“Franco Piperno Uitgeleverd aan Italie: Laatste interview foor zyn arrestatie over: De Autnome Beweging in Italie” (1980)

Franco Piperno, a physicist and founding member of Potere Operaio, was one of many militants targeted by the Italian authorities, following the kidnapping and subsequent killing of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978. He was a founder of the autonomist journal Metropoli (along with Oreste Scalzone and others) whose editorial team was targeted in the 1979 sweep against the radical left.

Piperno fled to France, and was extradited in 1979 on charges related to the Moro kidnapping. Those charges were subsequently dropped, with the Christian Science Monitor noting that they illustrated “the penchant of Italian police to often arrest first and hope to find concrete evidence later.” Piperno went back to France and was subsequently arrested twice during the fall of 1981 in Montreal (Canada). Subsequently, Piperno – with strong international support – won a fight against extradition back to Italy, only to be arrested again, for a third time, on additional charges; he subsequently beat that case. With a tourist visa expiring, Piperno sought to leave Canada and go back to France, only to be refused entry. He then filed for refugee status in Canada. In 1988, he returned to Italy, where, having been sentenced to 10 years of incarceration, he served a reduced prison sentence. (The CIA was a bit contemptuous of him). He has since been involved in other projects.

The international organizing in support of militants targeted by the Italian state in 1979 is a story in need of its own book(s). Interesting pieces of that struggle include Marty Glaberman (and Toni Negri’s) lawsuit against a voice expert in Michigan, the Committee Against Repression in Italy coordinated by Federici and Caffentzis, the organizing of Guattari and Moulier-Boutang’s Centre d’initiatives pour de nouveaux espaces de liberté (CINEL), etc. For those interested in a starting point, it’s worth looking at Red Notes’ fantastic collection Italy 1980-81: After Marx, jail! The attempted destruction of a communist movement, available here.

The subject of this post is the second of two pamphlets put together by activists in the Netherlands who were concerned about the repression in Italy and similars developments elsewhere. The first of the two pamphlets was put together by the Komite Bella Italia and participants in the psychiatry journal Narreschip, entitled “De autonome beweging in Italië,” and published in 1979. The second of the pamphlets, with the focus on Piperno, was put together by two participants in the Narreschip project, Martijn Bool and Ronald Kampman. Per the introduction, their interest is not just in Piperno but in the wider meanings of cases against activists internationally:

“We are not only interested in Piperno, but also in the fact that it is an example of how in Western Europe the (certainly outdated, dating from the King’s era) right of asylum is being eroded, and how there is an ever-increasing judicial and police cooperation at the European level: the creation of a European judicial area.”

(Translation via DeepL).

The two writers go on to note, “This brochure is written by two people from the group that made the first brochure. In itself we like to make such a brochure, but we have also become lonely, unpaid journalists; that means a lot of work, especially since there are only a few of us.” While they appeal for others to take up their project and engage in dialogue, we could not find published evidence of that having occurred.

The main text of the pamphlet is a Dutch translation of Piperno’s last interview prior to his extradition to France in 1980. The interview was done for the French journal Liberation (we, unfortunately, could not locate a copy online). The pamphlet also includes a court statement from Piperno and a call for Piperno’s freedom, written by CINEL.

This pamphlet is rare. We locate one copy, via OCLC, at the Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. As we could not find a copy online, we scanned it (not too well) and posted it on Libcom, here.

(Last update – November 11th, 2023).