Solidarity with a veteran of the revolutionary movement in Italy in the 1970's

Solidarity with Cesare Battisti
It would be a good idea if people could help spread the word about the persecution of this guy -- and, can anyone translate his novels?


State of betrayal

In the 80s, France offered sanctuary to Cesare Battisti, wanted for terrorist activities in Italy. But now it wants to send him back to jail - and he has gone on the run. Jon Henley on a case that has reopened deep political wounds in Europe

Thursday August 26, 2004
The Guardian (UK)

The answerphone message in the Paris apartment is brief and, for those who know the man who left it, final. "Cesare is not available," it says. "But he will be checking his messages." What the French and Italian authorities would now like to know is: from where? For Cesare Battisti - terrorist-turned-author, villain-turned-victim, a longstanding political, judicial and diplomatic headache finally facing near-certain extradition - has disappeared.
His friends say, frankly, that he has left the country, shedding a police tail, and that it was the best thing he could have done. "I can understand a guy who runs when he was living freely in France, and knows he faces the rest of life in jail in Italy," says the novelist Dan Franck. "If ever there was a case of legitimate flight ... "

For Oreste Scalzone, one of the first of more than 300 reformed far-left guerrillas from Italy who have, like Battisti, sought refuge in France since 1985, "his decision to unhitch his destiny from this extraordinary, senseless witch-hunt is nothing more than good human sense".

The popular French crime writer Fred Vargas, who published a passionate defence of her fellow author last month, The Truth about Cesare Battisti, says his apparent flight abroad is "a legitimate act of self-defence. I was witness to the dramatic decline in his psychological state ... He proclaimed his innocence, and was portrayed as a monster."

But not everyone is in agreement; Battisti's case (and his cause) have split France. To his backers - intellectuals, writers, politicians and showbiz stars of the broad left - he is a remade man who, like others of his kind, was promised sanctuary in France. That pledge has now been reneged on by a rightwing government that has brought shame on the Republic.

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To his opponents, however, Battisti is a criminal, a one-time member of a terror cell called Armed Proletarians for Communism, one of many violent ultra-left groups (including the infamous Red Brigades) whose bombings, kidnappings and killings rocked Italy in the 1970s and 80s and claimed 400 lives. Found guilty in Italy of three murders and of complicity in a fourth, Battisti must be punished they argue.

The pledge of safety given to the men and women engaged in the Years of Lead, so called because of the sheer weight of bullets used in the terrorist attacks, was made by France's first Socialist president, the late Francois Mitterrand, in a 1985 speech to the League of Human Rights. At a time when Italian courts were dispensing unsafe decision after unsafe decision, often based solely on the evidence of informants who had been promised immunity from prosecution, he said the former terrorists would not be extradited from France on condition that they broke with " la machine infernale ", that they renounced their past, and did not go into hiding, and kept out of politics.

Some 100 former Italian extremists who took up Mitterrand's pledge, upheld by two French presidents and nine prime ministers of both the right and left, are thought still to be living in France. Most, like Battisti, who has a wife and two children aged 18 and nine, are now fathers and mothers. All are worried. And rightly or wrongly, all feel betrayed.

"Faced with a wall of cynicism erected by an irresponsible state, by a wall of silence built on the lies of certain former militants who even today are prepared to pawn the truth for their own safe conduct, France took the political responsibility to offer us a way out: lay down our arms, come out of hiding, present ourselves before the authorities of the Republic," wrote two of them, Enrico Porsia and Alfredo Ragusi, in Le Monde this week.

"That is what we did. For its part, the Republic guaranteed that no one wanted in Italy for 'politically inspired acts of violence' would be extradited ... Why does this pledge suddenly have no value? Twenty years later, we are criminalised and pursued by our new community. A country that had promised us asylum, given us residence permits and even, in some cases, French nationality. We cannot, we will not, submit to this 'betrayal of state'."

The Paris appeals court that judged Battisti's case in late June, more than 10 years after another French court refused an earlier and near-identical Italian extradition request, did not sadly attach quite the same weight to Mitterrand's promise. In a country with an independent justice system, the courts "cannot be bound by political promises made by a French government 20 years ago", it said.

The defence's argument was that Battisti should not be extradited because, although he was convicted in absentia in Italy in 1993, he would not - as he would be in France - be allowed a retrial; the court ruled, however, that the writer had forfeited his right to be retried because he had voluntarily refused to attend the first one.

Several leading lawyers have since been heavily criticial of the appeal court's decision. "Absolutely no new evidence was presented that was likely to change the opinion of French justice on the reality of the crimes of which Battisti is accused," says one authority, Jean-Pierre Mignard. "The ruling overturned a policy of state that had been adhered to for 23 years, for no objective reason. It makes you think there has to be something beyond the confines of the case itself."

Battisti was born in 1954 in Latina, south of Rome. Jailed in 1976 for a string of minor offences, he converted to the cause of the armed class struggle and joined the Armed Proletarians for Communism. Arrested in 1979 as part of an inquiry into the murder of a Milan jeweller, he was sentenced in May 1981 to 12 years in prison for possession of arms and membership of an armed gang. In October that year, he escaped.

Battisti came first, briefly, to France, then headed to Mexico where he worked by turns as a graphic artist, a pizza cook, a barman and a freelance journalist. He arrived in France for good, preceded by his wife and daughter, on September 5 1990, and has since established himself as a crime and thriller writer. He is the author of a dozen successful and critically acclaimed works including Shadow Clothes, Never Again Without a Rifle, and Last Bullets. Most draw extensively on his past life; Paris-Match recently praised them as "the best-written condemnation there is of the absolute impasse that is terrorism".

But in March 1993, a Milan court convicted Battisti in his absence of murdering a prison guard in Udine in 1978, a policeman in Milan in April 1979, and a neo-fascist militant in Mestre in February 1979. The same court also found him guilty of complicity in the February 1979 murder of a jeweller whose son was left paralysed by the attack. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

In a rare interview earlier this month, the writer vehemently protested his innocence. His 1993 conviction was based on false testimony from turncoats, he said. "I have never killed, and I can say this looking straight into the eyes of the parents of the victims and the judges," he told Le Journal du Dimanche.

Since the June court decision against him, according to Vargas, he was in "a palpable state of distress. I don't know whether he had any confidence in the justice of this country, in Italy, in anything, and he had become very fragile. He cried a lot. He was scared. He had been psychologically destroyed."

Battisti's supporters openly accuse the French government not only of abandoning Mitterrand's promise but also of conniving with the rightwing government of Silvio Berlusconi in a cynical grab for the law-and-order vote. "The government put him in a completely impossible position," said Julien Dray, the Socialist party spokesman. "We are rewriting the script, playing with people's lives and those of their families, when the page had been turned. And it is absolutely unberabale to hear Berlusconi giving lessons to anyone about observing the law." For its part, the French justice ministry said bluntly this week that it "saw no reason" why convicted terrorists should not be punished, adding that "certain comments by those who defend Mr Battisti and approve his flight are appalling and irresponsible".

If Battisti's case has brought to the surface deep-seated antagonisms between right and left in France, the same is no less true of Italy, where domestic terrorism is still a live issue: only last year the Italian security forces broke up the reborn Red Brigades, whose guerrillas are accused of murdering two senior government advisers and a policeman over the past five years.

Many Italians argue that France did not suffer anything comparable to Italy's Years of Lead, in which right and leftwing terrorists battled with each other and the state. The most famous victim of those years was the former Christian Democrat prime minister Aldo Moro, kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades in 1978.

The pro-Battisti campaign in France has infuriated a large number of his fellow countrymen, many of who feel justice in such cases does serve a purpose. On Monday, two women who played a leading role on opposite sides in the Years of Lead sat across a table from each other at a meeting in Rimini organised by the Roman Catholic group Comunione e Liberazione.

Francesca Mambro, aged 45, a former member of the neo-fascist NAR who received six life sentences, smiled and chatted amiably with Nadia Mantovani, aged 53, and ex-Red Brigades guerrilla who served most of a 20-year sentence before her release in 1993. Their reconciliation, with each other and with much of the rest of Italian society, has been made possible in large part because they paid a penalty for their crimes.

It remains a running sore, particularly for the right, that some far-left terrorists never have. Roberto Castelli, the justice minister in Berlusconi's government, reacted with outrage to the news that Battisti had escaped, lambasting a European left which, he claimed, "defends murderers [and] defends fugitives".

Castelli has made it a priority task to get back those still on the run. Top of its list is Alessio Casimirri, the only alleged member of the group that killed Aldo Moro still at large, currently living in Nicaragua. Also earmarked as priority cases are two other former Red Brigadists, Enrico Villimburgo and Roberta Cappelli, both now living in France. They top a list of 12 wanted former guerrillas whom Paris has - until now - been reluctant to hand over for trial in Italy.

At the root of that reluctance have been profound misgivings over the impartiality of Italy's judicial system. Far from being eased, these have if anything been strengthened by the case of Adriano Sofri, a former leader of the hard-left Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle), who has been held in prison since 1997 for a crime many on the right, as well as the left, believe that he never committed.

Sofri is serving a 22-year sentence for ordering the murder of a senior Milan police officer. He was convicted largely on the word of a witness who turned state's evidence and had his sentence reduced. Sofri, a noted commentator who contributes each week from prison to the liberal news magazine L'Espresso, endured an absurdly contorted succession of trials shot through with anomalies and contradictions.

Battisti's supporters may well be right in arguing that he will never receive fair treatment in Italy: that meted out to Sofri was so outrageous that even Berlusconi has felt compelled to back moves for his release. Between a country that will no longer respect a promise, and another where justice is maybe not always all it could be, the writer has made his choice: in Scalzone's words, "He is ... I hope, as far away as possible. And, this time, really beyond their reach."