Leonardo Clausi: Violence in Italy Does Not Signal the Return of the Red Brigade
Leonardo Clausi is a freelance Italian journalist, based in London and Rome.
It was a moment straight out of an old television documentary: only it was coming from a 2012 Italian court. Last Tuesday in Milan, during the appeal hearing of 13 suspected members of a group linked to the New Red Brigades, one of the main suspects, Alfredo Davanzo shouted: "This is the right moment, ahead with the revolution, long live the revolution!"
Davanzo had just been asked by a journalist what he made of the recent kneecapping of Roberto Adinolfi, the chief executive of the nuclear power company Ansaldo Nucleare, by two masked men near Genoa on Monday 7 May. There is no established link between the men on trial, arrested in 2007, and the perpetrators, who define themselves as anarchists. The hearing was taking place after the Cassazione court overturned the previous sentence.
Another defendant, Claudio Latino, said: "Violence [is] inevitable and strategically necessary. We don't love violence, or have a romantic idea of it, but it is inevitable. No group of dominators has ever relinquished power peacefully". He concluded, his voice quivering with emotion: "Either communism or destruction. Death to imperialism and freedom to the people".
The defendants have "politically refused" their lawyers...