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Recent events
Paris 23 november 2008
International Conference
"Terrorism and Human Rights"
AIVITER SPEACH
On the part of the Italian Association of the Victims of Terrorism and
of his President, Dante Notaristefano, I convey their greetings and
grateful thanks to the “Mouvement pour la paix et contre le terrorisme “
for the invitation to participate in that conference, and to Huguette
Magnis Chomsky for the huge work in which she is involved for the
purpose of weaving and launching an international alliance of
associations under the common denominator of the struggle against
terrorism.
I must state, first of all, that even if I am speaking in this session
dedicated to the voice of the victims, I am not personally either a
victim or a relative of a victim of terrorism. However, since 2002 I
have been active within the association which I represent here in the
sector of communication, didactics and international relations. What I
am submitting to your attention, consequently, comes out of my personal
evaluation, which not withstanding has matured at the contact with the
victims and their problems, and with the leaders of the Association.
I am eager to specify that non only as a kind of a trite precision, but
because the voice of the victims of terrorism has a right to claim its
expression which is of a deeper nature than that which usually belongs
to any citizen of a free country. A depth which results from a simply
obvious fact: the deceased victims cannot have their say, while the
voice of the wounded survivors and of their families is spoiled due to
the offences which can hardly be overcome, as also happens to the
lesions inflicted to their bodies and to their souls.
It is truly starting from that statement that the interrogation arises
which I would like to submit here to a collective thought. How is it
possible to reach a balance between the memory of the crimes of the
ex-terrorists, who are alive and free to write, and that of their
victims, if the latter have died or if their voice is weakened or mute
due to the offence ? No doubt such an interrogation is probably
concerning mainly such countries like Spain and Ireland which, besides
Italy, have experienced a certain type of terrorism: the one which could
rely on a more or less broad ideological sympathy on the part of public
opinion and of the intelligentsia, yet the increase of the Arab
communities in Europe could make the problem a present one in the
context of the terrorism of Islamic inspiration.
In order to better explain the problem of the memory I will refer to the
reflection of a philologist of Turin University who recently edited
letters from the prison by the terrorists who attacked Aldo Moro, the
president of Democrazia Cristiana, several times Prime Minister,
captured and later murdered by the Red Brigate in 1978.
Miguel Gotor, in Lettere dalla prigionia, writes: “The recording system
(of the ex-terrorists) enjoys besides of the unpleasant privilege
consisting in the fact that the “full witness”, Aldo Moro, is unable to
express his own memory, since he did not survive to the chasm in which
he was thrown, thus losing the right to express himself. For that reason
his jailers of yesterday are in a position to go on keeping him in
prison today by means of an instrumental use of memory. A use which is
necessarily a functional one for the current needs (judiciary, political,
moral, psychological, religious ones) of free men or in search of
freedom, but not to an historical reconstruction of what did happen, of
a past over which they are going on to exercise a monopolistic and
paradoxical dictatorship of the testimony”.
That dictatorship has a devastating consequence for the survivors and
the relatives, because, today, they are in the condition of prisoners,
not the ex-terrorists. Prisoners who concerned with the suffering of
hearing a periodical misrepresentation of the facts on the occasion of
every press article or book published by the terrorists of yesterday or
by their ideologists.
The founder and president of our association, Maurizio Puddu, who was
injured at his leg at the door of his home in Turin in 1977 by the
Brigate Rosse has written:”It is terribly unpleasant to hear today at
new interpretations which in reality are tending to alter the facts and
their undisputable significance”.
Hence the victims of terrorism and their families don’t enjoy the
possibility to view the future: there are too many things in the dark
which are weighing on their shoulders and veiling a truth squeezed by
the dictatorship of testimony.
That epoch, commonly denominated “years of plumb”? is thus prevented
from being delivered to history “insofar as too many truths are missing,
too many responsibilities have not been clearly established, too many
people are still waiting for justice and the debate remains polluted by
the proprieties and the self defences, including those pertaining to the
generations”, Mario Calabrese writes, the son of superintendent Luigi,
murdered in Milan in 1972.
That dictatorship of the memory has further been amplify through the
logic of the mass media. Again Mario Calabresi writes, in his book
Spingendo la notte più in là, observes that “inequality of treatment
between he who kills and he who is killed is irretrievable, being
continuously increased in the course of the years by the fact that he
who killed is writing his memoirs, gets interviewed by tv channels,
participates in some movies, stands in positions of responsibility,
while nobody will ask the widow of a corporal how she is living deprived
of her husband, if there are children who experienced an orphan’s
childhood, if the passing of time did heal the wounds, the grief, the
pain”.
In order to understand that dictatorship of the testimony, one has to
look into the genesis of terrorism in our country and to catch the
origins of that broad ideological sympathy on the part of public opinion
and of the intelligentsia for the subversion of the constitutional order
of the State which I sketched out at the beginning of my discourse.
Judge Marcello Maddalena, in his report to the colloquium Lotta al
terrorismo, wrote that “one should not forget the culture of that epoch,
those who taught and the “teachings” of that epoch. Let me remind
further of what could be told about that, precisely in those dark years,
in a meeting of Italian and German law practitioners, by a German
sociologist, Kielmansegg. In that meeting, the matter was about the RAF
in Germany and the DR in Italy, and one of the assessments arising from
that debate was that the phenomenon of the red terrorism was much more
isolated in Germany than in Italy, to the extent that in Italy, around
the red terrorism, a substantially favourable or at least propitious
cultural atmosphere had taken shape: a widely diffused cultural “mode”
or “trend”, in particular in intellectual-bourgeois circles, such as it
could allow the terrorist talk to root and to prosper.
The nucleus of all that had to be researched –Kielmansegg stated – in a
concept, not only not repelled but on the contrary substantially shared,
according to which any individual need must or should be satisfied; and
any “unfairly” not satisfied need could legitimate a reaction even
beyond the limits of law; a violent reaction, in fact; while precisely
the first teaching in a sane democracy should be that the very
“democracy” is based on a rule of “citizens living together” even if in
a context of not satisfied individual needs.
Consequently, it is due to the hegemonic culture of that period across
the sixties and seventies of the past century that, in our country, the
terrorist phenomenon could develop up to an incomparable size with
respect, for instance, to what happened in France or Germany. What we
are alluding to, in fact, of 200 deaths and thousands of wounds,
kidnappings and attacks, not taking into account the side of the fascist
slaughters and that of the international Arab terrorism.
It is that culture which allowed terrorist groups to rely on a vast
network of sympathizers, beyond operating nuclei: their supporters are
deemed to have been some 20.000, to be compared with 7.000 individuals
who have been prosecuted, 4.000 of those ones having been definitively
sentenced on the ground of actions of “red” subversion.
It is that culture, again, by easing the opportunities of expression for
the dictatorship of the testimony on the part of the ex-terrorists, has
imposed to the Italian people, who has clearly and strongly expressed
her own solidarity towards the victims of the numerous tragic
circumstances inherent to the national and international events of the
past century, an attitude of coward embarrassment and even of ambiguous
silence when being confronted with the victims of the inner terrorism of
those terrible years.
No doubt, as I am now here in Paris, I cannot keep from wondering
whether from the scraps of that culture there could be here some
precipitates in the fact of supporting so much charitable pity and
understanding towards our fugitive terrorists. So I am reporting to you
an interrogation, in paraphrasing and synthesizing the article by our
man of letters Guido Ceronetti: how is it be possible that a civilized
and lay country as France is could have offered and go on offering its
protection to Italian terrorists, even if having been sentenced by three
levels of courts because of blood crimes, appearing in this way, in
today Europe, as a huge cathedral of pity which welcomes murderers and
provides them impunity, opportunities and patents of intellectuals?
I am on the way to my conclusion in observing that the attentive
examination of that culture by the German sociologist and cited by judge
Maddalena, that according to which any “unfairly” not satisfied need
could legitimate a reaction even beyond the limits of law; reminds us of
a theme which, in non juridical terms, reads as “any rebellion is
without limits and consequently is legitimated when killing”, which
means exactly the opposite to the thought of Albert Camus, an author
whom I know to be dear to your Movement, and whose words appear on all
documents issued by the International Alliance against terrorism.
Thus, today I believe that it is advisable to underline that the first
cultural fight against terrorism goes through the concept that no
rebellion should ignore the sense of moderation, the insuperable limit
constituted by the life of other people, because it is the lack of
moderation which generates terror: “The absolute good and the absolute
evil, if one includes in them the needed logic, are requiring the same
rage”.
It is not certain that the UN and the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, whose 60th anniversary we are celebrating today, but no doubt
that part of the political culture which still today idealizes - by
making them absolute values – the human and citizen’s rights, did not
understand that killing for an ideology is morally as reprehensible as
killing because of futile reasons. One is not conscious that the “good”
cause of the terrorist or his right to enjoy an “equitable” lawsuit and
penal treatment, are constituting elements of which ethic value is
inferior to that of having killed somebody in the name of a reality or
of a right which, when idealized and rendered absolute, truly takes
place outside the former or the latter.
To the tragic dimension of death due to a pirate of the roads or to a
jealous husband, we can say, in paraphrasing Hanna Arendt, that the
terrorist – just like the totalitarian State – with the ideology or the
religion in turns, transforms the victim into a trivial gearing in the
machine constituted by its adulterate reality, depriving him / her not
only of life, but also – in the eyes of he /she who believes in that
adulterate reality – of the tragic dimension which belong to his / her
death.
The corollary. is that do not exist a distinction between guilty victims
and innocent victims. Whatever could be the supposed guilty, the victim
could not have the opportunity to defend herself with any explanation:
because he /she is in the domain of the dictatorship of the testimony.
I think that the principal role and aim of our International Union are
to ask for the absolute value of the victims’ sufferance, without any
external possible reduction. I think to the encouraging words pronounced
by Vicenç Villatoro on the occasion of the 1° European Day for the
Victims of Terrorisms: « The victims of terrorisms ideologically
considered as nearest to our positions or more understandable for our
culture do not be considered as less victims of them who died or have
been touched by terrorisms generated by ideologies far from us. The
ideology of terrorists is a not a basis for the judgement of the
morality of the terrorism – always void - neither the sufferance of the
victims.».
Luca Guglielminetti, International Relations Manager
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