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After 40 years on the run, former left-wing Italian activist Cesare Battisti was brought to justice in his country on Monday 14 January. He is currently incarcerated in a prison in Sardinia. This extradition from Bolivia reopens the debate on the presence on the French territory of former members of the extreme Italian radical left.
According to the Italian daily Il Corriere della Sera , some 40 former left-wing activists convicted of crimes and attacks have reportedly fled abroad. Most would be in France, adds the most broadcast newspaper in Italy. Cesare Battisti had himself taken refuge in France between 1990 and 2004, protected by the Mitterrand doctrine that all those who had broken with terrorism would not be extradited.
Sentenced in 1981 to life imprisonment for his direct and indirect role in four murders, Cesare Battisti becomes a symbol for the French left and receives the support of artists and intellectuals, including that of the novelist Fred Vargas. But the wind turns in 2004. The right is in power in France and the threat of extradition weighs again. Battisti then takes refuge in Brazil. But last December, a judge of the Supreme Court finally orders his extradition, signed the day after by President Michel Temer. The former Italian activist fled again, this time to Bolivia where he files an asylum application.
"I am committed to making it the beginning of a journey, because so many others are walking in Europe and around the world. People sentenced three or four times in perpetuity and who opened a restaurant, who write books ... "Italian Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini, also head of the League, told Italian television one of the two parties in the ruling coalition. " There are some in France. France often asks Italy and the Italian government to respect the rules and human rights, "said Mateo Salvini, who, without giving names, said Rome would soon ask for several extraditions.
The Italian press quotes several names
The Italian press quotes several names of radical refugee activists in France: Giorgio Pietrostefani, sentenced for the murder of police commissioner Luigi Calabresi; Narciso Manenti, leader of a proletarian guerrilla commando, allegedly responsible for the murder of a gendarme in 1979 in Bergamo; or Enrico Villimburgo, a member of the Red Brigades, sentenced to life in the Aldo Moro murder trial. The kidnapping of this figure of the Christian Democracy, murdered by his jailers in May 1978 after 55 days of kidnapping, remains a major trauma in Italian history.
Among those Italian militants who have found refuge in France, we can also mention the case of Marina Petrella whose extradition was blocked by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008 for "humanitarian reasons". Or that of Simonetta Giorgieri, another figure of the Red Brigades.
After the support shown by Italian government officials to "yellow vests" and Emmanuel Macron's criticism of Italian migration policy, this new subject of tension should not heat up diplomatic relations that have become chilly between the two countries.