CONTENTS:

Preface by Leonardo Sciascia

The Courage of Fear

A City Under Siege

The Appointment With the Violent

Flowers in the Court Room

In the Bunker

The Next One Will Be Adelaide Aglietta

Justice For Giorgiana Masi, Justice For Marshal Berardi

The Via Fani Massacre

The Question of Self-Defense

The Debate Is Open

Tragedy in the Country, Illegality in Parliament, Boredom in the Courtroom

Curcio: An Act of Revolutionary Justice

Brother Machine-gun

The Referendum Campaign: The Schizophrenia of a Jurywoman

The Word Is With the Contending Parties

The Court Retires, My Job Is Finished

The Reason For This Book

ABSTRACT: Adelaide Aglietta, a woman of Turin, joined the Radical Party (PR) in 1974. After being active in the CISA (Italian Centre For Sterilisation and Abortion) for legalising and liberalising abortion and in the Piedmont branch of the Radical Party, she was the leading candidate on the Radical election list for Turin in the June 20, 1976 elections. The following November she was elected secretary of the PR and reconfirmed in that post for 1978 at the Bologna Congress. Her name was drawn by lots in March 1978 to be a juror in the Turin trial of the Red Brigades and she accepted the task after more than one hundred other citizens had refused it, thus allowing the trial to take place.

Thus Adelaide Aglietta was the secretary of a party to be a member of a popular jury: her diary originates from this experience on the borderline between public and private life, from the tensions and the contradictions that are necessarily part of the role of juror, above all in a political trial.

At present she is a deputy to the European Parliament.

("DIARIO DI UNA GIURATA POPOLARE AL PROCESSO DELLE BRIGATE ROSSE" - Adelaide Aglietta - Preface by Leonardo Sciascia - Milano Libri Edizioni - February 1979)

A CITY UNDER SIEGE

On Thursday January 19, early in the morning, I arrive at the Turin station. I had left Rome at eleven in the evening, but the nine-hours on the train did not succeed in making me sleep or lifting the anger, sometimes the desperation that gripped me ever since hearing the TV evening news say drily, imperturbably: "The Constitutional Court has declared four of the eight referendums inadmissible that the Radicals had requested and which seven hundred thousand people had signed petitions for. They are the referendums on the Concordat between Church and State, on crimes of opinion and union activity of the Rocco code (Fascist penal code, ed.) and on military codes and courts."

So then, had it all been useless? During the trip all I could do was keep thinking about his over and over again. I kept remembering the events of the last year, one after the other: the assemblies for launching the collection of petition signatures, the many tables set up in the streets, the nights spent with comrades checking and re-checking that the results were in order, correct, as they should be. And then again the women and the old people. They were the ones who had made the greatest impression on me: they came up to the tables during he demonstrations with five or ten thousand lire. They already knew about everything, ready to talk it over, to sign up.

The enthusiasm was great everywhere. Finally, after thirty years, we were putting into question the laws of Mussolini, of Rocco, of the clerics, the military. The hope was greater than the enthusiasm: one could expect a spring of struggle, a great movement of the left, unity in the common intention to break down the Fascist legislative pillars of the state and impose on the DC (Christian Democrats, ed.) a lay victory on abortion, sweep away the laws of the Bourbons, defeat the ideas of a corrupt and

corrupting government. It could turn into a May 12, 1974 (1) multiplied by eight with the left as a candidate for an alternative government; a left united in in its respect for the diversity of its components and in recognition of the Constitution of the Republic as an obligatory point of reference. But after only a few weeks the climate had changed: the Communists and Socialists indicated that they had quite different

intentions by supporting the government's attempt to massacre at the very least the principles of the referendum process (other things would be taken care of by the Parliament) by putting pressure first on the High Court of Appeals and then on the Constitutional Court.

The last forty days and the TV news announcement were what weighed most heavily on my sleeplessness. We had done everything possible. Tens of jurists, impartial ones, had declared their disagreement with the governments theses; at least a hundred of us had begun the nth hunger strike to demand information from the RAI (Italian state radio and TV network, ed.) on the course the referendums were taking, since we well knew that only through censorship and disinformation was it possible to realise operations such as that of the Constitutional Court. Hundreds of telegrams had accumulated on the desk of the president of the Council of Ministers, nor was it possible to count the sit-ins and street demonstrations against Andreotti's actions (2). All this was ignored by the ever tamer and more obedient news media. The "Constitutional Range" (3) replied to our actions with an iron-fisted control of the mass media, a terrible and impenetrable rubber wall.

Not having the vocation of Jan Palach (4) or of Buddhist bonzes, ready to burn themselves and be candidates for martyrdom, we decided on January 17 to stop the party's national political activity. A press release clarified the reasons for this decision: "For a political opposition party that intends to be non-violent and constitutional, there is under these conditions no room in which to function; the only practicable way by now is to spread the libertarian Radical battles throughout the cities and regions, but no longer from the center, from Rome". The Constitution had been shredded, the iron pact of the DC-PCI (Italian Communist Party, ed.), the suffocating logic of the "broad consensus" had won - probably due to the work inside the court of the Christian Democrat Elia and the Communist Malagugini. But the Socialists too had supported the "coup" with its silence or its absence.

And so I found myself back in my town with everything to be done all over again. In the course of a few days the situation had come full circle: the party "closed", the political project of the referendum decapitated, the needs of my commitment in Turin blocking any new moving around. I had hardly got off the train before I bought a newspaper - perhaps some paper had published disdainful comments on the sentence. An old habit made me open "La Stampa": "Pannella has stated that this is the blackest page in the last thirty years, the referendum committee has said that the sentence amounts to legal coup d'etat... With their agitated statements, Pannella and the committee assume violent positions and show that they do not know how to accept the norms and the institutions of a democratic country". The article, signed by assistant director Giovanni Trovati, is a eulogy of the court's decision which will bring about "less tension" among the parties. I feel impotent.

On Tuesday February 28, at the end of a party meeting, the talk turns, almost casually, to the coming trial of the Red Brigades. The Radicals often are moved to political action by personal experiences and, in any case, give particular attention to personal questions - their own and of others.

The complaints come raining down: Turin has become a city under military occupation, it's intolerable. The rhetoric spreads wildly, it is oppressive: The "constitutional" parties (see note 2), the PCI, the regional council, newspapers and citizens are all beating the big drum for collecting signatures of a referendum petition "against terrorism". Some are ironic: "The regional council's appeal begins by maintaining that the March 9 trial will certainly take place, but the more signatures that are collected, the fewer the people who accept jury duty". Others joke about the fact that even Archbishop Ballestrero has guaranteed the commitment of his diocese in collecting petition signatures. I observe this is a trial the regime wants as a test of power between terrorism and the State. Then I remember the article in "La Stampa" of January 13 that reproved the Turinese for not wanting to do jury duty: "No one is obliged to be a hero, but no one can fail in his duty. Violence will carry the day as long as t

he citizens continue to curse (even if under their breath) rather than taking concrete action". All of us observe together that in practice the "constitutional range" proposes that the citizens should personify the "avenger of violence" rather than the jurors that, as the law demands, commit themselves to discovering the truth through the trial process: "The people, in short, are being asked to be jurors". Some - remembering that we have always been in favour of all trials being held, without any exceptions - warn that this is the most absurd and counterproductive way of convincing the citizens to accept the task. Then the discussion broadens: what can push a man into becoming a terrorist? What kind of life do they lead? How is it possible to believe in the short-cut of armed struggle which is so convenient for the power holders? Hypotheses and curiosity mount.

The next evening - by a strange coincidence - we find ourselves having a discussion with Elena Negri, Paolo Chicco and Giovanni Negri, three Turin comrades whom I have known for years, and the question comes up: "What would you do if your name was drawn for jury duty?" The answers are various. Some think that "this regime has assassinated the Constitution and has no right to come and ask me for anything". One reminds them that our conception of law is different and is the heart of our way of making politics: the law is an occasion for confrontation in any case. We are the defendants in hundreds of cases and we want them to be held, just as we fight for holding the trials against the regime's men involved in frauds, in embezzlement of the state, and in the strategy of tension. "Otherwise the hope of a Constitutional government will also die".

Certainly we are all in agreement that the bourgeoisie makes "use of law for class purposes". These are the two historical contradictions. Our problem is to explode these contradictions by creating a crisis in them, by showing up the full degree of real violence in a strong light through civil disobedience and non-violence.

In the end we all agree with Leonardo Sciascia's appeal, civil and coherent, that appeared in the "Corriere della Sera":

"For this government I would not be a juror. If my name were drawn by lots I would accept in order to be consistent with myself and the values I believe in". The following day there appeared in "La Stampa" an article of Claudio Cerasulo's: "The function of the press in a case like this trial of the BR is essential. Correct information influences the behaviour of people and so also of those whose names can be drawn for jury duty. It is no accident if no newspaper publishes the names of those who have accepted the task".

Thursday March 2. At eight in the morning I leave for Rome with a companion. After more than a month of suspended party activity on the national level, an assembly has been called for the next morning to discuss and analyse the idea of converting the Radical's struggles to the regional level. It is a relief for me to leave Turin where the atmosphere is constantly getting heavier: by now the city is a field for military and Carabinieri manoeuvres, and for plain-clothes police. The number of civilian cars with out-of-town license plates have become too numerous to count and are evidently at the disposition of the forces of law and order: hard faces that remind me of those of the special squads that Cossiga sent to Piazza Navona on May 13, 1977 in search of a massacre and to make criminal of the entire opposition movement. That was the day Giorgina Masi was assassinated. The atmosphere is enormously heavy, ambiguous and sinister, of the so-called "bunker", the Lamarmora barracks where

the trial will be held. In the train, reading the newspapers, I see photos of the Turin victims barbarously murdered by unknown killers. The old attorney Croce, guilty of being president of the Journalists Guild; the political adversary Carlo Casalegno. I dwell on a phrase published in the daily "La Repubblica". It seems that a big name in Turin has been drawn for jury duty, possibly a prominent Communist. I am a little curious, make a couple of remarks. I fall asleep.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) The date on which the divorce referendum won its victory.

2) Giulio Andreotti, DC president of the Council of Ministers (prime minister) at the time.

3) The parties that had participated in drawing up the Italian Constitution soon after the end of the war.

4) The Czech youth who immolated himself in protest over the Warsaw Pact's suppression of the "Prague Spring".