jim submits:

"French Intellectuals Mobilise for the Liberation of Toni Negri"

Catherine Bedarida, Le Monde, translated by Ed Emery, December 13, 1997

A thousand people have signed a petition in support of the philosopher Toni Negri, at the same time as Italian public opinion is becoming increasingly concerned about the fate of another former leading figure in the extreme Left, Adriano Sofri.A thousand people have just signed an appeal for the release from prison of the Italian philosopher Toni Negri. They include historians (Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Jean-Pierre Vernant and Michele Perrot), philosophers (Etienne Balibar and Jacques Derrida) and sociologists (Pierre Bourdieu). Artists have also signed the petition, including the composer Pierre Boulez, the film-maker Gerard Mordillat, the actress Bulle Ogier and the writers Philippe Sollers and Regis Debray.

On 1 July 1997 Toni Negri, who had been a political refugee in France since 1983, returned to Italy in order to surrender himself voluntarily to prison. A former leading light of the extreme Leftwing Autonomia Operaia movement (Workers' Autonomy), Negri, who is now 64, considers that the time has come to turn a new page of history and put the Years of Lead behind us. Negri was arrested on 7 April 1979, and was accused of having been the leader of the Red Brigades, the terrorist movement which had assassinated Aldo Moro, the president of the Christian Democrat party. He was also accused of having organised an armed insurrection against the powers of the state of having been the leader of the autonomy movement in Turin and finally of having murdered a potential informer.

But one year after his arrest, Negri was acquitted of the accusation of having been the leader of the Red Brigades and of having assassinated Aldo Moro. As the years passed, as from 1985 all the other charges against him fell away, to leave only one: the charge of moral complicity in the killing of a young policeman, and this earned him a sentence of thirteen years and eleven months in prison.

For four and a half years, from the date of his arrest to summer 1983, this Italian academic was kept in conditions of preventive detention in the high security wings of various Italian prisons, without ever having been brought before a tribunal. He finally got out of prison when he was elected to Parliament, on a list put forward by Marco Panella's Radical Party. Two months later, members of parliament voted, by a narrow majority, to remove his parliamentary immunity. In order to avoid being imprisoned once again, he escaped to France, where he went on to teach philosophy at the University of Paris-VII-Saint-Denis, for fourteen years, up until the moment when he took the decision to return to Italy.

Several signatories of this petition (Regis Debray, Etienne Balibar, Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet) have also signed an appeal circulating in Italy in support of three other former leaders of the Italian far Left who are currently in prison. The three men in question, Adriano Sofri, Giorgio Pietrostefani and Ovidio Bompressi, have received sixty thousands signatures on a petition calling for their release. This was sent to the President of the Italian republic, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro. (See Le Monde des Livres, 26 September 1997, and Le Monde, 4 November)

Adriano Sofri, a former leader of the organisation Lotta Continua, and a teacher at the Academy of Fine Art in Florence, writes regularly for the magazine Reporter, and has published a series of accounts in L'Unita based on his visits to Sarajevo in recent years. Very recently (January 1997) he was sentenced to 22 years imprisonment for a crime dating back to 1972. He was accused of the murder of the police chief Luigi Calabresi, a charge which he denies.

Since he lived and moved for 14 years in French intellectual circles, Toni Negri is better known than other former militants of the extreme Left. More than a hundred people currently find themselves in the same position as him, found guilty of terrorism, but in cases not involving bloodshed. In France about 140 Italians are still living here as political refugees, and have no intention of going to throw themselves into the mouth of the wolf, in the words of Oreste Scalzone, an associate of Toni Negri who has opened an Internet forum on the whole issue (address: http://www.babelweb.org/logomachie).

At present Toni Negri is working out the remainder of his sentence in Rebibbia prison in Rome. According to the weekly L'Espresso of 13 November, the philosopher lives in a cell that is six feet by nine feet, which is lined with books, and here he spends most of his time writing. During the day the cell doors are open and the prisoners are able to circulate, and this sometimes leads to the philospher closing his cell door in order to be able to work without being disturbed... Negri is writing lessons on philoso`hy, as well as a book of reflections on economics, which his co-authoring with American academic Michael Hardt. He is also involved in a project for assisting mentally handicapped people who are imprisoned in Rebibbia: since the abolition of psychiatric hospitals in Italy, the most difficult cases have been sent to prison.

The Italian system of parole means that Negri could qualify for outside work as from the start of 1998. In such a case, the prisoner is allowed to go to work every day, but is required to stick rigorously to a pre-set schedule. Negri has applied for a post as researcher with the Don Luigi di Liagro cooperative, with a view to studying the position of immigrants in Italian cities. I shall be doing the same work as I was doing in Paris - looking at what I call 'affective labour', in other words work involving women, old people, services etc, he told L'Espresso. In June 1998, having served half of his sentence, he will be in a position to ask for semi-liberty.

Leaving aside the question of parole under the Italian system, the main debate in Italy at present is focussed on the possibility of an eventual amnesty for the political prisoners of the Years of Lead. In 1997 a section of public opinion was shocked by the imprisonment of two such figures as Toni Negri and Adriano Sofri, twenty years after the events in question. They want to close this page of history. Calls are increasingly being heard for measures of clemency, whether this is an amnesty, or a reduction ofsentences. The National Assembly has rejected several projects in this vein, but this is the first time that Italian public opinion, particularly sensitive to the case of Adrian Sofri, has mobilised this broadly.