I am unable to say whether there were specific collusions between individual judges and the party-political and bureaucratic apparatuses which set up the 7 April operation. However, I do know that, in objective terms, that repressive operation erected an institutional wall in the face of the various forces that were calling for transformation and participation. I know that, in objective terms, this repressive operation had the effect of opening murderous political spaces for terrorism. And I know that, in the name of a repressive state of emergency, this operation succeeded in sustaining coalitions of forces – both old and new, both within and outside the institutions – which were seeking to defended their own common interests by blocking any movement towards social change.
I do not claim, as the founding fathers of socialism always used to do, that proletarian society in revolt is the only force capable of effecting social transformation. But I do insist, stubbornly, on rejecting the validity of the reactionary reflex which, on 7 April 1979 (as also today), saw in law and order the sole guarantee of society.
Honourable colleagues, I am neither a pentito nor a turncoat, and this is why, at the same time as I reject what the facile defenders of the 7 April operation are claiming, I can also develop the theme of political responsibility to the point where I recognize my own errors. The illusions, the utopias and the (often devastating) effects of these impulses were as much a part of my own thinking as they were of the entire generation of ’68.
We were living in the midst of social upheavals. I made some mistakes, but on the other hand things were changing, and I am not ashamed to affirm my own change within the reality of that movement. I am accused of having been an evil teacher for students at my university. Perhaps I was; but here again this happened in the midst of things: within the terrible marginalization of thousands and thousands of young people, in the face of the impotence of the institutions to respond to the most elementary requests that were being put to them. I have never said that violence was the sole solution, and where there were violent responses, those responses cannot be considered as having been incited by myself. Nor have I ever killed anybody – as was irresponsibly claimed by a member of this House just the other day. Nor have I ever organized criminal actions against people and their lives. I moved in the real world of that time, between utopias and the reactions of the force of law and order, between a tumultuous upheaval of demands and institutional responses that offered nothing but blockage and repression. So the problem of political responsibility is actually far more complex than people are prepared to admit, particularly when my own political activity was immediately marked out as criminal activity.
Let us never forget, honourable colleagues, that 7 April is located at a pivotal point in the extraordinary production of emergency laws. Now, what are the contents of these laws? We know what they are. Preventive detention, which can be extended for life; denial of bail; the law permitting the use of pentiti; a maximum extension of the repressive efficacy of the accusation of association; and, above all, exceptional procedures. All this is accompanied by a configuration of extraordinary powers for the judges and investigating authorities, and thus by a virtual termination of the normal processes of balancing the evidence in the investigative phase and of a correct articulation of the regime of evidence. The rules of the game have been turned on their head. For example, take the law on pentiti. Try to imagine the development of a trial which uses that law. Even supposing that, at particular periods, in various aspects of the juridical system, efficacy is allowed to prevail over the force of law, this prevalence cannot be carried to the point of overturning the actual evidence. I have always considered the state of law [stato di diritto] to be a utopia; I have always pointed out the fragility of its mechanisms. However, it remains the case that, before and beyond any other juridical ordinance, we must have rules which prevent the abuse of judicial processes and put limits on power.
Honourable colleagues, political responsibility cannot be formed in these conditions. You should know that, when contemporary philosophers define political responsibility in contemporary society and try to give it a critical definition, they speak of ‘an institutional conjoining of evidence and legal validity, of consciousness and intersubjectivity’. This means that the political decision, in order to be responsible, in order to be rationally founded, has to nourish itself on debate and on a consensus which is neither prefigured nor extorted. The emergency regulations and the exceptional legislation have rendered impossible the formation and expression of a real political responsibility on the part of many of the subjects involved in the struggles of the 1970s. In particular, we, those of the ‘7 April case’, have been caught in the hystericism of the media and ‘opinion makers’; we have been pre-judged. And the functional outcome of the mechanisms of preventive detention has been continuously to reconstruct presumptions of guilt, regardless of the fantastical nature of the charges brought against us. The more the facts failed to fit the case, the more we have been accused of political responsibility.
Four and a half years later, not one of us has yet seen our accusers face to face, despite the fact that they were prisoners like us. There are prisoners who, after four and a half years, have had only one hearing, which lasted at most for a couple of hours, even in cases where they were willing to collaborate in the trial process but wanted to reject the accusations that have been brought against them. I set before you all the case of Luciano Ferrari Bravo, whose case has been taken up by the European Court of Human Rights and by Amnesty International. Nor do we understand why it has taken two whole years to move from the stage of permission to proceed in the trial to the actual opening of proceedings, despite our insistent requests for the trial to be started.
However, my purpose here is not to complain about violations of the law and of public opinion. The problem lies elsewhere. In this case there has been a breaking of the principle of the plurality of subjects participating in the justice process. There has been a dissolution of the condition in which it is possible to exercise not only the power of rendering justice, but also the power of accepting that justice.
The democratic state takes on board the division of powers that is traditional in the constitutional state. But the order of things is no longer simply constitutional – it is also democratic. And in this latter respect there is no conception of justice which is not established solidly, or at least conflictually.
Both individually and collectively we have asked to be represented as part of this mutual process, or at least of this conflictuality. The answer we have received is that the rigidity of the material constitution, and of the equilibria and historic compromises within it, would not permit that.
So what political answerability are we talking about, then? Of whom? And how and when?
On our side it was politically responsible – I reaffirm this – to struggle for social change and to suffer – in the environment of a social struggle that marginalized terrorism – unavoidable forms of mass violence, never murderous ones, which were often productive of a new and more democratic ordering of things.
It was, however, politically inadequate to think of overcoming a deeply rooted social crisis through the exclusion, marginalization and repression of new and irreducible social subjects.
Thus I accept my political responsibility, honourable colleagues; but I also denounce those who pose as the saviours of democracy but at the same time deny the very preconditions of that democracy.
Perhaps I made mistakes. In fact for sure I made mistakes. But this does not justify the deafness which, in the 7 April case, has produced the conditions for an ‘ecological’ disaster of the legal system and the democratic establishment.
Mistakes are always implicit in grand circumstances; but they are also present in my small circumstance. I do not intend to deny it. At the same time, however, I reject the claim that the autonomia was a cradle of terrorism. I cannot deny that contiguities were created. But this was not because the movement was organized in some vert
ical sense, as the prosecution is claiming. On the contrary, the contiguities actually developed at the time when the movement was coming apart of its own accord. In the Veneto, we only started to see the killings a year and a half or two years after the start of the ‘7 April trial’. Before that we had outbreaks of violence, which I condemn; and I categorically refute before this House what has been falsely attributed to me – even recently – by various journalists. Never, either at that time or now, did I approve of those acts of violence, nor was I responsible for them. I insist, however, on the fact that it was only after ‘7 April’ that the violence slipped across into the barbarism of murder, being brought there from the outside by the likes of Savasta.
Continuing on the theme of political responsibilities, honourable colleagues, I would like to add some further elements of reflection.
After ‘7 April’ there was a strong temptation – both for myself and for my comrades – to accept the solidarity which was offered to us in prison by the terrorists, in tune with what the ‘7 April’ situation had determined in the movement, both inside and outside of Italy’s prisons. But we resisted that offer. Against everyone – really against everyone – in terrible solitude.
The Ministry of Grace and Justice put the ‘7 April’ comrades into the special prisons, together with the terrorists. Good sense, which normally means finding ways of living with people, would have meant seeking a modus vivendi with them. But our history, our responsibility would not permit that. Despite the daily confrontations and the not always inefficacious death threats, we succeeded instead in building and consolidating that pole of political dissociation and in reconstructing our identity as militants for life and against death, against the violence of terrorism, and at the same time against prison and torture. In short, a front of hope for social change.
When we dissociated ourselves politically from terrorism, we did not do so for us, but for all those whom the combined mechanisms of repression and a blocked desire for struggle had driven into the arms of terrorism. Here we are talking about thousands and thousands of young people, women and proletarians. Political dissociation became our banner, against the pentitismo laws and for a political resolution of those Years of Lead.
Honourable members, do you really think that this was easy – or hypo critical, as some people have claimed – and that it was ‘simply a matter of words’? If so, you should have tried saying those ‘words’ in the prison at Palmi in 1979, or in Trani prison during the revolt of 1980, or in Cuneo, where two young men, guilty of having succumbed to torture, were killed; or in Rebibbia, where we were being sent repeated death threats in 1982!
And do you think that it is easy to utter ‘words’ such as ‘re-finding of communist identity’ and ‘political dissociation’, when the honour of these declarations is turned on its head by the media and by the regime’s persecutors, and the word ‘dissociated’ is used in cases such as that of ‘the animal’ [‘o animale’], Pasquale Barra?
So perhaps you should try it for yourselves, carrying forward this kind of politics, when the deafness of judges and party hacks destroys the very preconditions for a resumption of democratic requalification on behalf of subjects who have conducted – with mistakes, but also with generosity – struggles for social change.
However, despite all these misrepresentations, our battles have achieved important results, extending beyond the growing number of political prisoners, to become a mass agenda for all prisoners in the system. Today we are witnessing a major struggle in the prisons, where there has been a reduction in the strategies of the big clans and in the irresponsible behaviours of the irreducibles, who always push for taking the fight to extremes. We are seeing important openings towards a democratic order of things and towards the kind of debate which is indispensible today for a solution to the prisons problem.
When for the first time, in 1981, we proposed democratic delegations of prisoners, in Rebibbia and elsewhere, and we battled in order to introduce – against the logic of violence – the method of discussion in assemblies, we found ourselves caught between two fires: the deafness of the institutions and the threats of the irreducibles. Honourable members, I do not want to say that the one is the same as the other; but it is certain that, since I first entered this system of repression, I have always found myself crushed between the one and the other. Preserving our own lives and identities has not been easy.
So, honourable colleagues, today, inside the prisons, there is a large majority of political prisoners who ask to be reinstated into a democratic order of things. And they are doing this on the basis of a critique of the mistakes that have been made. I am very well aware that there is no easy solution to this problem. But I also know that reasonableness and responsibility require that some sign of hope be given by the governing classes.
The disregard for human rights in prison and the exceptional juridical measures which were imposed during the period of emergency have to be subjected to criticism and gradually eliminated. A sign needs to be given that a start is being made along this path. A reversal of things is needed – indeed it is overdue – also in order to avoid (and this is not a threat, or blackmail, but a simple forecast) desperation turning in on itself and producing new incitements towards terrorism and new impulses towards death, not only in the prisons but also outside.
But let us not concentrate on despair as much as on the hopes of the generation which has been caught up in this vicious circuit of terrorism and repression: crushed, with no other means of expression, by the institutional blockage of political development; and at the same time carried by Italy’s particular historical situation to a richness of desires and impulses for change that found no satisfaction. Let us look at the hopes of a generation which, albeit with serious errors, had conceived a dream of justice. The plague has touched these young people, but it has not killed them.
Honourable members, this is what we represent – my comrades and myself, and everything else that is summarized under the heading of ‘7 April’. We represent a relationship between the past and the present, a hope for social change in which anyone who so wishes is welcome to join us. And a political tragedy for which all of us are responsible, and which needs to be resolved.
So, honourable gentlemen, I urge you not to opt for imprisonment. That would be a negative sign; it would impart a sense of blocking a necessary tendency, and it would lead to a new and terrible disillusionment regarding the ability of democracy to resolve its contradictions. (Rome – 14 September)
Folio 95
The discussions continued in Chamber. My speech was well received by our friends, but it was not much appreciated by our enemies. Immediately after I finished the Chamber was deserted, but I stayed in to listen to the debate, albeit with some boredom. There were many speakers – both friends and enemies. Among the former, the formidable Giacomo M. – I appreciate his warmth, his intelligence, and his parliamentary practice. Then various people spoke in my support – Fiandrotti, Felisetti and the good Franco P.; then Stefano R., and, with great emotion, Gianni F. and many others. Speaking against me, and fiercely, was a band of fat Christian Democrats and hysterical fascists – plus various parliamentary clowns among the republicans and the social democrats. Such is Battaglia, in the midst of this pack, demonstrating the most excited sense of the state. Ignorant of things, but with arrogance. Big confusion among the communists. Loda made a speech – he had already distinguished himself in the Committee, with a heavily sermonizing, inquisitorial tone. Occhetto, on the other hand, spoke in favour of postponement. The ferocity on the one side is barely lessened by the sense of opportunism on the other. I do not understand how a proposal so timidly presented can have any chance of being passed – as a mediation, it is presented in terms that are solely formal – it says nothing about the substance of the trial, or the exceptional laws, or the problem of how to emerge from the Years of Lead. In the PCI there is a clear rank-and-file call for a political solution to be found (the debates at the Festa del
l’Unità festivals this summer showed this) and a leadership which evaluates this possibility. However, there is also a series of utterly ferocious intermediate levels who have no intention even of discussing their deadly loathing of the autonomia. On this issue the party bosses are deadpan; because the truth is that, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, they have set in motion a dreadful dance, which they do not know how to stop. Here, both yesterday and today, the main people to speak have been these intermediate cadres. They tell me of very hard-fought discussions apparently taking place in the PCI parliamentary group. I don’t understand this very well – I have the impression that the proposal for postponement is biting on a void, that it is politically sterile. On the other hand, it is the only political alternative to returning to prison, and those who are good at number-crunching assure me that it is going to pass. Despite the customary absences (what a sinister impression the Chamber gives when it is almost empty!), the debate is tense, with a sense of urgency. I don’t think it’s only my nervousness that produces this impression. However, I feel in myself, a sense of detachment, a schizophrenic repulsion, more and more as the hours go by. OK – better to head back to Milan, to talk to my friends. I’m on a plane now. Tommaso M. accompanied me to the airport. With his great affection and considerable legal skills, he gives me good advice. Remember, Tommaso, when I was in prison and I told you that we were not going to get out of this ugly story – or, better, that the only way out was by political means? You looked at me through those bars and that glass, as if my optimism was insane. It may have been insane; but, as it turned out, it was realistic. And now? ‘Toni, be realistic,’ you tell me, ‘there’s nothing more to be done.’ You’re right, Tommaso, but is it not possible that this realism will also turn out to be insane? Anyway, I have to decide. But what a wearisome thing it is, to have to live these different dimensions of one’s consciousness – on the one hand, the timescales of institutions, and, on the other, this hope for liberation. And to have to act decisively and to choose between them. Not that my spirit is not totally inclined towards freedom … and not that my head has not been rendered almost impotent by the relationship with the insanity of life in this institutionality – but this time of freedom seems to me to have been too short, and almost voraciously destroyed. You say: ‘What you promised to do has been done: (1) the political and parliamentary dramatization of the 7 April case and of the problem of finding a political solution; (2) the opening of up of the legislative debate in the institution and the opening the historico-political debate in the country; (3) support for a reopening of the prison struggles front, and its capacity for undermining the institutions. What more do you want, Toni? You could not have done more than that. Now the problem is entirely theirs.’ You’re right, you’re right! And yet … The plane is flying over the sea, with excellent visibility. Down below, to one side, you can see Sardinia and Corsica. This sea is beautiful. (Rome/Milan – 15–16 September)
Diary of an Escape Page 26
