DIRELAND

NEPAL'S FIRST GAY MP SPEAKS -- Nation's Two Largest Political Parties Embrace LGBT Rights

I wrote the following article for Gay City News, New Yorks largest lesbian and gay weekly, which published it today:

In an historic breakthrough, the leader of Nepal's largest LGBT group, the Blue  Diamond Society, has been named to a seat in the parliament following April 10 elections in that nation, the largely mountainous home to some 30 million people.

Sunil Pant (right), 35, a Belarus-educated computer engineer who founded the Blue Diamond Society (BDS) in 2002 and has been its executive director ever since, was named to the parliament by the tiny Communist Party-(United). The CPN-(U) won the right to have five seats in the new constituent assembly under a complicated proportional representation system used in the elections, the first since Nepal, long an autocratic monarchy, declared itself a "People's Republic" last December following a 2006 peace deal that ended a decade-long civil war.

The party is one of five separate and competing Communist parties to have gained seats in the 601-seat parliament in last month's elections, with the largest being the Communist Party of Nepal-(Maoist) — which led the armed insurgency against King Gyanendra (left) and his late brother Birendra, who preceded him — won 220 seats, and is expected to lead a coalition government yet to be formed.

The elections saw another first — ten LGBT candidates for the parliament who are BDS members were in the running and "the number of votes we received exceeded our expectations, which is why the CPN-(U) chose me as a member of the constituent assembly," Pant told me from the country's capital of Kathmandu. Eight of those candidates were metis, born as male and transgendered who dress and live as women — "third genders" as Pant calls them — and two were gay men, he said.

"Most of the CPN-(U) party have indicated their support for LGBT rights, and it was very happy to send an openly gay man to parliament. And there are also many good individuals in the parliament with whom we have worked in the past," Pant added.

Nepal is 80 percent Buddhist, and traditional society there has significant social rigidities and discrimination based on caste and gender. In the past, Nepalese police frequently used violence against gays and the metis and subjected them to arrest on various trumped-up charges. Under the monarchy, a law forbade "unnatural" sex.

Until last year Maoist cadres also hunted down, intimidated, and used violence against sexual minorities, particularly the metis, including a campaign to ask landlords not to rent to them.

Maoist leaders used incendiary rhetoric to denounce homosexuals as "unnatural" and for "polluting" society. The military commander of the Maoist militia in western Nepal, who was also a minister in the interim government that followed the 2006 peace accord, proclaimed that "homosexuality is a product of capitalism" and that "there were no homosexuals in the Soviet Union" (the Maoists displayed portraits of Stalin along with Mao at their campaign rallies). (See this reporter's earlier article, "Nepal's Maoist Assault on Gays," which appeared in the April 19-25, 2007 issue of Gay City News.) (Left, the Maoist Militia on the cover of its magazine.)

But, Pant told me, "There has been a significant change in the Maoist attitude toward sexual and gender minorities. I and the BDS had many meetings, dialogues, and orientations with several parties, including the Maoists. And this year, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), the Nepali Congress Party [the second-largest party in the constituent assembly], and the Communist Party-(United) all included LGBT rights in their election manifestos."

Pant identified a 2004 incident as a critical turning point in public opinion. A policeman forced one of the metis to perform oral sex on him and then slit her throat. Even conservative Nepalese who didn't approve of homosexuality or sexually transgressive behavior of any kind were horrified by the gratuitously cruel violence.

At a BDS-led protest a few days later, police arrested 39 of the LGBT group's members, leading to sympathetic media coverage for the movement, a denunciation by Human Rights Watch, and international outrage.

But the real breakthrough came last December, when Nepal's Supreme Court ruled on a lawsuit brought by the BDS and three other groups challenging the law against "unnatural" sex and demanding equal rights and an end to discrimination for LGBT people.

In its ruling, the court declared that sexual minorities were "natural persons" deserving of protection against discrimination, and ordered the government to come up with legislation guaranteeing civil rights for homosexuals. The court also ordered that a government commission be established to study the legalization of same-sex marriage, and to make official documents like identification cards and passports include a third option for a person's gender.

Since last year's unprecedented court ruling, "violence has been reduced against LGBT people, and many police have become much less brutal than before in treating us," Pant told this reporter.

Pant and the BDS were given last year's Felipa de Souza Award by the New York-based International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) for their courageous and effective work to end anti-LGBT discrimination and fight the spread of HIV/ AIDS.

Pant now directs a BDS that has more than 50 full-time staffers, funded entirely by donations and grants, and there are now ten other officially registered groups serving Nepal's queer community.

Pant and the BDS will now focus their energies on including pro-LGBT measures in the country's new constitution, which the just-elected parliament is preparing. A two-day "national consultation of sexual minorities" sponsored by the BDS and held in Kathmandu concluded its work on May 6 by voting to issue a list of demands, among them — "affirmative action" to "guarantee fundamental rights including education, health, and employment for our sexual minority," "legal provisions for marriage between homosexuals and third genders," "equal paternal property rights," and "laws against sexual exploitation and sexual violence of lesbians, gays, and third genders, and proper compensation for its victims."

The conference also demanded that "lesbian and third gender women should be included in the 33 per cent of seats" in parliament reserved for women.

The Blue Diamond Society's web site is at http://www.bds.org.np/.

ROME TURNS RIGHT: Berlusconi Chalks Up His Second Victory This Month

The following article was written specially for DIRELAND by this blog's Rome correspondent, veteran expat journalist Judy Harris:

ROME – This Sunday and Monday 5.8 million Italians were asked to return to the polls for a second time this month for a run-off among candidates for mayor and administrators in 44 townships and five provinces. Rome was the toughest battleground, where the vote was being viewed as a litmus test of the relative strengths of the two main parties that slogged it out at the polls two weeks ago, Silvio Berlusconi’s victorious Popolo della Libertà, or People’s Liberty party (PDL), and Walter Veltroni’s moderately progressive Democratic party (PD). And in the end, Berlusconi's candidate won, by 53.7% to 46.3%.

For the past fifteen years Rome has had a center-left government, headed alternately by Francesco Rutelli and Veltroni himself. Especially during the past three years the citizens’ tolerance has been sorely tried by Rom squatter camps, slow and jam-packed public transport, filthy and dangerous commuter train stations, immigrant hawkers and beggars blocking sidewalks, graffiti-sprayed buildings, drunken violence in the downtown historic center by night, and garbage-strewing hordes of tourists by day. Streets in the center are still hand swept daily; shopkeepers literally scrub sidewalks, and cleanup crews wash building walls, but old hands revisiting Rome are shocked at the sheer extent of  il degrado, the degradation of this unique and uniquely beautiful city with its heritage of history, religion and art.

In addition, in past weeks an unaccustomed crescendo of violence attributed to untrammeled immigration—rapes, murders, drunk drivers who kill children and the elderly—has given the Rome campaign a raw edge, heightened by the success of the anti-immigrant Northern League two weeks ago.

With this as the background, the PD candidate was the acting Culture Minister (and former mayor) Rutelli, who faced off against Gianni Alemanno (right, with Berlusconi), representing the Berlusconi alliance. Two weeks ago Rutelli (left) won almost 46% of the vote in Rome as compared with Alemanno’s under 41%, but the positions were reversed when all the votes were counted in the runoff in what was considered an upset victory for the right.

The Rome result was also a personal victory for Gianfranco Fini (right), the  former neo-fascist youth leader and head of the modernized "post-fascist" former Alleanza Nazionale (now merged with Berlusconi's PDL), who had turned out personally to campaign for Alemanno.

Challenging immigrant hawkers in one of Rome’s outdoor markets this week, Fini asked to see their work permits. When those he questioned proved to have their papers in order, and chummily photographed him with their cell phones, Fini grumbled, “They probably bought their papers.”

Fini himself has been a nudging hawker. On April 14-15 Umberto Bossi’s Northern League walked off with 8.4% of the vote and hence has more clout with Berlusconi than does Fini himself. Alemanno's victory in Rome bolsters the otherwise overshadowed Fini.

In the general elections he won at the beginning of April, Berlusconi, described by former Communist party intellectual Rossana Rossanda (left), the god-mother of the left-wing daily Il Manifesto, as leader of “the coarsest right wing in Western Europe,” felt certain enough of victory that he scarcely campaigned at all, saying languidly, “They know me. If they want me, they’ll vote for me.” So they did, giving him a comfortable majority of 98 seats in the 630-member Chamber of Deputies and, in the Senate, a majority of 44 seats out of the 315 elective seats, or 16 more than needed in a vote of confidence. (The votes of the seven more senators for life are divided.)

Who is to blame? In two unedifying years in office Premier Romano Prodi (right)  was unable to weld a functioning team. His coalition literally disintegrated in Parliament into something like seventeen separate, miniscule parties. EU regulations obliged the government to improve Italy’s state finances, but  this came at the price of unpopular tax hikes. A promised model labor contract never materialized, nor did the promised law permitting same-sex marriage and civil partnerships, dropped as Catholics imposed a discussion of abortion.

Nevertheless, on the plus side, this was also a watershed election, and what many hoped will happen has begun—the creation of an Anglo-Saxon-style bi-party system of alternating parties in government. Between them, Berlusconi and Veltroni began it.

That said, it had its peculiar elements. Both Berlusconi on the right and the center-left sloughed off votes to the League, and even Berlusconi’s wife Veronica has admitted to being her household’s League sympathizer.

As a result, Bossi (left) has new authority, reflected in tough early skirmishes with Berlusconi. Besides four ministerial slots, Bossi wants a League party boss appointed deputy premier, but at least on this Berlusconi out-talked Bossi, and the forthcoming cabinet will have no deputy premier. Yet other tough political battles within his alliance loom because Bossi and Fini  represent diametrically opposed constituencies. Bossi is usually described simplistically as “anti-immigrant,” but today his party has moved from its early rustic populism toward a more sophisticated brand of federalism, especially fiscal federalism, code words for keeping tax money in the regions where levied. If enacted, public funds would less likely flow from the full-employment North down to the troubled Italian South—but that South, and especially the Campania Region around Naples and the Puglie on the Eastern Coast of the peninsula, is just where Fini’s movement is strongest, and also where Fini also risks challenge by the vestiges of the far right associated with the otherwise lame group around Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of the Duce.

Attempting to keep everyone happy, Berlusconi is promoting three major state projects that promise something slushy for everybody. The first is, in the North, completion of an exceptionally costly Alpine tunnel for high-speed trains connecting Italy and France, touted as useful even though train traffic between the two countries declines year after year. In the South he has called for construction of a gigantic bridge linking Sicily to the mainland in order to bring wealth to Sicily, although no cost accounting has actually been done, according to economists here. His third proposal is to resolve somehow the Alitalia airways financial debacle, which is costing taxpayers well more than a million euros daily. When Vladimir Putin dropped by Berlusconi’s Sardinia villa for a few days of togetherness just after the elections (right, Putin and Berlusconi), the guessing became that Aeroflot might step in to help resolve the problem in a deal involving gas supplies from Russia, even though any expansion of Russian influence over EU energy policy is decidedly unpopular in North Europe.

It is therefore hardly surprising that observers, predicting that Berlusconi will govern for the next five years unchallenged, are taken aback “Mama mia!” exclaimed the Economist on its front cover with a picture of Berlusconi. “Here we go again.”

If so, it is less because Berlusconi won than because the left lost, shedding a total of three million votes over the results of just two years ago. Walter Veltroni (left) is congenial and friendly, and in his campaigns makes constant references to Jack Kennedy and Barack Obama, but he has neither the rhetorical powers nor the charisma of either of these. Veltroni is also accused of having hastily tossed together a new political party without allowing sufficient time for its launch. But of course it was not Veltroni who precipitated elections three years ahead of schedule; it was a disgruntled member of outgoing Premier Romano Prodi’s own coalition, Clemente Mastella, his Minister for Justice from May 17, 2006, through Jan. 17, 2008. Mastella resigned, bringing down the Prodi coalition, after magistrates put his wife, Sandra, President of the Regional Council of the Campania, under house arrest on allegations of corruption; Mastella (right) accused the government of not having avoided this.

Another Prodi ally, Antonio Bassolino, President of the Campania Region, could not avoid being blamed by citizens in the region he governed for the stinking garbage and odor of the Camorra overwhelming Naples. Prodi’s Foreign Minister, Massimo d’Alemma, won no Brownie points by declaring at a PD rally at Pompeii that, yes, Naples had “a few stinking garbage bags.”
The traditional left has traditionally been bolstered by the trade unions, but their management is aging, and their leadership has become overly centralized and, they acknowledge, overly politicized and out-of-touch with the concerns of the rank-and-file. That rank-and-file has also shifted from the metal mechanics workers of the Seventies to the bureaucrats in state employ who today are the backbone of the unions. Post-election studies show that many of the union votes formerly destined to the center-left shifted to the Northern League.

In addition, the trio of parties known as the “left of the left” running together under the Arcobalena (Rainbow) banner lost their pot of gold, failing to elect a single member of parliament. The soul-searching has been painful, especially in Rifondazione comunista, whose popular leader in Parliament, Fausto Bertinotti (left), announced he will retire from politics while the head of the party has resigned, and a new party congress has  been convoked for July. “We’ll be licking these wounds for as long as we have tongues, and maybe longer,” was the mournful comment of Alessandro Robecchi, in Il Manifesto.

     Meanwhile, the right's victory in Rome has some quite fearful. Last night as we walked by the Capitoline Hill, where the mayor has offices and the city council meets, supporters of the Alleanza Nazionale faction of Berlusconi's outfit were feting their victory. Among them was a group of young thuggish far rightists raising arms in Fascist-style salutes and yelling, "Duce, Duce!" as the middle-class Berlusconi backers hushed them and said, "One mustn't do that, the TV cameras are watching." The mood among the losers here is apprehensive. There is also fear in the gay community that there will be bashings to come, fear among the law-abiding immigrants of a harsh clamp-down, and fear in the Jewish community that the Nazi deportation of a thousand Romans will be forgotten or worse. Sign of the new times: on Sunday night a plaque to Auschwitz victims was hacked out of a wall in an Eastern Rome suburb. -- by Judy Harris in Rome

DIRELAND's Rome correspondent, Judy Harris (left), is a veteran ex-pat journalist who used to write from Italy for TIME magazine and the Wall Street Journal, and now writes for ArtNews. She's the author of the recently-published book, Pompeii Awakened: A Story of Rediscovery. You can visit her website by clicking here.

Read Judy's previous recent dispatches for DIRELAND: "Prodi's Contradictions," February 26, 2007; "Rome's Anti-Gay Family Day," May 12, 2007; "An Agenda for Bush's Italian Visit," June 8, 2007; "Rome's Gay Kiss-in Protests Arrests," August 3, 2007; "Italy's New Left Party, Old Divisions," October 23, 2007; "Pope Charged With Heresy by Rome University," January 17, 2008; "The Ghosts That Haunt Italy's Elections," March 16, 2008; "Aldo Moro, the Ouija Board, and Romano Prodi: New Revelations About Italy's Most Significant Political Assassination," March 26, 2008; "Italy's Elections: Viagra for the Doldrums?" April 4, 2008

ITALY'S ELECTIONS: VIAGRA FOR THE DOLDRUMS?

The following article was written specially for DIRELAND by this blog's Rome correspondent, veteran expat journalist Judy Harris:

ROME, April 4, 2008  – Unlike America’s, Italy’s national general election campaign is blissfully short, and so, called barely two months ago, the end approaches with the vote April 13-14.  Otherwise, to borrow from our favorite cashmere Communist Fausto Bertinotti, this is the lousiest election campaign in memory.

The front-runner remains the ultraconservative media magnate and aging roué Silvio Berlusconi (right), the once and future premier, who has been on trial for corruption more frequently than most Mafiosi. Even his enemies figure that he will prevail, and this has meant during the campaign that his arrogance has expanded, both shocking and amusing even his most charitable admirers.

A week ago he boasted that the influential Cardinal Camillo Ruini hopes no one will vote for the new Democratic party of  Berlusconi’s opponent, former Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni (left) . Truly or otherwise,  the sometime political meddler  cardinal primly retorted that the Church supported no one. Meantime, the rallies of the sassy fattie Giuliano Ferrara (right), who is running an anti-abortion list of candidates, are being broken up by police as feminists rally.

Berlusconi’s allies and advisers, including xenophobic demagogue Umberto Bossi (left) of the Northern League, who is much recovered from the stroke of a few years back, warned Berlusconi to stay off the subject of women, but he could not resist. Ever the feminist, Berlusconi told a group of women last week that they are the bosses “within the walls of the home”, that they are superior to men in having “instincts” (not in reasoning, mind), that he bows to his own women when he is safely near the hearth—and then he ardently hugged a lissome blond admirer, as is his wont.

Earlier, Berlusconi had advised a young woman, who complained that she could not find a job, to get married, since she was cute, “maybe to one of my sons.” And in Palermo he has just reminded Mafiosi they are not to vote for him, “just as I said last time.” (He scored 58% in Sicily.)

My favorite election cartoon was on the front cover of a L’Unità satirical insert, otherwise undistinguished. It depicts Berlusconi inside a drugstore handing the pharmacist a prescription: Pharmacist: The usual Viagra for you?  Berlusconi: Not just for me – it’s for all of Italy.

In the cartoonist’s imagination, the best the self-styled Freedom Party (Partito della Libertà, or PDL) can do is to offer, well, self-help for individual indulgence. Like politicians everywhere, Berlusconi tends to say the outrageous one day and explain the next that the media took his words out of context. In any case, what Berlusconi and, with him, the nation may need most in the post-election future will be not Viagra, but a headache powder. For a number of giant headaches are arriving thick and fast.

The biggest is Alitalia, the debt-ridden flagship airline that is losing one million Euros daily (about $1.4 million). Berlusconi’s undermining of the Prodi government’s plan to have the semi-privatized Alitalia absorbed by Air France is mischievous, not to say downright evil. A condition for the takeover is the sacking of 2,100 employees, a project which the unions noisily oppose, even at risk of the company’s going bankrupt within days, with the loss of all jobs. Berlusconi, the economic libertarian, is playing to and with the unions, for once, and has proposed that a consortium of private businessmen, including his own two sons, just might take over Alitalia in order to save national pride.  Shareholders objected, and last week Alitalia stock slumped by 37% in a day. Today, as the Air France takeover fades, Alitalia stock is virtually worthless, even as air “hostesses”, as the Italian press still calls stewards, were demonstrating against the unions, who are demonstrating, with Berlusconi’s blessing, against the outgoing government of Romano Prodi (above left ).

Should Berlusconi win the elections, he vows to boycott the Air France proposal. This suggests that the incoming government would have to help bail out Alitalia, before it can be sold at a handy discount (to wit, that worthless stock) to Berlusconi’s sons & co.

So will he win? All the polls concur that Berlusconi remains well ahead, but even here there are problems. Many Italians decline to reply to pollsters, and those willing to answer questions on the phone tend to be older and female—those who already back Berlusconi, that is. This skewing of the polls is aggravated by the fact that pollsters here contact almost only those who still have land line phones, and therefore ignore the youth vote, tipped to favor both Veltroni on the left and Berlusconi’s rival on the right and possible successor, the "post-fascist" Gianfranco Fini (right).

Predictions therefore are that, when the real vote is counted in mid-April, Berlusconi will prevail in the Chamber, but face the same sort of narrow win in the Senate which became a stalement that worked against outgoing center-left Premier Prodi.

Curiously, Berlusconi has similar troubles with his TV networks. On the face of it the Auditel measurements network audiences show he has a huge market share, but behind the TV sets and Fifties programming of men who put on fake boobs as entertainment there’s another story. Berlusconi’s trio of networks especially attract the elderly and intellectually challenged, and these “folks” living on minimal pensions do not buy  the products advertised; in advertising terms this is a phony audience. Proof of the advertisers’ canny analysis of the needs of the elder-market, morning radio audiences for RAI, the national network, are treated to a veritable flush of ads offering cures for constipation and Bolshie bladders.

The biggest headache of all may well be the newly revived Bossi, whose anti-immigration Northern League is likely to hold the parcel of votes crucial to Senate votes. And this just may mean a serious migraine headache for the entire nation. Given such a shortage of political Viagra, experts here are already predicting a frustrated and frustrating new legislature with a brief shelf life. -- by Judy Harris in Rome

DIRELAND's Rome correspondent, Judy Harris (left), is a veteran ex-pat journalist who used to write from Italy for TIME magazine and the Wall Street Journal, and now writes for ArtNews. She's the author of the recently-published book, Pompeii Awakened: A Story of Rediscovery. You can visit her website by clicking here.

Read Judy's previous recent dispatches for DIRELAND: "Prodi's Contradictions," February 26, 2007; "Rome's Anti-Gay Family Day," May 12, 2007; "An Agenda for Bush's Italian Visit," June 8, 2007; "Rome's Gay Kiss-in Protests Arrests," August 3, 2007; "Italy's New Left Party, Old Divisions," October 23, 2007; "Pope Charged With Heresy by Rome University," January 17, 2008; "The Ghosts That Haunt Italy's Elections," March 16, 2008; "Aldo Moro, the Ouija Board, and Romano Prodi: New Revelations About Italy's Most Significant Political Assassination," March 26, 2008

ALDO MORO, THE OUIJA BOARD, AND ROMANO PRODI: New Revelations About Italy's Most Significant Political Assassination

The following article was written specially for DIRELAND by this blog's Rome correspondent, veteran expat journalist Judy Harris; she previously wrote about the still-powerful legacy of the Aldo Moro assassination in her March 16 dispatch, "The Ghosts that Haunt Italy's Elections":

Rome – Three decades after the murder of Aldo Moro (right), the magistrate who wrote  the indictments for three Red Brigades trials has charged that the government willfully withheld evidence from both the judiciary and from a Parliamentary commission.

Judge Ferdinando Imposimato (left) was assigned to the case on May 18, 1978, just nine days after Moro was killed. He personally interrogated public officials and Brigatisti and interviewed Moro family members and government figures. As the inquiring magistrate, he was entitled to receive all available information from investigators, including from the ad hoc governmental “Crisis Committee” set up to manage the hostage situation.

“When the documents surfaced more or less by chance twenty years later, I was deeply shocked,” said Imposimato, speaking at a press conference March 17 at the Foreign Press Association in Rome. “We had already been able to find and have released other hostages. I couldn’t help but ask what had gone wrong now. Plainly, a political choice had been made, with the result that the inquiry was handicapped by asphyxiating political control.”

The missing information meant accumulated delays in the judiciary inquiry. Crucial arrest  warrants were left dangling, including one for Brigatista Prospero Gallinari, who participated in the kidnapping of Moro and the killing of Moro’s five bodyguards on Via Fani in Rome on March 16, 1978. Gallinari (left, as he appears today) was also one of the guards in the Roman apartment building where Moro was held until he was savagely murdered by the Red Brigades on May 9.

Imposimato believes that Moro’s release was possible, he says in his new book, Doveva Morire, Chi ha Ucciso Aldo Moro (He Had to Die, the Killers of Aldo Moro), written together with veteran journalist Sandro Provvisionato. In the Vatican, Pope Paul VI’s  personal secretary Mons. Pasquale Macchi (right, with Pope Paul VI) was involved in negotiations (although perhaps through a phony mediator). Another working against the government’s official line barring negotiations was the Italian Socialist party of  Bettino Craxi (left). According to Imposimato, on May 6, fifty-two days into the kidnapping, these secret negotiations were sufficiently advanced that it was “widely believed that Moro would be released within days.

Even among these mysteries, the Affair of the Ouija Board stands out. In sworn testimony to the Parliamentary Commission (see the appendix of Doveva Morire for the text), that bizarre story begins in a country house near Bologna, on April 2, 1978, a rainy Sunday. Moro had been in the Brigades’ hands for seventeen days. As children played in the background, a dozen bored grown-ups—mostly professors from the famous University of Bologna and their wives—decided to while away the time by holding a séance with a Ouija Board.

In this game, popular with adolescents, players gather round the Board (™ Parker Bros.) and place fingers on a sliding panel, called a planchette. In response to such questions as, “Does he love me?” departed spirits move the planchette across the board to spell out an answer, in this case usually “y-e-s.” In Victorian times this and other versions of spiritualism—rapping, woodland fairies, clairvoyants—were popular; Arthur Conan Doyle was among the many true believers. Even today, a Gallup poll of 1995 indicated that one  out of four Americans believes in reincarnation and communicating with the dead.

The august assembly in the Bologna country house, which included Romano Prodi (right; today, Italian Premier) and his wife Flavia, thus asked the spirits to reveal the address of the Red Brigades hideout in Rome. Lo and behold, the planchette spat forth a name, “Gradoli” and the numbers 6 and an 11. Evidently the spirit life does not overlook politics, for the spirits speaking in the séance were a much admired anti-Fascist priest, Don Luigi Sturzo (left), who founded Moro’s own Christian Democratic party, and the mayor of Florence Giorgio La Pirra, a famously progressive Catholic politician.

The information obtained from the departed spirits about Moro’s detention seemed important enough that Prodi passed along the information to those in charge of the investigation (although not to the judges, by the way).

This governmental inquiry and the crisis committee were controlled by Interior Minister Francesco Cossiga *(right), subsequently president of Italy. Informed of the séance and its dramatic revelations, Cossiga leapt into action, sending hundreds of police and paramilitary into upon the dank medieval town of Gradoli North of Rome on April 5, thirty-one days before Moro was killed.. Scattering chickens and poking into every house, the police searched Iraq style, while all was filmed for state TV.

Alas, the spirits had sent hundreds of troops to the wrong Gradoli—even though, as the ever more desperate Mrs. Moro suggested to Minister Cossiga, “Gradoli” may have been a street in Rome. No, Cossiga replied (so declared Mrs. Moro), there is no such road in the Yellow Pages.

But there was a Via Gradoli in Rome, a short street; and at number 96 was apartment number 11 (left), as the Ouija Board had said. Living there under a fake name, traveling almost daily to another Brigades hideout to interrogate Moro, was the organization’s top leader, Mario Moretti. If spotted, therefore, Moretti could have been tailed directly to Moro himself.

In fact, the police in Rome did know that a Via Gradoli existed. On March 28, two days after the kidnapping, a busybody  living in that very building had spotted three suspicious-looking young people on the usually tranquil street who seemed to be keeping the building under surveillance (they were). Five policemen responded to the summons with signed orders from the judiciary to check every apartment, with no exceptions. When nobody answered their knock at apartment number 11, they ignored their orders and did not break down the door, explaining lamely afterward that everyone they had met told them all the residents were trustworthy folks.

But not even this was true, for subsequently one couple swore that they had formally filed a report to police saying that the night before the kidnapping, they had heard sounds from apartment number 11 like a Morse code being tapped out. Somehow their complaint was lost, even though they supplied the name of the policeman who had taken their complaint.

When the Parliamentary Commission turned its attention to this complicated affair, all participants in the séance save Prodi and his wife Flavia answered the summons, and all repeated the same, memorized story of the séance and the talking-spirits.

This obvious lie meant that all risked arrest for perjury, as I learned. No one was arrested, however, perhaps because all those involved on both sides understood that the séance story was never meant to be believed. Possibly, some on the extreme left in Bologna had begun to realize that the government, in refusing to negotiate for Moro’s life, was following its own agenda, and that Moro’s death was not in the Brigades’ interest. Bologna had no dearth of radical leftists, such as in Autonomia Operaia, and one of these presumably had tipped off a faculty member.

For the recipient of the tip, this presented a problem. He could send an anonymous letter, but this was easily overlooked. He could refer the information to someone in charge, but then the source could be identified, at deadly risk. Hence the Ouija Board charade. Who can murder spirits which are by definition already dead?

Other explanations are possible, of course, but this makes it all the more important that, now that he has announced his retirement from politics after mid-April’s elections, Premier Prodi should break whatever omertà explains his continued silence.

The hideout was eventually found, in yet another mysterious sequence of events. On April 18, 1978, water dripping from a ceiling at Via Gradoli 96 persuaded an infuriated neighbor to call the fire department. In apartment number 11, according to the financial daily Il Sole-24 ore of March 16, 2008, someone had intentionally left water running in the bathroom in such a way  that it would flow into a crack in the wall, so that the apartment would be raided at last: “Attached to a flexible tube, the shower head rested atop a toilet brush holder, in turn placed into the tub. Did the occupants want water to be directed toward a crack in the wall?” the newspaper asked coyly.

            

An adviser to the crisis committee was the Harvard-trained psychiatrist Steven Pieczenik. Pieczenik specialized in hostage negotiations and was sent by the U.S. State Department to advise the Italian government during the kidnapping. Interviewed by  RAI radio March 16, Pieczenik said that the United States had encouraged Italian decision-makers to abandon Moro, a decision he now regrets. In a rebuttal, Richard N. Gardner, who had been the U.S. ambassador at the time, scoffed that, “After one month I asked for him to go back to America. He is not a reliable man.”  Reliable or otherwise, Pieczenik served as deputy assistant secretary and/or Senior Policy Planner under four U.S. secretaries of state (he later went on to write psycho-political thrillers, including a number co-authored with Tom Clancy).

Pieczenik is not the only one with regrets. In an interview in l’Unità March 17, Rosy Bindi (left), who is Prodi’s Minister for the Family, said, “Moro’s assassination still conditions Italian life. We have yet to compensate for the delay our country began to accumulate when we lost the architect of the project for a mature democracy, meaning alternating powers…. For thirty years we have been paying the consequences.”

For bibliophiles, the new Moro books (right) include:

• Abbiamo Ucciso Aldo Moro (We Killed Aldo Moro, including interview with Pieczenik), Emmanuel Amara (Feltrinelli);
• Il Golpe di Via Fani (Coup d’état on Via Fani), Giuseppe De Lutiis (Sperling e Kupfer)
• .Un Affare di Stato, Il delitto Moro e la fine della Prima Repubblica (A State Affair, the Moro Crime and the end of the First Republic) by Andrea Colombo (Cairo);
• Il Caso Moro, Un dizionario Italiano, by Stefano Grasso (Mondadori);
• Il Cinema e il Caso Moro by Francesco Ventura (LeMani-Micorart’s);
• Moro Rapito! Personaggi, testimonianze, fatti by Ivo Mej (Moro Kidnapped! People, Documents, Facts, Barbera);
• La Pazzia di Aldo Moro (The Madness of Aldo Moro) by Marco Clementi (BUR);
• Il Libro nero delle Brigate Rosse (The Black Book of the Red Brigades), Pino Casamassima (Newton Compton)
• Lettere dalla Prigione (Prison Letters) by Aldo Moro himself, edited by Miguel Gotor  (Einaudi).

            Director Giuseppe Ferrara’s carefully documented 1996 movie Il Caso Moro, starring Gian Maria Volonté, and based on the book by Robert Katz, The Days of Wrath, published in 1990, has been reissued as a DVD. -- by JUDY HARRIS in Rome

DIRELAND's Rome correspondent, Judy Harris (left), is a veteran ex-pat journalist who used to write from Italy for TIME magazine and the Wall Street Journal, and now writes for ArtNews. She's the author of the recently-published book, Pompeii Awakened: A Story of Rediscovery. You can visit her website by clicking here.

Read Judy's previous March 16 dispatch on the Moro assassination and the coming Italian electoral contest, "The Ghosts That Haunt Italy's Elections,"   as well as her other recent  Letters from Rome for DIRELAND: "Prodi's Contradictions," February 26, 2007; "Rome's Anti-Gay Family Day," May 12, 2007; "An Agenda for Bush's Italian Visit," June 8, 2007; "Rome's Gay Kiss-in Protests Arrests," August 3, 2007; "Italy's New Left Party, Old Divisions," October 23, 2007; "Pope Charged With Heresy by Rome University," January 17, 2008

THE GHOSTS THAT HAUNT ITALY'S ELECTIONS

The following article was written specially for DIRELAND by this blog's Rome correspondent, veteran expat journalist Judy Harris, who meditates on the complicated and dark political history shaping Italy's coming elections next month:

Of emperors, murders and the Ides of March

On the ancient Roman calendar the Ides of March fell on our March 15. On that day in 44  BC the political problems of the Roman Empire were neatly resolved with the brutal assassination of the man who considered himself not only godly but indeed a god, the emperor Julius Caesar (right). The Roman senate building had burned and the Senate was temporarily meeting in the vast stone theater which General Pompey had built near today's Campo de Fiori in Rome, and so the self-anointed emperor Caesar died in what we would call today the lobby, at the foot of Pompey's statue. His murderers were his disgruntled fellow Roman senators, which is to say his political friends as well as enemies, united in their fear and loathing of him.

It is a bizarre coincidence that the kidnapping on a suburban Roman street of the most powerful Italian political leader of his era, the mildly progressive and astute Aldo Moro (left), fell nearly on the same day, March 16, just thirty years ago. Especially in Rome these days that kidnapping, with the professional-looking murder of Moro's five bodyguards, and Moro's own brutal murder fifty-five days later, are cause of serious reflection and commemorations, interesting if without any hint at a revival of investigations into whether among his disgruntled fellow Roman political aristocrats one may have had a hand in sponsoring the kidnapping.

In an interview which ran in La Repubblica on March 23, 1978, Leonardo Sciascia,  whose novel Todo Modo foreshadowed the self-destruction of the Christian Democratic party, was asked by Alberto Stabile how he interpreted the kidnapping. Sciascia's reply: "The Red Brigades can be a monad [in biology, a mono-cellular organism] without a window, made up of violence and idealogical folly, but they can also have doors and windows. If they have them, the problem is to see with whom they communicate; that is, to raise the question that Italians asked some years ago but which now they don't seem to ask any more: who benefits from this?" In my own interview with Sciascia, ever skeptical of power, ever curious, he said something of the same. (Above right: a photo of Aldo Moro in captivity released by his Red Brigade captors)

"Moro mattered to Italy. For twenty years he represented the democratic continuity of the Christian Democrats, " synthesizes Eugenio Scalfari (left, the publisher of La Republicca, the respected center-left daily he founded in 1976) . "With all his slow ways and the mistakes he made, Moro was the man who transferred the centrist party into its first alliance with the Socialists, and then made possible today's parliamentary majority which includes the Communist party" (by which Scalfari presumably meant the Rifondazione Comunista).

The Moro kidnapping was carried out by a handful of Red Brigades fanatics, and it was  preceded by what is now a forgotten Brigades kidnapping, that of the son of the late Socialist leader Franceso De Martino (right). At the time Professor De Martino was aligned with Moro in promoting some form of an opening to the Italian Communist party, dubbed the historic compromise, in order to end a decade-long, frustrating political stalemate in government.

The legalistic and professorial Moro, notorious for both his subtle mind and the ambiguity of his political slogans, was a devout Catholic, but his party incorporated a strong Catholic farm worker and labor movement, with which Moro, who straddled the center, had some sympathy. His formula for suggesting discussions of an opening to the Communists was to counsel "parallel convergencies," a fuzzy phrase which puzzled and amused some observers at home, but absolutely terrified others outside Italy (read: Washington).

De Martino, like Moro, was a distinguished law professor noted for his personal honesty, and his version of the historic compromise was to urge "more advanced equilibriums," a phrase every bit as fuzzy as Moro's, but again, as with Moro, perfectly clear to those who made politics their business. In 1971 De Martino was a candidate and indeed the front runner to become president of Italy. He had the backing of the Communist party and the Socialists, but to be elected would have required a two-thirds vote in Parliament; without the Christian Democratic vote, he could not have been elected. So what would the Christian Democrats do, when it came to a vote? Many wondered: the party's left wing might split with its right and vote with the Socialists and Communists in favor of a Socialist president who, like Moro, was already advocating "more advanced" political agreements that would bring the Communists a share in power.

No one will ever know whether or not leftish parliamentarians within the Christian Democrats would have broken party ranks to vote with the Communist-led left, for it did not come to a vote. The Red Brigades kidnapped De Martino's son, who (like Moro later) was held for ransom. De Martino resisted for a time, but in the end he felt obliged to save his son's life by paying a ransom. Having little money of his own, he was offered and then accepted gifts of vast sums of cash from "friends." This obliged De Martino to withdraw his candidacy as president of Italy. Not long afterward he was replaced as General Secretary of the Italian Socialist party by leaders of another stripe, culminating in the corrupt Bettino Craxi (right) and the demise of the party itself, just as the murder of Aldo Moro began the process of destroying the Christian Democratic party.

It was subsequently revealed that De Martino's staff had included a number of junior members of the notorious renegade P2 Masonic Lodge (logo left), whose other members included 40 individuals of high rank in the Italian military and intelligence. In short, the 1970s were not noted for their limpid politics. And, in the end, both the Italian Socialist party and the Christian Democrats, forged out of the collapse of Italian Fascism and the desolation of war, can be said to have died with De Martino and Moro.

What is the connection? Like most others who lived through the Italian "years of lead," I can only guess, but the fact is that guessing is not good enough. That said, to the historical record I wish to contribute two small items of evidence. The first is that De Martino whispered, just once, to a close colleague, "They took money out of one drawer and put it into another." Who "they" were he did not say, but by this he meant those "friends" who had given him the ransom money which then financed the Red Brigades future activities. My second small contribution to the record is that a source deeply involved in investigations into the terrorism of those years said purposefully after due thought, "The De Martino kidnapping was a trial run for the Moro kidnapping."

Think about it.

Unlike Professor De Martino, those in charge in both party and government determined that it was unacceptable to negotiate with the Red Brigades for Moro's life because doing so would give the terrorists recognition and authority. A minority thought otherwise: among those favoring negotiations was the Socialist leader Bettino Craxi. Most importantly, Pope Paul VI (left, with Aldo Moro) made an appeal to the Brigades, irritating many in the no-negotiations camp by addressing them as "Men of the Red Brigades," since to call acknowledge them as " men" was seen by many as the pontiff's giving "monsters" (as a lot of people even on the left thought of the kidnappers) undue recognition of a common humanity. And perhaps some negotiations were afoot, or at least contacts, for a cache of copies of letters from Moro, which turned up mysteriously many years later in Milan, suggested that contacts with his family may have existed. A go-between therefore existed: who? Presumably a clergyman. But if one person could find Moro, so, it can be argued, could others.

Not long before Moro was murdered I received a telephone call with an offer of an interview with a Brigatista. I replied that of course I was ready and willing, but that I would not come alone: I would come with half the Italian army. The phone went dead. So, of course, did Moro. Who was the "terrorist" I was to interview? I never knew.

Not long afterward I was again contacted, this time by an America who occupied an official position. Could I kindly, he asked, "for a journalistic friend," arrange an interview with a Brigatista? Before I had time to think I snapped, "Sure. It will take place in my living room and I will wear a ski mask. It will cost $10,000. You get half." Again, the phone went dead.

But elsewhere the voices were speaking: the voices of children in the park, playing the kidnapping of Aldo Moro. The voices of people frightened in the streets. To recall the collective fear of those long days still leaves me gasping. And the day in May when Moro's body was found in a car parked only a few blocks from my own home I knew what had happened immediately because a thousand sirens were screaming at once. Like others I ran as fast as I could, and, since I was only blocks away, I was there to see the end of his personal drama -- but not the end of Italy's, which is still recovering,  (Above left, Aldo Moro's corpse in the back of the van in which it was found.)

And so to the present. Wreaths and conferences and press symposia on the significance of these three post-Moro decades have, yes, commemorated Moro, but above all have asked whither the Roman Catholic vote in the forthcoming elections, scheduled for April 13-14, to take place, shamefully, after less than two years since the last elections. Those of Spring 2006 were won, all too narrowly, by a helter-skelter, fractious coalition of leftists, including a miniscule if noisy Communist party plus Greens and Radicals and Social Democrats, all supposedly unified, but in fact increasingly at war among each other, under the leadership of two who in a way reflected the Moro dilemma: the devoutly Catholic Prime Minister Romano Prodi (left) and Fausto Bertinotti, the head of  the Rifondazione Comunista party (right). It simply did not work. The economists involved did their best and have improved Italy's situation, but other forces did their best to tear down whatever reforms were attempted.

So now what? The Italian Church appears to have been quarreling with the Vatican itself over the degree of interference to be tolerated, with the Vatican trying to calm over-excited local bishops. As for the Roman Catholic voters themselves, their vote is split. Walter Veltroni (left), until last month the Mayor of Rome and now the leader of the new Democratic Party (which supplants the Party of the Democratic Left), is working hard to forge a coalition that embraces ardent Catholics as well as libertarian feminists, among other unlikely bedfellows, resulting in a schizophrenic politics in which making abortions tougher to get is high on the agenda and any notion of gay rights is dropped.

Will the new elections bring change? It is sad that the logos of twenty-seven parties will appear on the ballot, but some here believe that "eppur si muove," to synthesize in the words of Galileo (right). By this is meant that it is positive that Veltroni, a moderate progressive, and media emperor Silvio Berlusconi (left), the former conservative prime minister, are forcing creation of two strong parties to replace the thirty-some ever quarrelsome groupuscules of the outgoing Parliament. It is eagerly to be hoped that it will work.

However, among the crucial elements missing from the programs of both these leaders is any proposal for an all-out battle against the ever more powerful forces of organized crime and its attendant political corruption. Since crime here still defines the political class (to wit., the garbage of Naples), this oversight, as we shall call it to be polite, is deadly serious--literally. Whatever the memorial wreaths symbolize, it does no honor to the memory of Aldo Moro or of De Martino either. -- by JUDY HARRIS in Rome

DIRELAND's Rome correspondent, Judy Harris (left), is a veteran ex-pat journalist who used to write from Italy for TIME magazine and the Wall Street Journal, and now writes for ArtNews. She's the author of the recently-published book, Pompeii Awakened: A Story of Rediscovery. You can visit her website by clicking here.

Read Judy's other recent  Letters from Rome for DIRELAND: "Prodi's Contradictions," February 26, 2007; "Rome's Anti-Gay Family Day," May 12, 2007; "An Agenda for Bush's Italian Visit," June 8, 2007; "Rome's Gay Kiss-in Protests Arrests," August 3, 2007; "Italy's New Left Party, Old Divisions," October 23, 2007; "Pope Charged With Heresy by Rome University," January 17, 2008