ABSTRACT: The Italian judge Giovanni D'Urso was kidnapped on December 12, 1980 by the Red Brigades who demanded the closing of the Asinara prison. The Radical Party began an intensive campaign over Radical Radio for the magistrate's liberation and to oppose the attempt of the "party of intransigence" to use D'Urso's death as an excuse for authoritarian operations. In an article published by the daily paper Lotta Continua (organ of the far left-wing movement of the same name, ed.), Marco Pannella declares that the Radicals and pacifists are against opening any kind of negotiations with perpetrators of violence, but they are, however, available for a dialogue with "killer comrades": "Consider us at your disposition not for collaboration, but for loyal discussions".

(Lotta Continua - December 1980 - from "Marco Pannella - Writings and Discourses - 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982)

That communiqué of the BR (Red Brigades) was apocryphal then. But welcome to it in any case. It has given us cause to reflect, as Radicals, on what can still be attempted, on what is imaginable, hence on what is our duty and what our possibilities.

Our position on the "Moro case" (1) was very clear, however much censored and still practically unknown even today. Apart from any judgements on what the BR wanted and what suited them, we were without reserve against negotiations and in favour of discussion. And we worked to the hilt, day after day, to assure that any political line taken would be through the obligatory channels foreseen in the Constitution. It was the governments responsibility to act according to instructions received - or better, to be received - from the Parliament and under its vigilance.

Just because it was so dramatic, so very extraordinary, the affair demanded to be handled according to the rules foreseen and required by the Constitution and the institutions. When the BR denied justice and law as being hypocrisy and simulated violence, we asked that the reply be made in the full respect of justice and law. A great and constant parliamentary debate, therefore, until Moro should be freed. The assumption of responsibility by means of a contradictory and public process for the formation of an intention and a choice, as the Constitution provides both for the Parliament and the Justice Department. Instead the Parliament was excluded. The DC (Christian Democratic) statute was itself violated with an aberrant and ignoble procedure, blocking its National Council and Administration from meeting and deliberating in order to give full power to a self-nominated and illegal "delegation". And the same for the other parties.

To the inherent clandestinity of the BR there was joined the clandestinity, the trickery and the meetings in the smoke-filled rooms and corridors of the government and of political democracy, violently reduced to this condition by the top levels of politics and the institutions themselves.

Even the action of the Socialists was conducted on the same lines and deliberately kept outside of and against the rules of juridical, constitutional and institutional prudence.

Quite rightly there was a refusal to concede recognition to the BR as a fighting and antagonistic force which they demanded as a premise for the liberation of Moro. But this recognition was given only some months later by the top levels of government when they officially declared that the country was in "a state of war" and the "enemy" was the BR... As we admonished - but gagged and censored so that the country even today has never had the chance to know and judge the line the Radicals sustained in order to defend Moro's life and with it the life of law and justice - all of this could only lead to disaster. And that is where it led to. That is where it led everyone, even the BR and the terrorists of every kind who saw their ranks fill, not with those whom they could have involved by finding a "political" and "generous" solution to that horrid adventure, but with those who from desperation of a social, generational, cultural and existential nature, or because with the fanaticism of vigilantes or of the

military, they are prey to the fascination of violence and death. It led everyone there, starting with the laws of the country which month after month were massacred in the name of a repressive pseudo-efficiency which was exactly what the terrorists and the violent were hoping to provoke, to prove that law was nothing but an expression and a cover for the power holders, respected whenever and just as far as it serves the violence of their interests. That is where it led, first of all, Aldo Moro.

After many years, it is now the turn of Giovanni D'Urso, in a scenario not entirely different from that of March 16. But with a big difference that no one seems to have noticed: on March 16, in order to capture Moro, they assassinated the men of his bodyguard, simple police workers who were doing their job. To free Moro, the powerful, the enemy, after having killed the four agents in Via Fani, constituted a political, an ideological, even a "human" difficulty and a perilous contradiction.

This time, luckily for him and for us, those who have kidnapped D'Urso have so far not committed any crime other than kidnapping.

This time it is necessary that the Radical Party and the democratic class movement, the non-violent movement, that those who believe in juridical humanism and government by law, that all those who do not intend to sacrifice a man and his life to a project created by men or by a society, that the non-revolutionary rebels and the non-reformist reformers succeed in carrying their convictions to such lengths and in strengthening them to the point of assuring that this affair ends in an affirmation of life, of humanity, of the growth of justice and the withering and defeat of violence.

It is possible that Giovanni D'Urso's life and not his death, the life that belongs to him, the life that is at least as sacred as that of them who have kidnapped him and threaten to kill him, may turn into an occasion of victory and growth for all, on both sides, in the only direction in which there can be growth and hope rather than despair and end. It is possible that we can convince - which is win together (from the Latin con: with, and vince:win, ed.) today and always. Not win against. Not even in those who have kidnapped D'Urso is this a fatal necessity, a bondage. Dialogue. Dialogue. Dialogue. No negotiations. There is no negotiation possible, none worthy of respect by either side if it is imposed by violence, by fear, by blackmail. One disobeys unjust orders. That is a duty. One does not collaborate with those who commit violence. That is a duty. There are no rules of war to be followed: by good fortune and the will of the people this has been banned by the Constitution, dictated by the anti-

fascism of the Resistance and betrayed by the "anti-fascism" and the "neo-fascism" of the parliamentary parties from 1947 until today, with the single exception of the Radical Party. Dialogue, honest dialogue, and without conditions.

If the Red Brigades really consider themselves "red", I will repeat to these killer comrades that they have chosen the path of murder, terrorism, violence and sacrifice not only for the others

but for themselves as well, and that they are making a mistake, a terrible mistake. And that it is a horrid, tremendous labour of Sisyphus to "fight for the liberation" of a few incarcerated comrades while those in prison for true or presumed terrorism are now more than a thousand and thousands more are risking imprisonment, are often living, in any case, as if they were already there, are killing and dying and watching pain, torment and desperation increase around them, and yet they continue to choose forms of struggle that only lead to the imprisonment of more comrades.

Meanwhile, others kill themselves "directly" and some damage themselves by denouncing others, possibly intending to save them and themselves, or in the illusion of doing this, or paying this price to remain consistent in their convictions.

However, it is not a question of convincing each other of everything all at once. We the revolutionaries from love and non-violent. You revolutionaries from hate and violent. The question - today - is to discuss in order to extract the maximum profit and strength, from the life - at least as sacred as your own - of Giovanni D'Urso. It is for all of us to pull the extraordinary trick of extracting an exemplary and positive conclusion from this filthy business.

I do not know what you are going to do and how. But you alone, unfortunately, will be responsible for whatever you do or don't do, for whatever you are capable of inventing and creating. it is difficult to choose well when there is not much you can do and when there are many of you; and when those many have differences and opposing positions it is difficult to discuss things and decide what is the best, the most profitable choice. You, in fact, are "soldiers" and we are civilians; you are"clandestines" while we live in the midst of people (or in the midst of dead people); you must invent at every moment the right way to speak and to act, and we have the rules (the channels) of the Constitution and the procedures it prescribes, and those of our party or of democracy. It is up to us, for our part, to respect our rules, those for which and by which we have the legitimate right (if we respect them) to condemn you as we would condemn ourselves if we acted as you do.

We have the much heavier burden of demanding that the Parliament, the parties, "politics", respect themselves and their prerogatives and norms to liberate D'Urso, to save his life, to help you and allow you ,in the absolute respect of the law, to return him to us unharmed. And that is the meaning of the proposals and decisions made public by the Radical Party yesterday.

But you cannot commit the error of demanding form your adversary what he doesn't believe in or which he believes is bad. When we pacifists reach the point of the most rigorous hunger strikes, the thirst strike or the most extreme fasting, we never ask to be given what we want and believe to be just. We fast in order to make the powers that be respect its own legality, its own commitments, that it ceases to be violent and to work against that which is and should be law also for itself, because it is imposed by itself and its respect is required from the others.

And do not commit the other error (I express myself in the exhortative mode as one does when speaking "among ourselves", not with "the adversary") to propose making deals with lives, any lives and in any sense, neither your own lives or those of your comrades, or of D'Urso or anyone whatsoever. Worse than useless, it would be damaging. Because the powers that be want death, they need D'Urso for a martyr, they don't want him alive. Certainly all this needs to be studied, documented to the very end, to examine and get to know the contradictions of the adversary, gain time (rather than lose or waste it) and thus space, physical space and space in the popular conscience and in that of every individual, and to unmask and defeat not "Violence" in the abstract, but this violence and that one and then the other, because power is itself and before all others an outlaw.

There are a thousand "unenforced" terms in our institutions that the popular conscience and that of us all must demand to have "enforced". There will only be amnesties and liberation when the popular conscience has been asked to and helped to understand the use and the necessity of them, oh you comrades who are tempted to murder or have chosen or committed murder: in connection with the principle, a sovereign principle of civility and juridical civilisation, of protecting the community and each individual from the persistent dangerous behaviour of one of its members, and not with the principle of punishment nor as an autarchic tool of social reintegration.

I hope there is now someone in Parliament other than the Radicals who will immediately propose a motion, a debate on a new and fruitful direction to find a political response to the danger in which you have put D'Urso. It is not a question of defeating you as these lugubrious and violent imbeciles imagine or believe, but to defeat the thing in you that will increase the certainty of the worst outcome, the nth cry of "viva la muerte" (long live death, ed.), a desperate and always suicidal cry when it comes from someone who is or considers himself to be a "comrade".

We must question ourselves publicly over television and in the newspapers, who should for once not completely censor the debate in Parliament (or in the parties), so that whatever the daily reply may be it will be given according to the requirements of the Constitution and those who demand the application of the Constitution.

Allow me to inform you that today the closing of the Asinara penitentiary, if not further off than before, is at least much more problematic than before D'Urso's kidnapping. In the government there are often dominating instincts and reflexes that are very similar to your own, that you yourself have perhaps inherited and share with a large part of the regime's leaders.

And it is not this, I am sure, that you want. It is not on the bodies of hundreds of your comrades that you want to build who knows what "tactical victory" or what other "vigilante-style executions".

The government, the parties and political groups, the people, we ourselves, must do everything to find the times and places, any possible ones, to hold an urgent discussion with you. You, I think, must do the same. In your case, I don't know how. You will know it if you want to.

Consider me at your disposal. But understand me rightly. Not to collaborate in any form of violence - for whatever reason or in whatever circumstances - or for any unjust order you may want to give me. But to hold a loyal discussion. That, yes. But without involving in any case, not even by omission, any kind of complicity or connivance. Neither from us to you nor from you to us.

But are you sure, comrades - if such you consider yourselves to be - that it is not to your advantage to set Giovanni D'Urso free at once? In reality they do not want it, they don't expect it. They would not be happy about it. If, instead to expect it and to be happy about it, and you know it, were "the people", us,

you yourselves.

Will you free D'Urso, comrades?

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(1) The assassination of the Christian Democratic leader Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades.