by Adelaide Aglietta

ABSTRACT: Forty days ago, Adelaide Aglietta (1) started a hunger strike to urge an increase in the prison personnel, the demilitarization and unionization of the category and the beginning of the procedureon the proposed amnesty. She was later joined in the strike by Gianfranco Spadaccia, Pino Pietrolucci, Valter Vecellio and Emma Bonino (2). However - the Radical Party's secretary Adelaide Aglietta points out - the party hasn't yet understood the direness of the situation, and its mobilization is insufficient.

(RADICAL NEWS N. 6, 17 February 1977)

I would have preferred not to explain once again, at least not to the radical comrades, the reasons for our hunger strike, which has been going on for the last forty days, nor the fundamental reasons supporting us in the decision to carry it on to the bitter end; however, considering the party's slow reaction, I believe I need to reaffirm the importance of our nonviolent praxis at a moment in which violence is inside the institutions, and special laws are the only answer the State gives and requires of the population.

Evidence of all this can be found daily in the press, in the e censorship which has been immediately applied when we tried to oppose (with nonviolence) and defeat the government's irresponsible policy, which has become no longer a policy based on omissions, but a policy based also on provocation and arrogance.

We all realize that a hunger strike is an extreme weapon, and on also this occasion, we resorted to it in conditions of extreme gravity: we ask the government to take minimum measures, whose urgency is acknowledged by all political forces, measures that are vital to try to re-establish an acceptable equilibrium between the prison population, the prison structures and the prison personnel, making possible the application of reformative programs and defusing the time bomb of the prison population which is about to explode.

In the face of the government's passivity and ruthless and guilty optimism, in the certainty that there would soon be further massive escapes, new victims, new havocs in the country, we started our hunger strike. After 40 days in which the press reported nothing but massacres, deaths, armed conflicts, arrests, once again we have to confirm the validity of our struggle. At this point, it is essential to continue our hunger strike: the intentions of the forces of this government, which we have not managed to force to pronounce themselves on simple measures, are clear: they threaten to suspend certain reformative programs, they talk of special prisons for those who head any further protests on the part of the convicts, they invoke stricter emergency laws. All this points to the clear intention of exacerbating the tension in the country, increasing citizens' sense of uncertainty, criminalizing an ever vaster part of the population, especially the poorest and most alienated part, stirring chaos and disorder in th

e country, because chaos and disorder will then justify, in the eyes of the public opinion, new police laws, new Reale laws (4), and, last but not least, the army's intervention in the country. This is why it is more than ever necessary to continue the hunger strike: one cannot carry out hard struggles without running risks (including personal ones). Today and now it is worth facing these risks!

What I am on the contrary forced to remark is that the party has not fully grasped the direness of the situation and of the initiative; in fact the party has not even mobilized on this objective, has not devolved energies, as the situation called for (whereas it has managed to come to an almost hysterical block, with lengthy discussions, on Senator Plebe's statements), once again convinced that the real fascism is the fascism of the followers of Almirante (3), not the fascism of their manipulators, who are the real cuprits of this massacre of the republican institutions, whose heaviest costs fall onto the weak and the defenceless.

I have found myself confronted with comrades who wasted time and energy, as never before, to trigger a violent and intolerant campaign (worthy of the inquisition or of witch-hunting) against the "afterthoughts" of senator Plebe; such comrades foreshadow, for the present and the future, further alienation for those who, "different" from us, experience contradictions which belong exclusively to themselves, not to our party and statute.

Today, as I see doubts raising in the Radical party on the meaning and validity of our statute, and on the awareness that the risk of external pollutions can be opposed through action and political coherency and not with contempt, excommunications and inquisitive statutory mechanisms, I am extremely deceived and perplexed. If to this we add the comrades' uninterest toward the referendums, the hunger strike and the nonviolent method of struggle we are conducting, I am brought to say that perhaps the party is running the risk of changing aspect: no longer a socialist, lay and libertarian party formed by different and alienated people, convinced of its theses and of its strategy, but a party of alienated and different people which is starting to feel ashamed of its identity, which is, it too, invoking arbitrators and is starting to talk of "ideology". These are the moments in which a party either recollects its identity or loses its way. As for me, I would spend not a day more in a party that choses the directi

on of totalitarianism and repression, that repoduces, on a smaller scale, the mechanisms of alienation against which we have to laically fight against every day, and most of the time with ourselves.

Translators' notes

(1) AGLIETTA ADELAIDE. (Turin 1940). Currently President of the Green Group at the European Parliament. Former member of the Italian Parliament, Secretary of the radical Party in 1977 and in 1978, year in which she was chosen to be part of the popular jury at the trial in Turin against the Red Brigades and Renato Curcio. Promoter of the Turin-based CISA (Information Centre on Abortion and Sterilization).

(2) BONINO EMMA. (Bra 1948). President of the Radical Party, former member of the European Parliament, as of 1976 member of the Italian Parliament. Among the promoters of the CISA (Information Centre on Sterilization and Abortion) and active militant in the campaign against clandestine abortion. She was tried and acquitted in Florence. Participated in the conduction, on a national and international scale, of the campaign on World Hunger. Among the founding members of "Food and Disarmament International", promoted the circulation of the Manifesto of Nobel Laureates.

(3) ALMIRANTE GIORGIO. (Salsomaggiore 1914 - Rome 1988). Secretary of the MSI, Movimento Sociale Italiano (right-wing party which considers itself the heir of fascism) from 1969 to 1987.

(4) REALE ORONZO. (Lecce 1902 - Rome 1988). One of the founders of the Partito d'Azione (1942), secretary of the republican party (1949-1964), deputy, minister of justice. The "Reale bill" is an emergency bill which attributed special powers to the police forces, introduced by Reale to defeat terrorism (1975). In the referendum of 1988 promoted by the Radical Party to abrogate the "Reale bill", 76% of voters declared themselves in favour of maintaining the law.