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 first 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)

IN THE BUNKER

Tuesday, March 7. The trial starts in two days. I have lunch at a restaurant with two friends. They too are worried about me, but one joke follows another and I notice - all told - that I laugh a lot. I get angry when I read the news of my acceptance in the "Gazzetta del Popolo": "The participation of Adelaide Aglietta at the trial of the BR is a good publicity maneuver for the Radicals. I consider that here once again the limits of incivility have been overstepped. In the afternoon I write to the paper.

In fact, this story about publicity is one of those things that succeed in making me indignant. Is it legitimate use that the newspapers make of my image and my acceptance for their regime propaganda? Is it legitimate the way they amplify the armed party in its every act of violence, every declaration and communique? In these opposing and converging attempts at propaganda, every time we try to get across our non-violent message (in this case the reasons far-off my acceptance [of jury duty, ed.] which are not those reported in "La Stampa" and "La Gazzetta del Popolo"), we are immediately cut off with an accusation of "publicity stunt" or Radical folklore. And what other means do the non-violent have for asserting their ideas other than their words, their bodies, and their actions in the attempt to impose a dialogue in this way? But dialogue is exactly what the clash of opposing violences wants to impede. It is as if the journalist wanted to say, without being aware of it, that not only I, but all those

who are disarmed and powerless, can only receive but not send messages. These are the considerations which a few months later would lead me to push the logic of my adversaries to the extreme and accept an offer to pose for an advertisement.

Towards evening I meet my father who has come from San Remo. It seems to me that he is a bit emotional, even if, as always, he hides it behind his silence. He asks me where I am living. It might seem a strange question, but ever since I decided to live by myself and accepted the party leadership I have practically had no fixed residence either in Rome or in Turin. Rather, to be exact, I had finally found a house in Rome, but only days before deciding to suspend the activities of the national secretariat and to return to Turin. Therefore after having lived in rotation with several comrades for a year and a half, I find myself back in my home town without a house and once again being put up by friends. To be exact at this time and in all the succeeding months I will be staying with Angelo Pezzana, with whom I have the ties of a long-standing friendship. My father asks me again what my plans are, if I have any even minimal plans, and if so, which; If in this period I need more money (he knows that I am

often in difficulty)? No. I thank him, I don't need anything, the little I have is enough to live on. I don't think I will have unusual expenses, otherwise I will let him know. For the rest, I reply that if anyone wanted to hurt me no precautions could stop him. Friends and comrades, however, insist in trying to make me accept the idea of changing my lodgings frequently. He urges me again to be careful and gives me some money and repeats that I should keep in touch and visit him often. Talks with my father have always been made up of subtleties and the silences have often been more meaningful than the words, but it has always been easy for me to understand him.

Wednesday, March 8. I go to see the children and spend a few very calm hours with them. They also seem untroubled to me. Alberta asks me when there will be "that thing there". She means the trial and I tell her it starts tomorrow. With a certain relief I say: "so then tomorrow evening it will be over".

In the afternoon I see comrades from Lotta Continua (1) who are to report on the trial for the newspaper. They ask for my collaboration and I say it is not possible except relatively for particular episodes that are not predictable. We talk a little about my acceptance which they do not agree with even if they understand it and agree that my presence on the jury is a guarantee for the trial being correctly handled. But they say to have kept out of it would have been better. I point out that their comments are very contradictory and they would do well to think it over, at least. I have already thoroughly dissected my own contradictions. We embrace.

In the evening, as I leave the house, a car parked across the sidewalk suddenly turn on its lights. I jump and take refuge in a restaurant. Evidently even though I am calm and am always joking about the possible risks (but much less so, certainly, this evening before the trial), actually I am very tense. After dinner, with Giovanni, Paolo and Elena, I give in to insistence and go with them to sleep in a house in the hills. It seems strange to me, I am sure it is useless, but nevertheless I am happy to be with the three of them. It is purely psychological, but I don't feel like being alone.

Thursday, March 9. I get up very early, long before the alarm goes off, as I always do when I have a commitment. As soon as I leave the house I phone my father, buy the newspapers and with a taxi we start off for the Lamormora barracks. "La Stampa" minutely describes the security measures that have been taken in the city: four thousand men equipped for war, the "leather heads" (2), sharpshooters on the roofs around the Lamormora barracks, nine hundred armed bodyguards. As we approach the barracks we begin to see men wearing bullet-proof vests everywhere, behind each tree on the boulevard. In order to get inside I have to pass a series of barriers, in the midst of very young kids holding machine-guns at the ready and with a confused look on their faces. To live through all this is quite different from reading about it in the newspapers. These scenes will remain in my mind throughout the trial and will reach the point of literally making me throw up. The street leading to the barracks and the park in front is

unbelievably thick with Carabinieri, police and plain-clothes men. This street is reserved as access and car park for lawyers, jurors and their bodyguards. I continue to believe that the bodyguards can at best only serve to increase the number of possible victims without offering any security to the people being guarded. During the entire course of the trial I will continue to come in my own car and park it outside the fenced area. That way I will at least avoid some of the machine-guns and barriers.

At the entrance reserved for the press and the public, two out of three people are plain-clothes men disguised as people on all levels of the social scale: there is the house painter, the factory worker, the middle-class type wearing a loden coat and with a copy of "La Repubbica" under his elbow. And there is the false extremist.

After controls and counter-controls, orders and counter-orders, I manage to get to the entrance. I greet the comrades who will try to get in as Radio Radical reporters (without success). In the courtyard I pass through a line of Carabinieri and a dozen German shepherds. I reach the entrance to the building where I am thoroughly searched and my personal belongings are checked. For a moment I am perplexed, then I let it go. After me they search a person who, to my great astonishment deposits a pistol (later I will learn that it is another juror). In the following months I will discover that other jurors also go around constantly armed and I will try to understand by asking them directly what kind of protection they can get from a revolver. The vagueness of their replies convinces me that is a purely psychological factor and therefore even more dangerous. I walk up to the first floor where the courtroom is located. There is a salon where we will pass the intervals in the trial and three rooms of which one

is for the presiding judge, one for the jurors and one for the court secretary and the lawyers. It has all been repainted and cleaned, but the structure shows unequivocably its barracks origins. There is another little salon outside the courtroom where I wait with the other jurors, about thirty people. Besides us there are Carabinieri and plain-clothes men.

A long wait begins, during which I try to talk to the other people who are with me. A woman, in great anxiety, tells me she cannot accept because she has two children and no one with whom to leave them. Another one, again for family reasons, will not accept and is very worried that her refusal may go on the police records. man has a stand in a market which he is not allowed to be absent from after one o'clock on pain of losing his license. The others are mostly silent. At a certain point I start looking for a coffee vending machine, a telephone and information about what happens next. The Carabinieri don't know anything, telephones and coffee have not been provided. I feel segregated. Two women (who will not be part of the jury) begin to ask me for news of the party (I discover that they are sympathisers) and my own activities. In effect, women most of all always show great curiosity about me, my life, my political activities, my children.

Barbaro arrives at last with a captivating smile and in a decisive tone explains that we are about to begin, that the defendants are in the courtroom and certainly (as his experience suggests, at least), will read a communique. The first act in the trial - Barbaro continues - will be the nomination of the jury and the swearing in according to the order of extraction. Immediately afterwards we will have to resolve the problem of the court-appointed lawyers because it is evident that the defendants are going to revoke the appointment of their personal lawyers. He has a reserved but a firm air, very polite, formal, smiling, a bit paternalistic. He is wearing a grey suit that brings to mind friends of my father's. Certainly there is an abyss between our mentalities, our ways, our choices. One point in my favour, however, is that by birth, education and the milieu in which I was brought up, I am familiar with the world he represents. For my part it is clear to me that it is to be hoped - the trial being as d

ifficult and complicated as it is, not only juridically, but because of the climate that has been created around it by the political and press campaigns and by sure pressures of other kinds - that there will always be a confrontation between the president and the jury on the way the debate is conducted, even with regard to decisions which are distinctly within his competence and will obviously remain so. I show my worry that, with the defendants refusing to be defended, there should be guarantees that they have the opportunity to state their ideas to the fullest. The president seems to agree with me and says that we will talk about it again once the jury has been formed. The bell rings that opens the hearing.

The presiding and auxiliary judges enter while we wait outside. We hear voices coming from the courtroom. I enter and realise that a defendant is reading a communique. I don't manage to see who it is. Listening to the reading of the communique, I am astonished. It is the first time I have ever witnessed this ritual. Journalists, lawyers, Carabinieri, everyone is tense and attentive to the defendant's discourse.

By way of the microphones, that make it possible for everyone to hear the "communiques" of the Red Brigades, I can hear the main statements:

"...As Communists we have and do maintain that bourgeois justice is only a tool which has always been used to oppress the people; and this barracks, which with particularly good taste you have chosen to celebrate the triumphs of "armed democracy", demonstrates this in its form as well.

"This IS NOT A TRIAL but, more precisely, IT IS A MOMENT IN THE CLASS WAR; it is an episode in the more general clash that opposes the forces of revolution to those of imperialist counter-revolution in an irreversible struggle. And therefore it is on this more general ground that we will face the battle.

"That this is the way things are is amply demonstrated by the general mobilisation that has involved all the political forces of your front (from the DC to the revisionists to the Radicals) in a united action to support the decisions of the executive...

"... The REVISIONISTS want the trial to be held at all costs and in Turin to show all the dogs and pigs the effectiveness of their counter-revolutionary model and their ability to mobilise the working class and the intermediate classes in support of the imperialist state. Thus we have been witnesses in recent days to the hysterical and reactionary campaign that they have unleashed by having recourse to the squalid activation of all the organs they control (from the Regions to the FGCI (3) to mobilise the new SILENT MAJORITY. It is clear to everyone what the substance is of this operation in which the revisionist bureaucracy has turned itself into an imperialist government: to divide the proletariat and use every means to attack its vanguards.

"But the mobilisation that was to be a mass one, despite its terrorist-blackmailing-police character, has not succeeded in involving more than a minimal part of the working class, the petite bourgeoisie and the so-called "middle classes". The thousands of signatures in the entire region are nothing but a cheap sleight-of-hand trick...

"...The Radicals. If it was by "chance" that a Radical activist's name was drawn for the special jury, the conscious political choice to be a part of it was in turn entirely rational. The accident that happened to the Radicals is in its way emblematic and pathetic: after having growled at the regime and the "special laws" (4), at the required moment they rushed to head the most special of courts! In this general rush, they too have not lost the chance to "become an imperialist government". The Radical-pacifist ideology here reveals the full depths of its bourgeois and reactionary nature: anyone who disarms the masses cannot help but end by arming the counter-revolution. Mimosa flowers no longer fool anyone!...

"...THE ATTORNEYS. We are not here to defend ourselves and we have no need of defense lawyers.

"THEREFORE WE REVOKE THE MANDATES OF OUR PERSONAL LAWYERS AND WE REFUSE ANY IMPOSITION OF REGIME-APPOINTED LAWYERS.

"No one can reasonably expect to proceed along this blind alley without meeting the most relentless replies from the revolutionary movement..."

At the moment, obviously, I only reflect on the part regarding the Radicals, also because I am instinctively tempted to make a reply. Their language strikes me as being as crude as their thinking. They have understood little or nothing about the Radicals: little about the concept of law, nothing about non-violence ("disarming the masses"). When I hear them say that I growled about the special laws and to have now "become an imperialist government" I want to answer that we are trying to abrogate the special laws while their actions give the government the best excuse for adding others to them. Their language confirms the opinions I have already formed: their attitude is a synthesis of Stalinism and Catholicism with a view of human and social relations based on intolerance and being averse to dialogue. At its heart is a strong and rhetorical mystical devotion to death and sacrifice. The values which - directly or indirectly - I hear propounded don't tell me anything new. The only interesting thing in the

communique may be that about the "collection of the signatures". It is no accident that they grab onto that.

The accusations and threats made to the jury and the lawyers are heavy: is it a message they are trying to get through to the outside by way of the mass media? Don't they wonder how come the regime's mass media give them such an enormous amount of space?

The presiding judge begins to call in the jurors. While I am waiting for my turn I hear someone beside me say: "Yes, I would accept because they have to be condemned. In fact, they ought to be condemned to death". I immediately decide to ask that he be removed from the jury, but he won't be called to take part in any case. The jury of peers must be one more guarantee of equity and control of the trial procedures, it cannot be composed of people who have preconceived ideas and opinions. Their judgement must be formed and founded on knowledge of the facts that are acquired during the presentation of the case. The point of departure is the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. That is a point on which one must be rigorous right from the start.

I am the ninth one to accept with the ritual swearing in. But I am among the auxiliary jurors. I don't know yet if I will have the possibility of participating in the council chamber and the discussions, it is a debatable point, there is no precise regulation about it. The presiding judge will declare immediately that he intends to let all the jurors participate in the discussions and the decisions - except for the right to vote - until the sentence is made. There is less responsibility, but I am guaranteed the chance to keep a check on the proceedings and to intervene: this is what worried me most, to have to give de facto support to the jury without being able to exert influence or intervene. I take my seat behind the presiding judge, from where it will be easier to speak to him even during the hearings, and I look around.

The defendants are in their cage, or rather their two cages, and it is almost impossible to see them because they are surrounded by a cordon of Carabinieri. I am very shocked by it all and it could hardly be otherwise. I have the suffocating perception of the loss of liberty, liberty of the least kind, even of the most inoffensive and innocent movements. Everything appears absurd starting with the disposition of police forces inside the courtroom which even relatives hardly manage to get into: a show of impotence and fear, a crowd-thrilling exhibition of useless force, a subtle way of selling public opinion on an image of "monsters", of "criminals" who must never be allowed to appear as normal human beings. Otherwise people might begin to ask themselves questions, even inconvenient ones. These defendants are not being tried for killings or massacres, and it is no accident that the public doesn't know it and will not know it for the entire course of the trial.

The defendants seem calm, laugh a lot, look for familiar faces in the crowd, show themselves to the press and the photographers, aware that today they have the chance to break the isolation in which they have been kept for months and months and to use the information media to transmit their political message, even if distorted. It is obvious that they are going along with the game, trying to make use of the limelight of the trial. The behaviour of the journalists adapts itself perfectly to this need: they will never miss a chance during the trial to be hard on the comportment of the defendants, even at the cost of confusing things. The flashbulbs go off wildly, the photographers climb over each other. It really seems to be a historic opportunity to photograph the cyclops or the last specimen of Neanderthal man.

In the midst of the Carabinieri I glimpse the face of Curcio, (5) the one most familiar to me. I will get to know the others during the course of the trial. For now they are faces without names. They are men: but who are they? What have their lives been like aside from the official biographies that the press presents us with from a very particular angle? What is it like to live for years in clandestinity, limiting one's individuality, one's life, one's relationships to a restricted circle of people? What is it like not to live in the midst of people? And what are the political origins of their experience? How does one pass from open political activity to the choice of the machine-gun?

At the end the jury is formed, the court retires into the council chamber where the presiding judge explains everyone's function to them, especially to the auxiliary jurors. He tells us that ten court-appointed attorneys are still to be named, which will not be easy. He has already consulted many and has had fifty refusals (so now I understand his quip on the day of my acceptance). He is very querulous and makes the impression of feeling himself alone, left alone to carry the burden and responsibility of this trial. We look for ten lawyers, they are named in the courtroom and the hearing is adjourned until tomorrow morning. I get the impression that Barbaro breathes a

sigh of relief.

I leave with the other jurors returning along the route of the array of machine-guns. In the courtyard - to my astonishment - a Carabiniere with his machine-gun at the ready takes up his place at the side of each juror. The cars of the jurors and the lawyers leave each followed close behind by another car containing on the average three machine-guns each. I stop to observe the scene asking myself what kind of life the "guarded" people can have constantly followed, on foot or in cars, by armed guards. Goodbye to the gaiety, one among many, of walking among people. It seems like madness.

I start alone to leave the fenced area that blocks off the parking area reserved for this new species of "criminal under surveillance". Beyond the barriers my comrades are waiting for me. They embrace me. We go in search of a taxi, but I am literally attacked by photographers who make it almost impossible to walk. At the same time plain-clothes men and Carabinieri pop out around me. I start to walk faster hoping to get free of them all. A group of three of four women, relatives or comrades of the defendants, hurl insults at me. I stop, paralysed. I am tempted to go over and talk to them, but I know it would be useless. It is an episode that hurts me.

My comrades tell me that it was almost impossible to get into the courtroom, the public was ninety per cent plain-clothes men. The relatives had great difficulty and so did the mob of journalists as well who were blocked by the bottle-neck caused by the controls.

Finally I find a taxi. I go home where I spend the rest of the day. A journalist from "La Stampa" looks for me, but I have no desire to give interviews. Perhaps I need to be quiet for a while, to catch my breath after all these hours.

At lunch I learn that a "commando" of the so-called "Communist Combat Formation" occupied the premises of Radical Radio this morning and broadcast a delirious transmission against the trial. I immediately ask for news of Carlo Couvert, a comrade who was bound and gagged with a pistol pointed at him. They tell me that he is well, that he has gotten over the shock, that the perpetrators were very young and rather unsure of themselves. I wonder what this direct action can be foreshadowing, but I am still psychologically too much occupied with the atmosphere of the trial to be afraid. It is strange (and I am aware of it) how fear is relegated to a single, grey, surreal world that is entirely detached from everyday life. In the evening we go to sleep in the house in the hills again. When leaving in the morning we notice a police car in the vicinity.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle) a far-left wing organisation.

2) Special police assault troops.

3) Italian Federation of Communist Youth

4) To rigidly enforce public order.

5) Founder of the Red Brigades.