The return of the Red Brigades?

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/europe/story.jsp?story=276750

The Independent (London), 21 March 2002

Italy fears revival of Red Brigades after government aide is shot dead
By Frances Kennedy in Rome

Shortly before 8.30pm on Tuesday, Marco Biagi telephoned his wife and asked 
her to throw the pasta in the pot. The thin, silver-haired professor had 
been teaching at the university in Modena and was heading home tired and 
hungry. He unlocked his bicycle from the train station and cycled the brief 
distance to his home under the medieval red brick arcades of central 
Bologna.

Minutes later, neighbours found his bike, body and briefcase on the 
pavement, surrounded by blood and cartridge cases. That it was a 
professional hit was obvious. A silencer was used and witnesses saw two men 
speed away on a motorbike. Once the 51-year-old victim's identity was 
revealed, police did not hesitate to label the crime a terrorist killing.

Last night, the Interior Ministry said an offshoot of the Red Brigades was 
responsible. The Red Brigades was a revolutionary left-wing movement from 
the Seventies and Eighties that staged kidnappings and cold-blooded 
killings culminating in the 1978 kidnapping and murder of former Prime 
Minister Aldo Moro. Police say the latest incarnation is a splinter group 
not a continuation of the original movement but it includes minor players 
from the old terror network.

Italian media was yesterday weighing up the prospects of the country 
returning to the blood-letting of the anni di piombo, or years of lead. 
Marco Biagi was not a politician, industrialist or other high profile 
public figure. As an economist, expert in labour law and adviser to the 
Minister of Labour, Roberto Maroni, he was a influential policy shaper, 
behind the scenes.

What sealed Professor Biagi's fate was his latest contract. He was the 
author of the controversial reform aimed at ending every Italian worker's 
virtual right to a job for life, that the government of Prime Minister 
Silvio Berlusconi has been trying to ram through despite fierce resistance 
from unions.

The government has found itself in deep strife, facing the prospect of 
perhaps a million-strong union demonstration on Saturday in Rome and the 
threat of a general strike aimed at bringing the country to a standstill.

In the confused initial reactions to the killing, politicians of all hues 
and commentators linked the slaying of Professor Biagi to the ugly climate 
which has emerged in response to Mr Berlusconi's determination to ram 
through his labour market reforms in the teeth of popular opposition.

Mr Berlusconi moved quickly to lower the temperature yesterday, asking the 
trade unions and employers' bodies to resume dialogue immediately while 
advising everyone to tone down the political rhetoric.

Yet he himself has frequently raised the spectre of terrorism in a bid to 
denigrate and criminalise those who don't share his views, namely the 
opposition "communists", the judiciary "persecutors" trade unions, 
intellectuals and anti global demonstrators.

"Terrorism returns" headlined Italy's three leading daily newspapers, 
suggesting that the slumbering beast that sowed blood and terror through 
Italy in the Seventies and Eighties had awoken. The original Red Brigades 
thrived in a time of massive social upheaval, with universities occupied by 
students, unions who caused industrial chaos with strikes in their demands 
for a better deal, and a climate of seeking to challenge outdated and 
authoritarian institutions.

It remains to be seen whether Italy is about to enter another dark period 
like that which began with the bombing of a Milan bank in 1969 and 
concluded, with the murder of a government adviser Roberto Rufilli in 1988. 
The same chilling question was raised three years ago when Massimo 
D'Antona, another labour adviser was killed by the newly reformed Red 
Brigades.

The parallels with Tuesday night's murder of Professor Biagi and the death 
of Mr D'Antona are unnerving. They were the same age, both labour experts 
working on reform, both gunned down outside their homes. The Interior 
Ministry said the men that killed Mr Biagi even used the same gun that 
killed Mr D'Antona.

A group calling itself the New Red Brigades for the Construction of the 
Combative Communist party claimed responsibility in the D'Antona murder. An 
anonymous caller to a Bologna newspaper claimed the Biagi killing on behalf 
of the organisation, and an amateurish five-pointed star, the Red Brigades 
symbol, was daubed on a wall nearby. The Red Brigades typically leave 
long-winded statements claiming responsibility and setting out their 
motives.

What sets the murders apart is that Mr D'Antona was killed when unions and 
a left-wing government were negotiating reform, and Mr Biagi died when a 
deeply rooted union movement and a determinedly free-market government are 
at loggerheads. Mr Berlusconi's authoritarian approach to government has 
upset the delicate fabric of Italian society, the something-for-everyone 
policy of the Christian Democrats which held Italy together for decades.

At the heart of the debate is Article 18 of the Workers Statute, a 
high-water mark for the trade unions in the Seventies which they intend to 
defend to the hilt and which the centre-right government wants to remove to 
make hiring and firing easier. Under the statute, workers who can prove 
they were unjustly fired can get their old jobs back, and in many cases 
these are jobs for life. The changes would mean they'd have to settle for a 
cash payoff.

Although the statute may seem anachronistic in the European context, and Mr 
Berlusconi has used his friendship with Tony Blair and the Spanish Premier 
Jose Maria Aznar to push his case, the planned reform has split Italian 
society down the middle.

Mr Berlusconi broke off talks with unions and employers and flatly refused 
to remove Article 18 from the reform package. The government had hoped to 
split the three-headed trade union confederation but failed and is facing 
the prospect of crippling strikes by the biggest and most left-wing union, 
CGIL, and smaller unions.

Article 18 has become a lightning rod for dissent with Mr Berlusconi's 
right-wing coalition, for its policies on justice, health, and media 
freedom. Mr Berlusconi's billion-dollar media empire, which controls 
directly or indirectly nearly 90 per cent of Italian TV, print and 
electronic media, has also raised issues of conflict of interest.

In response a spontaneous, movement has emerged, based on citizens of all 
hues. In a series of peaceful rallies around courthouses, and state 
television premises they have expressed their disgust and disapproval at 
what they call the Berlusconi regime.

Just four days before Professor Biagi was assassinated, the 
Berlusconi-owned magazine Panorama, leaked details of the latest report by 
the Italian secret services on terrorist threats. The report said 
consultants on sensitive areas such as labour and welfare reform were 
especially at risk of attack. Professor Biagi's bodyguard was removed in a 
post-11 September shake-up and, despite his fears, had not been replaced.


The Red Brigades' years of terror

1969: Brigatte Rosse (Red Brigades) formed out of student protest movement 
seeking, through armed struggle, to pull Italy out of Nato and establish it 
as a Marxist-Leninist state.

1973: Burst into the headlines with the kidnappings of businessmen.

1974: Kidnapping of Genoese Judge Marco Sossi. Eight Brigades' activists 
killed in Brescia when a hand-grenade was thrown at a march by the fascist 
Ordine Nuovo (New Order).

1976: Assassinated Prosecutor Francesco Coco, who, they said, had reneged 
on a deal to free two Brigades' cadres after Judge Sossi's release.

1977: Attacked Indro Montanelli, the editor of Il Giornale, who is critical 
of the communists, and shot him in the legs.

1978: Reaches its nadir with the kidnapping and murder of former prime 
minister Aldo Moro, the leader of the left wing of the Christian Democratic 
Party. Robbed of support from the Italian left.

1981: Kidnapped US Army General James Dozier, who held a position with Nato 
in Italy. He was freed, after 42 days, in a raid on a Brigades' hide-out. A 
crackdown on the group followed.

1983: 1,350 Red Brigade suspects and accomplices in custody.

1984: Claimed responsibility for murdering Leamon Hunt, US chief of the 
Sinai Multinational Force and Observer Group. Internal wrangling splits the 
group.

1989: Many members arrested, group thought to number no more than 50. 
Activity dried up, but a decade later a splinter group claimed to be behind 
the killing of a senior government adviser, Massimo D'Antona.


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