Re: article on Sofri case

[batcom@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Steve posted the article titled
>_______
>The final twist that jailed a socialist hero
>
>by Julian Coman from The European, 30 January 1997

It's a good title which has no right explanation in the body of the article.
Sofri, once he abandoned the illusionary perspectives of Lotta continua,
became, some year later, one of the political advisors of Bettino Craxi, and
particularu for the foreign politics. Do you know Bettino? The former
"segretario" of the PSI, one of the most corrupted parties of the
bourgeoisie, which has been  swept away by the same bourgeoisie for to
prepare the new political scene after the cold war. It was the "socialist
party" and Sofri was an its hero. If the author of the article meant
"socialist" as pertinent to the workers movement and its perspectives, well,
he's completely wrong.

>along with Mario Capanna who led the students' movement,
>>Sofri was the most charismatic performer in the
>>youthful extra-parliamentary left.
Right! The students' movement, not the workers' movement, which at that time
was seeing its *heros* in the PCI leaders.

Briefly. The final sentence of the Supreme Court is certainly a revenge by
the one faction ot the italian "magistratura" (the body of the judges) but
has some other "political" reasons which are eventually stronger than the
fear for the "schok in the civil society". The Supreme Court had to say to
the public opinion that the "repentant's testimony" is anyway valid.
Marino's testimony is filled up by "holes" and is likely false. Several
times the press reported about the doubts of interventions by the police and
the secret services on Marino.=20
But Marino is a "repentant" and, as such, has to be believed in his
testimony. This is the political message of the sentence about Sofri.
They need it because the internal struggles (inside the ruling class and its
magistratura) is fought through trials and judicial persecutions.
The only solution they (the judges) actually offered is the presidential=
 pardon.

I can only solidarize with the aut.op actitude: solidarity with Sofri,
Bompressi and Pietrostefani, yes, but if we ask for a pardon it has to be
for all the political prisoners who by hundreds are still kept in jail,
mostly just for having been member of the red brigades or similar groups
(while most of the actual killers, of course repentant, are going araound as
free men) or for having took part in militant actions.



>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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