Electioneering with Violence

Bombs, bullets and a break in the Moro case

The early spring tourists who went to see Rome's magnificent Renaissance landmark last week got a shock: the exquisite Piazza del Campidoglio was blocked off and obscured by police barricades and scaffolding. Blast damage showed on the graceful columns, and the main portal of the Palazzo Senatorio, Rome's city hall, was wrecked. Surveying the desecration of the work of the Eternal City's greatest artist, a shopkeeper snarled: "These terrorists are maniacs! What did Michelangelo ever do to them?"

Left-and right-wing extremist groups claimed responsibility for the bombing, which both explained as an attack on Rome's Communist municipal administration. Whoever did the deed, the blast was only part of a surge in mayhem that has paralleled the campaigning for the June election that is to produce Italy's 42nd postFascist government. Since early April, after Christian Democratic Premier Giulio Andreotti's attempt to form another Cabinet was stillborn because the Communists refused to support it, Italy has been racked by new violence.

Hit teams of the far-left Red Brigades have killed a member of the DIGOS police intelligence unit in Milan, "kneecapped" a TV news editor in Turin and similarly wounded a local Christian Democrat official in Genoa. Bombs have demolished a Milan police station and two Rome offices of the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement. Then there has been the re-emergence of the Autonomisti, a semi-clandestine amalgam of Marxist student organizations.

For the first time since 1977, when student mobs rampaged through Rome, Autonomisti toughs have clashed with police in many cities. Their reappearance has been spurred by what Italian officials believe to be a break in the 1978 kidnap-killing of former Premier Aldo Moro. In coordinated raids in five cities, DIGOS squads arrested 22 suspected terrorists belonging to Autonomia Operaia (Workers Autonomy), one of the Autonomisti groups. Nine of the 22 were charged with involvement in the Moro case. The prize catch appeared to be one of the Autonomisti's leading theoreticians, Antonio Negri, 45. He is a soft-spoken political scientist who teaches at both Italy's University of Padua and Paris' Ecole Normale Superieure and has sympathized with violence for the sake of proletarian revolution. Accused of practicing what he preaches, as both a secret organizer of the Red Brigades and a figure in the Moro atrocity, he was taken to Rome for interrogation.

The evidence against Negri was locked behind judicial secrecy, but officials mentioned that a draft of instructions to Brigatisti that was found in Milan, as well as notes about the Moro operation discovered in a Rome hideaway, was thought to be in Negri's handwriting. Also, experts tentatively identified Negri's voice in the tape of a kidnaper's phone call to Moro's wife. Negri has denied any operational connection between Autonomia Operaia and the Red Brigades, and any involvement in the kidnaping.

Italian and French police are said to have been tracking Negri for several months, after one of the kidnapers' calls was broadcast in the hope someone would recognize the voice. A Milan judge named Emilio Alessandrini identified it as that of the young professor, with whom he had dined on April 11, 1978, while Moro was still captive. Last January, Alessandrini was killed by terrorists belonging to a Red Brigades splinter group.

The Autonomisti claimed that the police roundup of their members was orchestrated by Premier Andreotti's Christian Democrats to attract the law-and-order vote in the election. But the Communists, who have been anxious to dissociate themselves from Italy's nonstop terrorism, took a tough line against both the detained Autonomisti and reckless intellectuals in general. Ugo Pecchioli, a party spokesman, declared that responsibility for Italy's appalling level of terrorism--the toll already this year is 15 dead and 85 injured--lay not only with the bombers and assassins but also "with those who for years have preached, proclaimed and incited violence."

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