ABSTRACT: The report on the vicissitudes of the various militant Radical groups who, on April 19, 1982, demonstrated in six Warsaw Pact capitals at once (Moscow, Prague, Berlin, Sophia, Budapest and Bucharest) to denounce the complicity of governments of East and West in the policies of rearming and the extermination of the Southern peoples of the world, as well as to support the objective proposed in the manifesto signed by the 72 Nobel Prize winners: the priority of priorities in our time must be the survival of the peoples menaced with hunger and underdevelopment. Moscow: a two-minutes-long demonstration in the Red Square, four hours of police arrest, then expulsion. Prague: a half-hour demonstration in St. Wenceslas Square on the spot where Jan Palach immolated himself (1), then arrest and long, hard hours of interrogation and expulsion by way of the German border. East Berlin: Twenty minutes until we were arrested and then expelled into West Berlin where we held a press conference at the European Parlia
ment. Sophia: Forty minutes in front of the ZUM Department Store, arrest, police violence and arrogance and the expulsion by bus to Yugoslavia. Bucharest: half an hour in the midst of the crowd, the militia courteous and embarrassed, two hours of arrest and then release, unhoped-for but consistent with the liberal facade of the Ceaucescu regime. Budapest: Twenty minutes in Rakoczy Square, a low-key arrest and expulsion across the Austrian frontier.
(NOTIZIE RADICALI No.6, May 28, 1982)
(From Bucharest to Radical Radio, from Moscow to Brussels; in all these places the Radicals, from the party secretary to the radio "technicians", have worked night and day without interruption. Here we report on how they did it.)
MOSCOW
An appointment in Brussels on Thursday April 15 at the home of Annie Braquemont, our press officer. We arrive exhausted, Gianfelice and I, after 24 hours on the train. We have to meet around a table at once with Jean Fabre and Annamaria and the others to set up time tables and communication codes.
Here I meet Luc and Marc, the Frenchmen, Pedro and Fernando, the Spaniards, with whom we will execute the action. We show them the material we have brought from Italy to produce the flyers (stencils, ink, and rollers) and scotch tape for the sashes. The first problem is the stencils: do we hide them in the baggage or on our persons? We keep them in our stockings and it is well that we do because the baggage is searched up to the last handkerchief.
We take off for Moscow after only three hours of sleep. In the plane a hostess begins an insidious conversation about the reasons for our trip. It is the first of a series of episodes that will make us feel constantly followed and spied on. We arrive at the airport which, at three in the afternoon, is unbelievably deserted; it makes one think of [Rome's] Tiburtina Railroad Station at three in the morning. To Marc, Moscow seems like a monolithic ice cube and, in fact, passing through it to reach the hotel, cloaked in dark greyness, it brings to all our minds only dark aversions.
In the evening we go to have a first look at Red Square. Luc, as he looks at an enormous cannon and an out-sized bell that have never been used, observes that Russia is the country of the great unused achievements. The cannon and the bell, besides representing tools of power, indicate in their uselessness what the Soviet Union has made of the Communist ideology: a monstrosity.
We dedicate two days to sight-seeing in order not to arouse suspicion in our fussy tour guide who stuffs us with pacifist political propaganda, fitting it in between the history of the underground and that of Lenin, and tells us how the Russians have been forced to love each other "a little" to defend themselves from the Americans who will not ratify Salt 2, etc., etc. During the night we discuss the details to be worked out: we will pass out leaflets at the foot of Lenin's Tomb and we will not offer passive resistance. We and the Spaniards would have wanted to, but not the French and the Belgians. And this is not a decision that can be taken by majority vote.
The night before the action we prepare all the material and go to bed for a few hours only. The last obstacle is presented by Gianfelice who, living in Bologna, has not had the chance to become familiar enough with the general organisation of the action and is afraid of getting six months in Siberia. I tell him if he doesn't feel like going through with it, no one can reproach him for anything. In the morning he says he will participate and his final reason for this is the calm and assurance that I have shown. This makes me glad.
At 1 p.m. on Red Square we open our banner, but after only a few seconds the policemen who crowd the square pounce on us, possibly informed by the international news agencies which they had contacted half an hour earlier. Within three minutes we are in the nearby police station where, for the first time, I feel afraid. Marc comforts me by pointing out rightly that at bottom all police stations and policemen are alike. The interpreter we have requested is a character out of a film: squalid, with a nasty, sadistic smile which in itself was a kind of psychological torture leaving us little hope for better physical treatment. After four hours and after having interrogated only two of us they release us.
In the evening, before taking the plane our merriness ends as we watch the workers return home tired on the steppe on the edge of the city. As we leave we feel that we are abandoning them to tyranny. We are weighed down by the consciousness that human rights depend on solidarity and so we should do more. The fact of having been immediately released is a recognition of the value of our ideas and our actions. They are not susceptible to ambiguity; but it would be lovely, as Luc says, to be able to hold a Radical Party congress in Moscow.
PRAGUE
In the days preceding our departure I have to make a general check up on the organisation, working even at night. Really stressful. Thursday I leave for Paris where our press officer, Bernard, and I have to agree on plans before he leaves for Prague that evening. There I meet Olivier (a Belgian) and Jean-Paul (from France) with whom I will leave the next day on the worst train I have ever taken.
We reach the border in three different compartments carrying the stencils for the leaflets on us and the "painting" materials hidden in Jean's luggage. Tense moments, but despite the incredible number of soldiers and customs officers Jean finds a stratagem for avoiding a search of his luggage. In the evening we are in the hotel. The next morning we are quiet tourists who accidentally encounter a friend - Bernard - and tour the city. In reality the atmosphere is half way between James Bond and Silvio Pellico. Olivier and Jean actually are worried that they are being followed. I, much calmer, enjoy completely this marvellous city, filled with the fascination of the Hapsburgs and Mittel Europa which contrasts sharply with a style of life reminiscent of the Fifties.
On the morning of the action, knowing that we will go without eating for many hours, we head for St. Wenceslas Square, tense but in a good mood, armed with our banner and leaflets which have only come out well thanks to the ability of Olivier. Jean is afraid of rapid police intervention while I joke about the dangers of being ignored - a danger that seems justified to me after we have been holding our banner high up for half an hour on the spot where Jan Palach set himself on fire in 1968. But the evident sympathy of the Czech people, several hundreds of whom who constantly gather around us, force the police to intervene. First two policemen in uniform come and only try to take away our banner. They go away when we withdraw up higher to the applause of the crowd. Then, after I have given other leaflets to the people who form into small groups to read (by now we have been demonstrating for an hour), policemen armed with clubs arrive. We sit down on the ground and make them carry us away while the Prague
citizens smile and applaud us or shout angrily to the police. Bernard, a little way off, hears words shouted such as "democracy" and "totalitarianism".
At 12:15 we find ourselves in Prague's 1st District police station. According to the functionaries who interrogate me in English for five hours while Jean and Olivier wait out in the corridor, we are trouble makers and terrorists. I remind them that we have broken no laws nor violated the constitution (we studied them before leaving) and that we want to deliver a letter to Husak. In the end we were back were we started from, but with a great advantage for us: I have inundated them with information concerning the meaning of our action and the facts of the pacifist struggle in Europe, both in its appearance and its reality. They understand so well that at the end of the interrogation they all, except for "the chief", shake our hands and one of them wishes us good luck.
After three hours each of us is in a different cell of the police station. At 11 p.m. I explain to one of the guards that we haven't eaten anything since 10 a.m. and ask him to bring Jean and Olivier something to eat. He doesn't understand, but he is kind and brings some cigarettes (poor Jean doesn't smoke). At seven the next morning (I haven't slept because the light in the cell has been left on all night) they take us separately into the interrogation room where we will wait nine hours a day with a break for lunch which doesn't concern us because Olivier and I are holding a hunger strike. I take advantage of these hours to overwhelm them with all possible information on the fight against hunger in the world, on the different conception of a party that the Radicals have, on the political situation in Europe.
They are very interested. The "big chief" (the one who didn't shake our hands) continually enters the room to read the continuation on the typewriter of all the sheets they send him of the police report. By the afternoon my nerves are frayed and I would be ready to sign the police reports even in Czech just to be able to get out. Only Jean Paul's firm opposition (with whom I asked to be able to talk for five minutes) convinces me to desist. The problem is a political one: they do not want to write a translation because then they would have make it an official provision and thus admit to having arrested us. JEan is right and I will not sign.
Between English, French and Czechoslovakian I no longer understand anything. I return to my cell dead tired only to find out that one is not allowed to sit on the bed before 9 p.m. (the regulations are very strict) and since there are only two stools which are occupied by two Czechs I decide that if they do not bring another one I will sit on the bed. Two guards enter who, after giving me a couple of blows because of my passive resistance, agree to bring me one. It may seem something of little account, but from that moment on, the consideration with which the guards and my cell mates treat me shows yet again the power of non-violent behaviour.
On the third day of imprisonment, fasting and sleeplessness, we learn that we are to be expelled during the night. But before having them take me back to my cell, the "big chief" asks me if I will agree to talk to him. For half an hour we talk freely of the East-West situation, the Radical Party, the hunger in the world, the false Reagan-Brezhnev negotiations, of Jaruzelski, Khabul, Walesa and Sakharov. At the end he too shakes my hand. For me it is the greatest of personal and political satisfactions. I return to my cell only to leave it for good to go with Jean and Olivier to the train which, at four in the morning, reaches the German border where we are free again at last.
BERLIN
Four of us left for Berlin - Luis Boris, Miguel Angel Sanchez, Juan Antonio Herrero and Miguel Alarcon - all members of the Spanish League of Conscientious Objectors. The contacts with the press and for our security were to be maintained by Mariam in Spain and Helen Krauser in Berlin. Because of the difficulties of contacts and to save money, our group worked with less coordination than those in the other capitals. But all the political objectives, the schedules and, of course, the cities, had been coordinated by Mariam who had participated in all the international coordination meetings.
The first problems, which are actually fun, begin in Stuttgart. We arrive in great haste one day before the appointment with Helen. We think we have made a mistake, have arrived a day late and that Helen has gone away already. Then we become aware that the following day is the right one. And so, satisfied, we go to the station where a blonde, pleasant girl wearing a Radical Party pin comes to meet us at the established hour. It is she... a very pretty contact. In proceeding on our trip to Berlin, the only thing we hope for is that April 19 will arrive soon. We console ourselves thinking of how cold it surely is in Siberia this spring. In Germany too, for that matter, some of us feel it getting colder as, little by little, we near our goal. We reach the frontier between capitalism and socialism. None of the customs officers suspect us. On the contrary, the customs officers on both sides smilingly ask us if we are Spanish and we reply: "precisely... olé!" Perhaps it is because of our reputation as nice pe
ople that we are not searched. We arrive in East Berlin at 2 a.m. and despite the insistence with which we telephone our contact, there is no reply.
We try to find a hotel so that we can sleep, but they are all full (at least the ones which would fit our financial conditions). There is nothing to do but take it philosophically and get a brainstorm: sleep in the car. No sooner said than done. At ten the next morning we receive hospitality at a friend's where we will print our leaflets in German on the equipment we have brought with us on the trip and which, we are told, will work much better than that of the other groups. As we prepare our banner we talk constantly about the fate awaiting us. The opinions are various. The conclusion is: wait and see.
At this point, as we had agreed, we were to telephone Madrid and say "everything OK"; easy to say but not to do since a terrorist attack had cut most of the telephone lines. In the end we learn from Jean Fabre that everything is all right in Madrid and ready for the press conference. In code we give our "go ahead": "the potatoes are cooked", and Jean wishes us good luck. We pass the border on the underground (which goes from West to East Berlin) without problems. No one imagines that we have 300 leaflets and a banner with us. Our behaviour is impeccable. We reach Alexanderplatz by crossing a city full of policemen whose atmosphere reminds us of Franco's Spain during the Seventies. We have the sensation of going backwards in time.
At 11 sharp, after having wished each other good luck, we split up. Luis and Miguel Angel go up a few steps of the museum to spread the banner while Miguel Alarcon stays at the foot of the steps to distribute the leaflets. Miguel Angel and Luis are arrested in a flash, within a few seconds, whereas Miguel Alarcon continues to distribute leaflets for about a quarter of an hour. The police let him do it until he offers some to them too. At first they are stunned and do not know what to do. Then a non-commissioned officer arrests him too. It must be about 11:20 when we reach a police station where the first thing they do is test us for our alcohol content (the famous German precision). Then we are questioned.
Actually our story, just like the clarity of our actions, must be convincing, because before releasing us a high official explains that they too agree with our demands for disarmament, but the re-arming policies of other countries oblige them to remain armed. It would be more convincing if he didn't add in the same tone that we will be expelled to West Berlin, that we cannot come back to the German Democratic Republic and that, since they have withdrawn our visas, we cannot go back in the car through East German territory that surrounds Berlin. Perhaps for politeness he then asks if we have any questions. We ask how it is, since they too are "pacifists", that they arrested us, that they will not allow us to return to East Germany, and why they have withdrawn our visas. They are not able to give us an answer. Certainly it is a strange way of being pacifists.
The trip and the nervous tension have worn us out, but in West Berlin it is a press conference and not a rest that awaits us and which we will hold in the seat of Parliament before a crowd of journalists.
Furthermore, it must be added that things go no better for our comrades in Spain. While they were holding a peaceful demonstration of solidarity with us in front of the national employment office, the police arrested them and held them for 32 hours only because they asked for less arms and more work in consideration of a government military budget for 2,500 billion which will help Spain get into NATO.
Thinking over, on the trip back, what the police official had said about their pacifism - as we notice military convoys that are entirely similar to those we had seen on the way in passing through Spain and the other countries - it naturally occurred to us that all the countries are joined together in this strange kind of pacifism... You understand me, don't you?
SOPHIA
The Sophia group had to organise itself in four days rather than in three months. In fact, it was exactly on the evening of the 13th that Mario Buschadin convened the first organisational meeting with Nicoletta Figelli, Antonio Zappi and Paola Ghersina.
On the 17th at 9 p.m. we leave with Mario Pujatti's truck (he is our press officer) and we arrive in Belgrade where we gulp down a coffee after 12 hours of continuous driving. At 2 p.m., we stop for a snack on the road and then reach the border. After a half hour wait, during which they check to see if we are on the blacklist of smugglers or political undesirables rather than searching us, we leave and head for Sophia. Pujatti does all the driving and is dropping with sleepiness while the others try to keep him awake by telling him about Bulgaria. The situation is backward both economically and socially. People live in extremely simple conditions. In particular Sophia, where we arrive at 4 p.m., has on the one hand a well-kept old city centre with shops and impeccable shop windows; and on the other hand outlying districts with muddy streets and houses that look more like a village than a capital city and people who live like they did in the South of Italy during the Fifties.
We immediately have to find our hotels. Pujatti will go to the Balkan whereas we must find someplace else so that the police will not be able to trace him after the demonstration. In the hotel we prepare all the material and worn out from the trip we go to sleep shortly after midnight.
At about 9 in the morning we head for the site of the demonstration, the ZUM department store in the heart of town, first of all to eat a big breakfast. Paolo Marini and Antonio go out at 11 and start extending the banner to the applause of the passers-by who immediately gather round while Nicoletta starts handing out the flyers. Some of the people who have taken them start reading them out loud, obliged by the hunger for news of the little groups who surround them. For us - and we believe for them too - these are moments of true happiness.
After about 40 minutes two police cars arrive and the officers make us get in. They take us to the Sophia police headquarters. After a quarter of an hour of tense waiting - we try with little success to joke among ourselves - two officials arrive: one, who speaks French, is very courteous. The other takes hold of Mario and throws him against the wall, gives him a kick to make him spread his legs and begins searching him. The rest of us will get the same treatment from him, but we keep calm and do not show fear so the situation does not get any worse. In the meantime Nicoletta is taken into another room and searched by a woman officer who makes her undress completely. She then has to wait more than two hours for the interrogation of the others to be completed.
Meanwhile Pujatti, after having hidden the photos in steering box, crosses the Yugoslavian border and waits for us in Nish, drowning his anxieties in a bottle of vodka, but not before informing Rome and Brussels of the consequences of the demonstration..
While Pujatti is on his trip, Antonio and Paolo are interrogated by police officials who turn out to be perfectly well informed about the Radical Party (with only 2,000 registered members, for them it's a sect); about the Red Brigades (capitalist agents); about capitalists (war mongers and violent), which means everyone who does not live in the Eastern block. For the police that and only that is how things are.
After more than two hours they take us in a police van to our hotel where they give us back our baggage and passports stamped with an expulsion order. At 7:30 p.m. we arrive in Nish and eat something while Pujatta informs Radical Radio of our release. The following morning we leave for Trieste where we have to hold a press conference and tell friends and relatives our story, etc. In short, a real rest will not start before the 22nd. The best memory is that of the faces of the Bulgarians as they read the flyer - the best for us, but we think for them too.
BUCHAREST
We leave from Milan - Gaetano Dentamaro, Gerard Buchard and Phillipe Gautier - the evening of the 15th. A tragic trip! We miss our connection for Vienna and arrive a day late at the Romanian border by taxi after having hitch-hiked as well and having spent several nights without sleep.
At the border there is tension due primarily to the fact that we have no visas and the complications of getting them is such that we cannot think of anything else.
We arrive in Bucharest after 15 hours on the train. It is a city of row houses, infinitely sad, cloaked in greyness. The soldiers who here too, as in other Eastern European countries, are an important "caste", are dressed in very bad-quality wool, so that they seem more like theatrical costumes than uniforms. The people also seem out of fashion and not just because they don't wear "Western" clothes, but because they don't show the least trace of anything but a post World War II atmosphere. The station too, dark and crowded with the poor, seems nothing but a space.
The evening of the 18th, in the hotel, we begin to make the banner and the leaflets. The former is no problem, but the flyers drive us to despair. The next morning, the 19th, at 9:30 p.m. we are at our appointment with Francesco Tullio, our press officer, who has already made contact with the local ANSA (2) correspondent, a very helpful person, who gives us some advice regarding the site for the demonstration (in front of the Officers Club in Via Victoriei).
At 12:45 the next morning, Gerard and Philippe extend the banner while I begin handing out the leaflets. Within a few seconds I am surrounded by hungry hands and my stock is completely plundered except for one last flyer. And after turning from one group to another of those who have gathered around the banner, asking them to pass the leaflets around, I get up on a nearby capital bearing the inscription "Life, Peace, Pinedazarmi". Taking advantage of the similarity between Romanian and Italian, I myself begin reading the text out loud. The people applaud and oblige me to re-read it several times.
When the "Militiei" arrive someone even shows Gerard an escape route and we pass through two wings of the applauding crowd which holds out hands for us to shake and warns us to be careful.
At the police station, after having convinced them that we understand but do not speak Romanian, we take turns explaining to the interpreter (a woman) who we are and the purpose of our action, etc., etc. Above all we ask to speak with Ceausescu, to deliver our letter to him. This when the miracle occurs: they immediately release us, giving us the address of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party. Before going there we stop off at ANSA where we make a live report to Radical Radio on the situation. We help the ANSA correspondent with a piece of a report on the demonstration. We meet representatives of the "Front for Democracy and Unity", a non-government pacifist organisation, and we make some appointments with Romanian diplomats for the next day.
On the 23rd we begin the return trip - a worse trip than we had imagined for a demonstration that was beyond all our imagining. But we have left behind us quite precise contacts and commitments; for us the action does not end here, we will see in coming months what fruits we can harvest.
BUDAPEST
On April 9 Frederique and I get a tourist visa for Hungary. It is one hurdle passed. If they have given us a visa they have no suspicions. On the 13th I ask Adele Faccio to inform and reassure my family whom I have kept in the dark to avoid anguish and worry. On the 16th Frederique, Nicola Cantisani and I are in Milan for an appointment. On the 17th, in Vienna, we split up: Frederique and Nicola, who has been blind since birth, in one compartment and I in another. At the border the atmosphere is a little tense, but they, with their air of two lovers, easily get through. Hungary seems to me a country massively controlled by the police and the army. Grey. At Budapest one lives in a heavy atmosphere, with smiles and human relations reduced to a minimum. To Frederique, who has more experience of the East than I do, the country seems less hard and poor than others she has visited. On the next day we are at our appointment with Patricia, our press officer, whom we inform of the site for the demonstration and
the last arrangements.
That evening, holed up in our hotel room like secret agents, we work until 4 a.m. to make the banner and the leaflets (by hand and in Hungarian!). Frederique's sleep is haunted by cadavers hidden under the bed and various assassins, but at 11 sharp the next morning we are in Rakoczy Square, open our banner reading "Bread, Life, Disarmament" in Hungarian and begin passing out our leaflets. While Frederique tries to attach one to a monument a plain-clothes policeman stops her, and another one whose badge I first ask to see "disarms" me of my leaflets and the banner. The same thing happens to Nicola. The policemen behave discreetly so that no one notices what is happening. They don't want to be seen preventing a pacifist demonstration. After half an hour they ask us to follow them to the street corner where they load us into two cars and take us to headquarters. An official tells us he is in agreement with our basic ideas but that his country is not guilty of participating in the arms race. He also says th
at the mass media will not give information about our demonstration because the leaflet is "incorrect" and that our letter will not be delivered to the president because we are not an official organisation. Meanwhile we have reached the alien's office of the police where we are interrogated primarily to learn what other foreigners or Hungarians have helped us with our translations.
We tell them smiling that we prepared all that in Rome and then we protest for the treatment we have received which is against the Helsinki Treaty and their own constitution which defends the right of any Hungarian citizen to present his own proposals to the institutions.
After two hours they accompany us back to the hotel where they search our baggage and offer us food and drink. Reconstructing the preparations for our demonstration they relax and become perfectly "cordial" to us. Then they take us to the Austrian border on a bus saying that what has happened will be written in our passports. It is the moment in which Frederique's moral hits bottom: when she considers how few of our leaflets have ended up in the hands of Hungarians, she almost feels that we have worked two months for minimal returns.
After reaching the border we see that nothing has been written in our passports. Evidently they decided they did not want any evidence that a pacifist demonstration had been held in the capital of Hungary.
With regard to the cancellation of history they have nothing to learn from any other dictatorial regime - quite the contrary, they may perhaps have something to teach the RAI [Italian Radio-TV] and our newspapers. But only very little.
----------------------------------------------------------------TRANSLATOR'S NOTES
1) Jan Palach, the Czech student who burned himself to death to protest the Warsaw Pact's suffocation of the "Prague Spring".
2) An Italian news service.
