A-Infos (en) Italian police arranged rape

[Platformist Anarchism <platform@geocities.com>]

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     A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
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Italy's Nobel Prize-winning dramatist Dario Fo has 
called for an urgent inquiry into allegations 
paramilitary police ordered neo-fascist thugs to 
gang-rape his wife to punish her for her leftist 
views.
ROME (February 17, 1998 4:30 p.m. EST 
http://www.nando.net) - 

In an open letter to President Oscar Luigi 
Scalfaro, Fo said an investigation into the 
alleged 1973 assault on Franca Rame would help 
Italy come to terms with its violent past.

Fo, who was awarded the Nobel Prize last October, 
was arrested in 1974 during a performance of one 
of his plays and in 1980 the couple were refused 
visas to enter the United States because of Rame's 
involvement with the far left.

Fo said a failure to probe the charges would prove 
that corrupt police officers, so often the targets 
of his theatrical satire, enjoy the protection of 
the Italian state.

"Dear Mr President, this week's newspapers have 
reported that several top officials from the 
Pastrengo division of the Carabinieri paramilitary 
police ordered the rape and torture, 25 years ago, 
of Franca Rame, my wife," begins the letter, 
copies of which were sent to the media.

"Franca and I are outraged and shocked," Fo wrote, 
detailing allegations made last week by 
Carabinieri officer Nicolo Bozzo, who was on duty 
at the Pastrengo barracks in Milan on the night 
Rame says she was raped.

"We are not thirsty for revenge," the writer 
added. "We do not ask for (the culprits) to be 
punished with anything more than the long, tedious 
and empty lives they are quite certainly living 
already.

"No, the issue is a different one. Reaching a true 
understanding of the crimes of the past is an 
essential step in the growth of any civil 
society."

Rame, Fo's wife for more than 40 years, says she 
was abducted as she walked down a Milan street on 
March 9, 1973, and raped by a gang of five men.

In an interview with La Repubblica newspaper at 
the weekend, the writer-actress, who has performed 
in many of her husband's plays and is widely 
regarded as his artistic muse, recalled the attack 
in graphic detail.

"I can remember it as if it happened yesterday," 
she said.

"They put a pistol in my back and the next thing I 
knew I was thrown in the back of a van. I don't 
remember their faces, even though they only put 
their masks on afterwards, in the dark of the van.

"When they dumped me near the park my clothes were 
ripped and I was bleeding. I just had one thought 
-- to get home to Dario and my son Jacopo. They 
(the attackers) told me that if I talked, they'd 
kill me."

Rame said her attackers burnt her with cigarette 
ends and cut her with knives.

No one has ever been charged.

In 1987, a former neo-fascist jailed for his part 
in the bombings and shootings which rocked Italy 
in the 1970s, said Carabinieri officers had 
ordered right-wing extremists to rape Rame in 
retaliation for her outspoken leftist views.

The claim was neither investigated nor 
substantiated.

Then, earlier this month, Milanese political 
historian Biagio Pitarresi said he too believed 
Rame was the victim of a politically-inspired 
rape.

"The assault on Franca Rame was the idea of 
Carabinieri from the Pastrengo division," 
Pitarresi stated bluntly, saying he had 
interviewed officers from the Milan barracks.

A week later, Bozzo, who was a junior officer at 
the time of the assault, said he had seen one of 
his superiors "celebrating" the news that Rame had 
been abducted and raped.

Fo and Rame's work has frequently brought them 
into conflict with the Italian establishment.

His best known play, "Accidental Death of an 
Anarchist," is based on the true story of a 
railway worker who fell out of the window of a 
Milan police station in suspicious circumstances.

"Mr. President, see what you can do," Fo wrote in 
his letter to Scalfaro. "We await a firm and 
concrete response.

"If not, the usual culprits will once again know 
that the institutions, with you at their head Mr. 
President, are there to protect them, and not 
those who have had to suffer something no human 
being should have to suffer."

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