> - Adelaide Aglietta - Preface by Leonardo Sciascia - Milano Libri Edizioni - February 1979)CURCIO: "AN ACT OF REVOLUTIONARY JUSTICE"
Thursday, April 27. The hearing opens with a discourse of Curcio's: The Ministry sent a person to see him in prison with permission to hold a conversation without a glass partition while this right continues to be denied to relatives of the defendants. I learn from Barbaro that this person was Franca Rame. (1) At least this is symptomatic of the stage in which the investigation of the Moro case has bogged down.
When I leave the courtroom I am approached by a young Carabiniere who very timidly asks me about how and where his girl friend can get an abortion. I push down the barrel of his rifle inadvertently aimed at my stomach and give him the information he wants. The trial has been adjourned to May 3.
During these days I dedicate myself much more to party affairs and spend a lot of time with the girls whose company is a moment of truce in my daily life. On Friday, the 28th, we will have a torch-light parade in defense of the referendums in Turin. More than a thousand people participate and in a climate like the Turin one, with a party still functioning with the telephone cut off and full of debts, connected only by the miserable equipment of Radical Radio, it is indubitably a success.
The newspapers these days continue to dedicate their front pages to the Moro case developments. The PCI, the DC and the government are all against giving in to blackmail. Craxi is venting a humanitarian proposal that never becomes concrete and Moro writes letters and more letters from the darkness of his prison in the attempt to unravel the knots of the situation. The country appears inert and impotent.
I try at times to imagine the relationship Moro has established with his captors, or I feel certain that he has maintained his lucidity and his negotiating abilities in any case. Will they be sufficient this time? It is hard for me to imagine him in a situation without strength and power. It is hard to enter into his psychological reactions, even if the letters to his wife - the ones that have been made public, at least - reveal the dramatic anguish of a man who is denied dialogue, trust, life.
The ultimatum for the exchange with the thirteen convicts, but it is universally interpreted as being an instrumental proposal. Our deputies still ask for a debate in Parliament, but once again the rights of the people's representatives are expropriated.
During the whole time of the Moro kidnapping, and up until his assassination, my thoughts are no different than many other people's. The repercussions on the trial have, in fact, been only indirect if one excludes the tensions of the first days due to the declarations and the comments of the defendants. Often I have the distinct sensation (which will then be confirmed by the reading of the "memorial" and the so-called "interrogation records") that Moro never lost his lucidity nor denied in any way his past. As the days gradually pass I will become more and more indignant at the attempt to deny him the authorship of the letters, and in general at the behaviour of his party friends who from the first have accepted as the only possible outcome, the tragic epilogue of May 9. (2)
Wednesday, May 3. Ognibene gets to his feet at the beginning of the hearing and reads communique no. 14, which re-launches in a more organic way the program for struggle in the prisons that Curcio had already announced in a preceding hearing. An appeal is made to all convicts to unite in the fight against the special security prisons.
...The strategic program of the Communist Fighting Organisation Red Brigades is precise: the liberation of all proletarians and the destruction of the prisons.
This does not mean there are no initiatives for immediate problems. The abolition of all differences in treatment for prisoners in the camps is the most urgent. It involves:
The elimination of solitary confinement for individuals and groups, which means: the possibility of intra-mural socialising; the fight against all attempts to destroy the personal and political identity of the prisoners; self-determination of the composition of cells; hours for open-air recreation and collective life, etc...
The abolition of isolation from the outside world, which means the abolition of glass partitions during visits and the blocking of information and correspondence...
...What we propose "is not" the terrain of the negotiations, of the claims for unionisation, but the realisation through struggle of the power relationships already achieved on a general level.
By fighting for these objectives we intend to construct proletarian armed power in the "special security prisons" too, and anchor the fight of various proletarian strata to the strategic program of the "attack against the state"...
...Once again the bourgeoisie has made wrong calculations if it believed that with the creation of "special security" prisons it could definitively resolve the problem, because those who they desired to annihilate will bury this criminal prison regime.
Who is afraid of the special security prisons?
Certainly not we who are closed up in them...
Barbaro announces that the witness Girotti cannot be found. To better understand his position, one is asked to hear again Col. Franciosa and Capt. Pignero under whom "Frate Mitra" [Friar Machine-gun] worked, obviously for pay. Slowly we are reaching the end of the list of witnesses, but the witnesses we hear continue to be almost entirely void of content and proofs. The investigation of the Judge Sossi affair is rather eventful: (the judge's bodyguard, machine guns in hand, had attempted to impede the presence of the lawyer for the defense nominated by Barbaro.) After this the Sossi hearing is set for May 22.
The split between the job of juror and commitments to political activities becomes constantly more painful. After the hearing I run to the party offices. I phone the [parliamentary] group and Emma [Bonino] answers, curtly and almost offensively. I haven't managed to talk to Marco [Pannella] for some time. Gianfranco [Spadaccia] is taken up with party affairs. I feel cut out of everything. I have a depressive crisis which I turn into rage. What is the point any longer of my taking part in this trial? I am only an auxiliary juror and my presence is just about superfluous now that the trial is firmly fixed on its course and the hearings go on, boring but regular. I surely will have the right to invoke my functions of party secretary and return to them, free of other public duties, at least during the referendum campaign! It is a state of mind that lasts for several days. I well know that my comrades in Parliament have also gone through a killing period. I also know that I must carry through to the end the
responsibilities that I took on when I accepted to become a juror. It is a responsibility towards the public which would quite rightly not understand my abandoning it. We have so often said that we were people among the people. I am not a "deus ex macchina" who can lead the trial away from the shoals of fear on which it threatens to be stranded. I am and I must be a juror among jurors and share the sacrifices and the renunciations that fate has imposed on the others. The first skirmishes of the referendum campaign have enabled me to imagine very well the use the PCI would make of my abandoning the trial. They would tear me
to shreds and they would tear the Radical Party to shreds if, as things already stand and despite my experiences on the jury, they have indicated us (it happened in Parliament) as supporters of the Red Brigades.
These considerations don't improve my state of mind. I feel as if I have been betrayed by events and the duties they have imposed on me. All the efforts I have made, first in collecting the signatures for the referendum and then in defending them, and now to be kept far from all participation at the decisive moment... Gianfranco must have guessed it in the few, quick phone calls we made to each other. I get a long and affectionate letter from him, but with no trace of the paternalism that sometimes marks my relations with my comrades in difficult moments.
Thursday, May 4. I have time off from the trial and go with Elena and Giovanni [Negri, a brother and sister, prominent Radicals, ed.] to see the mayor of Turin, Novelli, to remind him of the referendum campaign expiration dates and the arrangements for which he is obliged to make by law which have already slipped by as in many other municipal administrations. His reaction is disconcerting. The mayor seems astonished and almost appears not to remember the existence of the referendums. Immediately afterwards, however, he calls for the municipal secretary and, on verifying the delay, orders the machine to be set in motion.
I am sick of trains and the nights spent in sleeping cars. Saturday and Sunday I almost always rush off to Rome for various important appointments for the party, the Federative Council and the Theoretical Conference. Precisely during this latter, the afternoon of May 5, that we get the news of Moro's death sentence. The three succeeding days, with the last dramatic letters to his family and the silence of the Red Brigades, are sombre and paralysed. Once again the country is stunned, paralysed (or indifferent?) in the face of the violence of a band of assassins. The idea of this cold-blooded assassination, which may be about to happen or have just happened, throws me back into the obsessive and oppressive atmosphere of these months and cancels out the little bit of hope and optimism that I had been regaining. The ideas expressed in my discourse, given at the party's Theoretical Conference, may have felt the repercussions of my state of mind.
...Before going to the Conference, I had read in <> (3) the tragic letter of comrade Valitutti, who decided to let himself die in prison. I wondered if we will be up to saving him from death or if we are already in a condition to watch impotently while such crimes as the scientific and legal annihilation of a person happen. And I also asked myself what wouldn't we have done, how many demonstrations the extra-parliamentarians would not have mounted, what <> itself wouldn't have done, if we had received and read this letter a year ago or just a few months ago. Then I arrived at the Conference and found again the familiar and dear faces of so many people of Rome and other cities with whom we have been travelling the same road for years now, day after day. Even if we have pompously called it a "theoretical conference", to set things straight, we have succeeded in keeping it from being a meeting of professionals in the field but something resembling an occasion for reflection and study, even in the midst of the debate on commitments, which our regular meetings by now badly needed.
And yet, I had the sensation that there was something lacking, something that made it different from our usual meetings. And then I understood what it was that made our work so easy and so orderly: it was not the content of the conference or the character of the debate, but it was the absence of a certain type of personality that had always characterised our congresses, our public actions, often making them difficult and creating problems for us. You remember them. They were and are perhaps the most exhibitionist of a group of the humble and the isolated who claimed to find their place or their rostrum in our midst and who were our unsolved problem, sometimes our defeat, and yet always a factor of truth. Their presence among us was certainly not the solution to the problem of their isolation, but it at least was a sign of hope. And their absence today, far from making me feel relief, worried me and made me ask myself a question: if it was not perhaps a consequence of the fact that the recent episodes o
f violence and the growing spiral of violence had not by now created a crisis for the other forms of non-violent civil disobedience, had not already replaced it with other models.
But if that is the way things are, those who are absent will find no place in the other models, the ones proposed by the new clerics, by the exclusive, cold and ruthless depositories of violent revolution and the armed party. For them there will only be a class massacre, the massacre which Valitutti's letters foretold and which regards the thousand Valituttis whose faces and names are unknown and who already today are victims of illegality and of violence.
Tuesday, May 9. The hearing opens with a communique read by Ferrari in which the defendants associate themselves with the protest of the convicts of the Turin prison going on since yesterday afternoon. There is a denial of the report given by several media organs that common convicts are contesting the defendants, and instead they give the news of a communique of the convicts and request its publication. I listen to the communique and I can only agree with it. Some of its objectives are ones that we have been pushing for in and out of Parliament for some time. The life and conditions of the convicts make the prisons an objective factor to be rigorously contested whose importance should not be mistaken.
...The objectives that all Italian convicts want to reach are the following: the immediate approval of the law on the amnesty and an ample general pardon; the immediate debate and approval of "provisional liberty" for all convicts, both men and women, who are in bad health; provisional liberty for all convicts with young children and especially for those with children in prison or who will be giving birth; application to the letter of the reform that has been passed but never, in effect, applied in any prison.
With regard to the conditions in the Turin prison, we want to point out the present over-crowding and inhuman conditions in the "cells" where dozens of convicts are forced to sleep in the corridors among filth, without hygienic services (and those few that there are work badly or are broken). We point out that diseases such as scabies and diarrhoea have broken out...
...At this moment all convicts are refusing to return to their cells and are peacefully invading the corridors and the sections in expectation of a positive reply which we reserve the right to evaluate. While our demonstration was going on peacefully in expectation of the people we had asked for, the guards of the outer wall shot volleys of machine-gun bullets at body-level against the second and fifth wings for no reason...
Meanwhile Col. Franciosa and Capt. Pignero have come to testify. The interrogation, conducted by the defense lawyers Zancan and Arnaldi, is very long and detailed, but does not succeed in throwing light either on the period in which the collaboration with Girotto began (on the contrary, the statements appear to be partly contradictory) or why Borgomanero was chosen as the preferred site of the investigations.
Franceschini stands up and offers the defendants' interpretation of the Girotto operation which, afterwards, will be put in writing in communique no. 16, delivered to the court on May 19. I watch Franceschini, whom the official biographies indicate as one of the theoreticians of the group, and as always he gives me a feeling of great coldness and aloofness. In his discourses he is very hard and aggressive even while being very careful of the terms he uses in order not to be shut up. Frequently there are ironic subtleties that bound from his eyes through his glasses even if his speeches are stuffed with dogma. Instinctively other defendants seem more interesting to me because they are more direct and simple.
The Girotto operation, Franceschini tells us, was put into effect as a support for the historic compromise (4) to destroy the first fighting workers units.
...In order to understand Girotto's functions as a spy, one must insert his actions into the general political picture in which it unfolded. In Autumn of '73, after the military coup d'etat in Chile, that process of political revision come clearly to the surface within the PCI which will solidify into Berlinguer's "historic compromise". His two famous articles that appeared in <> (5) at that time... ...It is in this framework that the "Girotto operation" ripened. It was prepared by the PCI and the DC together by way of collaboration of the [Communist] union (CGIL) with the Carabinieri (special squad) and the magistracy. In fact, during the first days of May '74 Levati, who at the time was a union official, was summoned to the Labour Chamber and his membership card was revoked on the grounds that "since the BR was preparing an elaborate operation of provocation in which members of the union might also become involved, it was better to take away his membership card because he might become involved".
It is after this encounter that Girotto begins manoeuvring to hook up with Levati.
This collaboration PCI-DC we find again in all the units participating in the operation.
Among the magistracy there is the team Caccia-Caselli. Caccia, substitute procurator general - thus a direct expression
of the executive (hence of the DC) - functions as a control on the entire investigation. That is to say, he must guarantee that everything works within the limits previously established by the government.
Caselli is an official of the Magistratura Democratica (6) administration and a PCI man. His function during the entire inquiry is essentially political. His job is not so much to find proofs but "to understand politically what is going on" and then, on the basis of these political evaluations, to establish who is a member of the BR and what role he played in the organisation, etc.
On the directly military level we find the pair Dalla Chiesa-Girotto. Dalla Chiesa is a trusted DC man and has assumed a large number of special assignments for this party. Furthermore he doesn't seem to be entirely persona non grata to the PCI, at least not to judge by the repeated statements of approval and eulogies of "the man's seriousness and efficiency" released by PCI representatives (the Hon. Mr. Trombadori, the <> (7) journalist Settimelli...) due to his work of "prison reform" (that is, the construction of prison camps!). Girotto is a PCI man playing a political consultant's role to the special units. Furthermore, only a "leftist" could hope to infiltrate the BR with any success. Thus the Girotto operation is one of the occasions on which the "historic compromise" policy clearly indicates its objective: collaboration with the class enemy to destroy all forms of class revolutionary opposition...
In the afternoon at home, where I have taken refuge to try resting, I hear the news of the discovery of Moro's corpse. For a while I remain empty-headed, with no thoughts.
The city is immediately covered with manifestoes bearing black borders of mourning. A crowd is organised going towards Piazza S. Carlo, but it doesn't seem very large to me. I find myself hearing this comment: "Who knows how many people breathed sighs of relief in Piazza del Gesù and Botteghe Oscure". (8)
Wednesday, May 10. The constitutional parties (9), the newspapers, the radio, all commemorate Aldo Moro. At the Lamarmora barracks the hearing is opened in an even more funereal mood. Curcio stands up and begins to read a communique, the 15th, which analyses the meaning of the Moro operation in terms of "class struggle" and claims the "revolutionary" significance of the kidnapping and killing of the Christian Democratic president. More precisely, the defendants affirm in the communique:
...The events of March 16 did not affirm a new regime capable of stabilising the economic-political-social situation in a short time as was intended, but rather there was manifested the existence of two opposing powers, the expression of antagonistic classes, of irreconcilable interests, needs and aspirations: the imperialist state and the armed proletarian force.
The armed proletarian force, of which the RED BRIGADES constitutes the strategic nucleus, has roots sunk into the working class, in the productive workers, in the metropolitan proletariat; and its "general interests", which means its goals, are the transformation of the capitalistic production relations and the creation of a Communist society.
The proletarian armed power knows that it is an organised and concentrated force and aspires to become a DICTATORSHIP.
The exercising of this on the part of the COMMUNIST FIGHTING ORGANISATIONS, the Proletarian Offensive Resistance movement and the mass struggle does not make reference to an abstract form of "justice" but is the product of a real relationship of forces in the process of liberation. And as abstract justice does not exist, so, for us, no abstract "morality" exists. For us, as Lenin said, morality depends on the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat. Morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society.
That is why we maintain that May 9, the anniversary of the cold-blooded killing in the Stammheim prison of our comrade Ulrike Meinhof, is a just conclusion to the battle begin March 16 and inaugurates a new phase of the revolutionary class war.
That is why maintain that the act of revolutionary justice executed by the RED BRIGADES on the political criminal Aldo Moro, responsible along with his DC accomplices for a thirty-year anti-proletarian and sanguinary regime, as well as grey eminence of the new projects of imperialist stabilisation entrusted to the collaboration regime, launched on March 16, is the highest humanitarian act possible for the Communist and revolutionary proletariat in this society divided into classes.
Curcio is expelled and Franceschini too. The indignation of <> and all the other newspapers will be enormous. Despite the the seriousness of the affirmations, it seems to me that there is a very tight logic in the defendants identifying themselves with the Red Brigades organisation which operates on the outside, even if they should not be in agreement with some of its actions. I am convinced that the defendants are not in agreement with the cold-blooded killing adopted as a solution by the kidnappers, but it is understandable that they back it. The public prosecutor asks for an urgent trial for illegal apology for a crime. The court consults and rejects the request as contradicting precedents and sends it on to those competent.
Friday, May 12. The wounding of someone has become such a daily occurrence by now that it no longer impresses people. In the Lamarmora barracks, in the intervals of the hearing, there is more and more often speculation about the duration of the trial and predictions about its conclusion.
A year ago, in the midst of the collection of signatures [for the referendum petition], the Piazza Navona affair occurred (10) and still today I think of the helpless comrades, the terrified faces of the people, the encirclement by the police, the pistols of the plain-clothes policemen that shot at body level, of the tear gas smoke that invaded the entire centre of Rome, of the dramatic attempts by our members of Parliament to solve the situation, of the ostentatious absence of Cossiga (11) and at the certainty acquired that this was a premeditated operation, coldly planned around a desk, to attempt to incriminate non-violent opposition. At 9 p.m. the news arrived in the almost deserted square of the assassination of Giorgiana Masi (12). Too often in the course of this year these thoughts have come back to mind. Today we are holding a difficult trial and others will have to be held. I prepare a communique asking for these trials to be held: the one for a criminal conspiracy of which, according to Cossig
a, I am a part as promoter of the May 12 demonstration, and the one against Cossiga for massacre.
It is exactly a year ago today that, according to the denunciation of ex minister Cossiga, I am the representative of a criminal conspiracy, guilty of having instigated thousands of citizens to commit a crime. I protest resolutely against this demonstration of chronic inefficiency furnished by the magistracy. In Italy, today more than ever, all trials must be held, above all when it is a matter of serious crimes such as presumed "criminal conspiracy". I don't manage to understand how it is that this does not happen either to me or other Radical deputies who on various occasions have solicited the authorisation to proceed in Parliament. We demand justice for all those who have been killed. Demanding justice is the only way of assuring the country of better times to come. If we are a criminal conspiracy we want to be condemned immediately. If it was a criminal conspiracy on the part of those who on last May 12 sent special squads disguised as "autonomi" (13) to disseminate terror in the disarmed crowd, to
look for and find a massacre, to attempt to incriminate those who use non-violent action rather than pistols, well then it is time that they pay, and pay at once, because it is too long by now that this conspiracy has been on the loose. Let Cossiga exhibit his proofs, we our photos and films, and let the courts decide. But let the courts do their duty: this trial must be held.
Speaking of this with Barbaro and other jurors, I become aware that these things are little known or already forgotten. The commitment of a year ago to demand clarity and to bring it about is all the more important as the evidence becomes ever greater of the attempt to bury the case.
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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES
1) An actress specialised in political satire.
2) The day on which Moro's corpse was discovered.
3) A far left wing newspaper, official organ of the party of the same name.
4) The decision of the Communists to collaborate with the Christian Democrats and Socialists is known as the historic compromise. This political strategy was delineated by PCI Secretary Enrico Berlinguer in 1974.
5) A Communist periodical.
6) Democratic Magistracy - a magistrates association.
7) The official PCI organ.
8) Piazza del Gesù and Botteghe Oscure are the sites of the DC and the PCI headquarters respectively.
9) The so-called constitutional parties are the ones that participated in drafting the Italian Constitution immediately after the end of World War II.
10) A Radical-sponsored demonstration.
11) Francesco Cossiga (DC) at the time Minister of the Interior, presently president of the Italian Republic.
12) Giorgana Masi was a student participating in the demonstration who was shot by persons unknown.
13) A name given to far left groups in the '70s.
