article on Sofri case

[Steve Wright <sjwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I found this at www.sofri.org . . .

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The final twist that jailed a socialist hero

by Julian Coman from The European, 30 January 1997

There can have been few stranger spectacles in recent Italian history
than the sight of Adriano Sofri, now 55 years old and a
respected journalist and teacher, walking into a Pisa prison for a crime
committed in another era and quite possibly, by another
man.
Sofri, along with two other ex-members of the defunct Lotta Continua,
the revolutionary organisation he co-founded in 1969,
had been found guilty by the Italian Supreme Court on 15 January of
organising the murder of the Milanese police
commissioner, Luigi Calabresi, shot twice in the chest leaving his home
in 1972. The killing was immediately assumed to be a
revenge killing after the earlier death of a young anarchist, Giuseppe
Pinelli, in Calabresi's custody.
The verdict, and the severity of the 22-year prison sentence, were all
the more shocking given the sober respectability Sofri
had attained in late middle age. A commentator for both L'Espresso and
Panorama magazines, Sofri also taught at the
Accademia di belle Arti in Florence. Like the other firebrands of his
generation, it seemed, early radicalism had merely been
the prelude to a creative and responsible maturity. After all, even
Massimo D'Alema, the leader of the PDS, had admitted to
once throwing a petrol bomb, caught up in the bearpit that was Italian
politics in the 1970s. Suddenly though, the past has
caught up with Sofri and cast the darkest of shadows over his future.
The doubts surrounding the conviction are considerable. The
prosecution's case was sufficiently fragile for the charges to be
thrown out of court on three separate occasions over the last seven
years. It rested solely upon the disputed evidence of a
former "comrade", Leonardo Marino, who waited sixteen years before
alleging in 1988 that Sofri had ordered him to drive the
getaway car on the day of the assassination. His testimony has never
been corroborated and aspects of it were inconsistent.
But the circumstances ensured that Sofri's would be no ordinary trial.
To examine the case, the judges were obliged to
examine a past which might aswell have been another country. The
hearings, which lasted nearly seven years, were a tour of
all the yesterdays that Italy would rather forget - a journey through
years in which the country came perilously close to civil
war.
Prosecutors and defendants struggled to reconstruct motives, values and
intentions that belonged to an age when Revolution
was considered a real possibility, and the state was prepared to use any
means to prevent it. The trial in effect became an
investigation into the sins of a generation.
In 1990, Sofri handed the judges a written `Memoir' arguing his
innocence and explaining the oddities of defending the
person he was in 1972: "I had to overcome a resistance to fighting on an
old battleground which I had abandoned a long time
ago," he wrote. "I couldn't defend myself as I am today, with my more
rounded thoughts, my good manners and my old
books. I had to defend the person I was then, sharp-tongued,
vituperative, constantly on the move. I was faced with the
alternative of confounding time and identifying absolutely with the
person I was, or denouncing that person and losing my
relationship to my own past."
Sofri's past was an exemplarary version of the radicalism which swept
through Italy in the wake of the events of 1968. Born
in Trieste in 1942, he was 26 and studying in Pisa when student unrest
gripped Europe. It was the right place at the right time
for one of the outstanding intellects of that generation of students.
The Universit=E0 Normale di Pisa, an elite institution
comparable to Oxford, Harvard or Freiburg, was rivalled only by "La
Statale" in Milan as a centre of radical thought and
action in Italy.
The dry, acerbic Sofri quickly made a political impression. One icy
exchange with the venerable leader of the Italian
Communist Party (PCI), Palmiro Togliatti, during a general meeting,
entered student folklore. After Togliatti's speech, Sofri
cornered the ageing patriarch of the left and asked him "Why haven't you
made the revolution? Togliatti responded: "Make it
yourselves." It was clear that Sofri had no time for the reformism of
the "institutionalised" left. In 1969 he co-founded Lotta
Continua, devoted to developing the politics of mass struggle outside
Parliament.
The early seventies represented the high watermark of LC's activities
and popularity. "Let's kidnap the bosses" was a
favourite headline in the group's paper. "Prendiamo la Citt=E0" (Let's
take over the city) was another Sofri-inspired slogan. But,
unlike other organisations, the group scrupulously avoided terrorist
activity, wary of provoking the Italian state into violent
repression.
At this time, along with Mario Capanna who led the students' movement,
Sofri was the most charismatic performer in the
youthful extra-parliamentary left. He was ironic, clever and angry, the
worst nightmare of every bourgeois parent. A brief
spell in prison did nothing to harm his reputation.
But by 1976, as far as Sofri was concerned, the game was over. Although
Italy had become progressively more violent, the
Revolution had come no nearer. Those still committed to the cause were
drifting steadily towards the isolated acts of terrorism
which would culminate with the Red Brigades. After a disastrous
excursion into electoral politics, where the LC was routed
by the PCI, Sofri took the decision to dissolve the organisation, ending
it seemed a tortured chapter in Italian politics. Sofri
moved on to a quieter life.
Twelve years later, and 16 years after the murder of Calabresi, Sofri's
nemesis appeared in the shape of Leonardo Marino. A
working class former Lotta Continua footsoldier, he told Carabinieri
(who approached whom is not clear) that a meeting in
Pisa on 13 May 1972, Sofri and Giorgio Pietrostefani ordered him to
drive the getaway car for Calabresi's assassination. The
murder itself, he alleged, was carried by Ovidio Bompressi. The motive
was revenge for Pinelli's death.
There followed nine years of arguments about times, places and
ideologies. Aside from factual holes in Marino's testimony.
Sofri's defence was that an isolated murder as Calabresi's was at odds
with Lotta Continua's declared strategy.
Friends and former political allies such as the author Leonardo Sciascia
and the Green MP Luigi Manconi have spoken up for
Sofri. The prosecution's case rested on the judges accepting Marino's
word. After seven years of conflicting judgments the
Supreme Court, to general surprise, has decided to do just that.
And now Sofri has returned in Pisa, to the prison which overlooks the
university where he made his revolutionary name. He
has taken a copy of "Dombey and son" by Charles Dickens and is sharing a
cell with Bompressi, with whom he can never
have imagined to share such a melancholy intimacy.
Outside the clamour is growing for a presidential pardon, advocated by
some on the grounds that the conviction is so dubious,
by others on the basis that it was all so long ago.
Inside, neither Sofri, Bompressi nor Pietrostefani, who has returned
>from France to serve his sentence, will ask for a pardon.
To do so could be taken as an admission of guilt.
People often talk of being prisoner of their past, but in Sofri's case
the expression is barely a metaphor. A ghost of his past
actually tracked him down in the present, jangling jailer's keys.
Appropriately for someone intellectually so fastidious, his
immediate response has remained his only response, most eloquently
rehearsed in the "Memoria" he presented to the judges:
"Whoever wanted to make the suicidal and murderous choice of pursuing
the armed struggle had to do it by breaking with us.
Lotta continua, fortunately for us and for Italy, made the opposite
choice. Fanaticism, hatred and violence overwhelmed all
bar a few in those years. But the accusation made by Marino is a
grotesque distortion of our history."
(Additional reporting Michele Puccioni)


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