Stamga, the Turin daily owned by FIAT, was killed by the Brigate Rosse, hundreds of workers at the automobile factory refused to go out on strike to protest...
...Like the grosse Koalition in West Germany in 1969, the new Italian government--which received its vote of confidence in record-breaking time following the Moro kidnapping--leaves a tiny minority in the opposition (a little over 6 percent including two small parties on the left-- Democrazia Proletaria and the Radicals---and two small right-wing parties---the Liberals and the neo-Fascists...
...The trial of 49 Brigatisti including the group's charismatic leader Renato Curcio, which opened March 9 despite the killing of a judge in Rome and a police officer in Turin a few days before, was almost postponed for the third time because a jury could not be set up...
...Also like the grosse KoaIition, such a widely supported government carries with it an inherent danger: without a coherent democratic opposition to voice " their dissent, the Cmarginated groups tend to move to the extremes and to turn to undemocratic methods...
...MARGO HAMMOND (Margo Hammond, a frequent contributor, is an American journalist based in Rome...
...But for now Aldo Moro---vchose byzantine speeches and role as the Great Compromiser within the Christian Democratic Party had just a week before ended one of the longest governmental crises in Italian history-had become the symbol of an attack on the country's democratic institutions, an attack on democracy...
...For months the situation in Italy has been described as desperate: unemployment is soaring...
...In 1975, 702 terrorist attacks were recorded...
...Fear...
...Terrorism grows like grass in the ruins and you have created this ruin," Sciaseia warned the Christian Democrats...
...the justice system is ~n shambles...
...Instead when the Brigate Rosse kidnapped Aldo Moro, who is after all the symbol par excellence of these past 30 years of inefficient government, the reaction was swift and clear: Basta con il terrorismo (Down with terrorism...
...Thousands of citizens across the peninsula filled the streets and piazzas to protest the terrorists' action...
...Others--like the Brigate Rosse of Renato Curcio and his wife Margherita Cagol (killed in a police ambush) who were once militants in a Catholic group (They have transferred the absolute value of their religious faith, commented journalist Alberto Ronchey, into a sacralization of the class struggleF---insist on their left-wing matrix...
...In Rome alone over 200,000, organized by the united trade union federation, gathered in Piazza San Giovanni the night of the kidnapping...
...The people have understood well why the Brigate Resse wanted to strike at this man and on the very day when a new majority--which is determined to confront this country's emergency situation--was being formed in Parliament," commented L'Unitd, the Communist party organ...
...Dozens of citizens refused to serve on the jury...
...According to Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia (who several months ago resigned-as city alderman in Palermo after being elected on the Communist Party ticket) the refusal to accept jury duty was comprehensible...
...In 1976 that figure rose to 1198 and in 1977 the terrorists struck 2128, the record for any Western society...
...Even the petition against terrorism circulated in Turin on the eve of the Brigate Rossr trial in the Piedmontese capital was not as successful as foreseen...
...The trial in Catanzaro for those accused of planting a bomb in 1969 in a Milan bank killing dozens of people, a trial that has implicated the Italian secret service and highranking politicians, has dragged on for eight years with no end in sight...
...When Publio Fiori, a local Christian Democratic leader, was shot in the legs by the Brigate Rosse last November, a group of Roman high school students applauded on hearing the news...
...The public denunciation of these acts of violence has not always been as unanimous as the reaction to the More kidnapping seems to have been...
...He had become also the symbol of a government that for the first time in 30 years includes the Communists...
...Indifference...
...Some claim to be right-wing groups...
Vol. 105 • April 1978 • No. 9
