"Most Barbarous Assassins"

A statesman dies, while his troubled republic survives--and grieves

"Aldo Moro has been pitilessly and horrifyingly slain. The beast who tried to cover the kidnaping with a political and ideological cloak failed to listen to the cry from the whole of mankind that this man be spared. With his death, barbarity seems to want to kill not a man, but thinking and intelligence and liberty. Yet while this death appalls and disturbs, it will never succeed in defeating us. In that way, a tragic error has been committed by these wretched heirs of the most barbarous assassins that mankind has known. " --Giovanni Leone, President of Italy, on television last week

The end seemed almost inevitable, but still it came as a sickening shock. Two months after he had been kidnaped on his way to parliament and his five bodyguards slain, Aldo Moro, 61, president of the Christian Democratic Party and Italy's most eminent statesman, was brutally assassinated, his body left in the back of a stolen car parked in the historic center of Rome. The cruel ordeal was over, but the grief and anger over his murder had only begun.

A spontaneous outpouring of sorrow suddenly supplanted the cynicism with which many Italians had come to regard the kidnaping. Flags fell to half-staff. Both chambers of parliament closed to hold memorial sessions. Crowds poured into the piazzas of the cities to vent their anguish and their frustration. Most supported the government's refusal to negotiate with the Red Brigades terrorists for Moro's life. Some did not. One small band of protesters marched outside the headquarters of the Christian Democrats, shouting: "It is you who have killed him!"

The next day Moro was buried, following a private funeral attended by only his family and friends, in a cemetery at the village of Torrita Tiberina, 30 miles north of Rome, where the Moros had a country home. On Saturday the government held a televised state funeral in Rome's Cathedral of St. John Lateran to honor the man who had been Italy's Premier five times. While hundreds of Italian leaders, including Communist Party Boss Enrico Berlinguer, and representatives of 100 countries stood in hushed silence, Pope Paul VI devoted a special prayer to his personal friend, Aldo Moro. The Pontiff asked "that our heart may be able to forgive the unjust and moral outrage inflicted on this dearest man."

Across the continent, revulsion over Moro's assassination was mingled with relief that Italy had withstood such a tragic test. But at the same time, it became clear that Italy's long bout with political violence was far from over. Gunmen from the Red Brigades and members of other groups in Italy's crowded arena of militant radical factions shot and wounded seven victims in as many days.

The Brigate Rosse had kept Italy on a cruel seesaw of suspense since Moro's abduction on March 16. They had spurned pleas for mercy from the Vatican, from the Pope himself ("I beg you on my knees") and from the United Nations as they dangled their victim like a political puppet. The end came when they executed Moro with eleven shots fired from a Czech-made Skorpion 7.65-mm pistol and a still unidentified 9.-cal. handgun. Eight shots were centered around his heart. The hatchback Renault in which the body had been placed was left on a narrow, one-block street, Via Michelangelo Caetani, almost equidistant from the nearby headquarters of the Christian Democrats and the Communists. The location was a contemptuous taunt at both of the parties that Moro, more than anyone else, had worked to bring closer together in a political accommodation aimed at keeping Italy's government functioning.

From the first, there was no doubt that the goal of the Red Brigades' attack against what they called "the heart of the state" was the destruction of that accommodation and the fomenting of chaos that would lead to civil war. Moro was seized on the same day that the governing agreement he had succeeded in obtaining, bringing the Communists into the parliamentary majority, was to be voted on in parliament. In a series of haranguing "communiques," the kidnapers pointedly indicted their victim as his party's "political godfather" while attacking the Christian Democrats as "antiproletarian criminals" and the Communists as so many "bourgeois revisionists." Their attempt failed; both parties sensed the danger to the political process, and the government refused to bargain for Moro's life.

The murder followed by five days the receipt of the ninth and last communique from the kidnapers. It stated that they were carrying out Moro's death sentence, handed down after a "people's trial," in the face of the government's refusal to negotiate the release of 13 of their colleagues in prison. Shortly after followed a letter of goodbye from Moro to his family. "Dear Nora," Moro wrote to his wife of 33 years, Eleonora, "soon they will kill me. The friends could have saved me but did not. I kiss you for the last time. Kiss the children for me." In a series of late-night phone calls to party leaders, Mrs. Moro pleaded once more for a change in the party's stand against negotiations, but the government held firm.

Shortly before 1 p.m. last Tuesday, an anonymous man telephoned the Christian Democratic headquarters. "Go to Via Caetani," he said. "A red Renault. You will find another message." Police quickly spotted the maroon Renault 5-L and its grim contents. An autopsy showed Moro had been shot earlier that morning, then dressed in the same navy suit coat he wore when he was kidnaped. There was also a partly healed bullet wound in his buttocks, apparently incurred in the abduction.

At that moment, Christian Democratic leaders were meeting to discuss the Moro situation. When word came, Party Secretary Benigno Zaccagnini stood to make the announcement, tears streaming down his face. Many politicians rushed to the scene. Giorgio Napolitano, a prominent Communist leader, spotted Interior Minister Francesco Cossiga, rushed up and kissed him emotionally. Claudio Pontello, a Christian Democratic deputy, could barely contain his anger: "This is the ultimate mockery that they should return him to us this way right on the doorstep [of party headquarters]!"

Bitterness over the position the party took was painfully bared by Moro's wife and four children. "We ask that there be no public demonstration, no ceremony or speeches, no national mourning or state funeral or medal to his memory," said a statement. "Let history judge the life and death of Aldo Moro." As the private funeral procession moved swiftly out of the capital through torrential rain, few passers-by realized that Moro was making his last journey. But when it halted at a stop light, a truck driver jumped down, ran over and kissed the hearse. Near another crossroads, some 50 people, standing silently under umbrellas, tossed white hydrangea blossoms cut from a nearby bush at the passing cortege. In the 12th century Romanesque Church of St. Thomas the Apostle in the small hill town, Don Agostino Mancini, the parish priest since 1930, conducted the funeral Mass and blessed the casket. "The journey of our brother Aldo ends here," he said. Francesca de Paolis, who used to sell Moro the home-made doughnuts he loved, remarked: "He was modest, and so we have tried to honor him in a humble way with our presence." In keeping with a wish Moro had expressed in one of at least 20 letters he wrote from captivity, there was no one present from the Christian Democratic leadership.

Countless Romans, meanwhile, paid homage at the spot where the body was found. Fixed to a corrugated iron fence was a somber portrait of Moro with the caption: ALDO MORO HAS BEEN ASSASSINATED. HIS FAITH IN LIBERTY LIVES IN OUR HEARTS. Below were candles and a rapidly growing pile of carnations, roses, lilies and gladioli. One mother watched as her two sons, 8 and 10, each laid a single rose at the memorial. "They must learn something from this," she said. "It's our only hope." A young woman, said to be one of Moro's daughters, left a bouquet of red carnations with a card signed "Anna." It read: "Father, teacher, I thank you for having educated me with your strong mind..."

Lanky, stooped and with an incongruous shock of white in his dark hair, Moro was the antithesis of the political emotionalism that had branded the Fascist years. Soft-spoken and self-effacing, he was a protege of Alcide de Gasperi, Italy's first postwar Premier. In political style, he was a conciliator, dedicated to the art of the possible, with a gift for fashioning ambiguous phrases that could be used to cloak disagreement. One of his most famous was "parallel convergences," which he used to describe the center-left formula for the 1963 D.C.-Socialist coalition--even while laughingly noting that "geometrically this is impossible, but politically it is feasible." After the 1976 election, when the Communist Party vote spurted to 34% of the total--close behind the Christian Democrats' 39% --Moro promoted the gradual process of accommodation between the two. When many members of his own party rebelled against the present governing agreement that formally ushered the Communists into the parliamentary majority for the first time in 31 years, it was Moro who persuaded them to go along.

In the first shock of emotion after Moro's death, former Italian President Giuseppe Saragat lamented that "alongside the body of Moro lies the body of the first Italian republic." That judgment was excessive, but it reflected a common fear that in the wake of the Moro tragedy, Italy might be in for a bout of vengeful political overreaction, skirmishing between the far right and the fringe left, or vigilante justice. "We will all pay for this act, the high and the low," said Pietro Campagna, a Rome accountant.

Already under fire for failing to stop the brigatisti, Interior Minister Cossiga resigned the day after Moro's body was found. Many Italian legislators now contend that the need is to implement police reforms rather than draw up new anti-terrorist legislation.

Italy's police have not proved very effective against terrorism, largely because the various police organizations, especially the 68,000-man national public security force and the 99,000-man paramilitary carabinieri, lack coordination. In a country that is still uneasy about anything that smacks of authoritarian rule, that division was deliberate as a presumed guarantee against potential coups. Disclosures in recent years of political plotting in Italy's two secret services led to a fundamental reorganization of the intelligence agencies, which some officials charge has in turn handicapped them in the war against terrorism.

The problem of dealing with the threat posed by the Red Brigades is a difficult one. Even though the brigatisti's war against Italian society goes back more than a decade, little is known about the young, shadowy terrorists who operate under the vague revolutionary motto "Vogliamo tutto e subito (We want everything and now)." Estimates of their strength range up to 500 hard-core recruits organized into small cells, or "columns."

Founder Renato Curcio, 36, and 150 other brigatisti are currently in jail or on trial for numerous crimes --39 murders, 30 kidnapings, ten jail breaks and a variety of subversive activities. But the organization continues to grow, and so does its appetite for mayhem. When Curcio, then a sociology student, formed the group in 1969, its activities were largely limited to rhetoric about the need for "an armed proletariat vanguard" to do battle against "the imperialist state of the multinationals." In the early 1970s, the group moved from vandalism and arson into a new field: kidnapings of plant managers and junior executives, who were usually freed after admitting crimes at "people's trials."

In the mid-1970s, the Red Brigades expanded their enemies list to include politicians, judges, policemen, lawyers, professors and journalists as well as businessmen, and added a new crime: murder. The targets in Italy's long tradition of political violence had almost always been the police, soldiers and statesmen. But for the Red Brigades, notes Rome Historian Rosario Romeo, revolutionary action "is essentially class action. They attack businessmen and professional men as representatives of a class rather than as individuals. Their targets are marked because of their social position, not their political beliefs."

The brigatisti apparently have some links to terrorist organizations in other countries, such as West Germany's Red Army Faction and various Palestinian groups. There is even some speculation that they have a Czech connection, although the evidence--like the Czech-made pistol used in Moro's killing--remains tenuous at best. But Italian officials are convinced that there is an important difference between the Red Brigades and say, the West German terrorists who operate in virtual isolation. The Red Brigades enjoy considerable support from left-wing organizations in Italy, which, at a time of lingering 7.4% unemployment (nearly half are people under 30). are attracting many middle-and working-class students and ex-students.

Some indication of the political consequences of the Moro assassination, meanwhile, could come from results of local elections in two provinces and 816 municipalities held over the weekend. Both major parties were expected to hold steady, with the Christian Democrats gaining slightly for their tough stand toward the kidnapers. But there was always the chance of a backlash in the emotional aftermath of the tragedy.

Most experts on modern terrorism agree that the danger in combating it is to fall into a repressive reaction--which is exactly what the terrorists seek to provoke--and thus undermine the democratic values that are under attack. In the 1970s. Uruguay, once the model of democracy in South America, succeeded in wiping out the leftist Tupamaros. The cost was great: the get-tough climate set the stage for the military to seize power and set up a dictatorship. The dilemma of how to cope with terrorism is not lost on any European government these days. Spanish Premier Adolfo Suarez's center-right coalition warned last week that the Moro tragedy was not an isolated phenomenon but indicated "a generalized threat to all democracies and an intent to destabilize on a European scale."

Most European governments have stepped up security for their public officials, enacted new laws, tightened up police forces. A European antiterrorism convention, already ratified by three countries, will provide for international cooperation and ease extradition procedures. But there is a growing realization that new laws alone are not the answer: the social grievances that provide the breeding grounds for terrorists must also be assuaged. Above all, say government officials, it is essential for the state to keep public opinion on its side. Britain, for example, was forced to abandon its policy of internment in Northern Ireland because its violation of basic human rights alienated the population.

That lesson may give the brigaiisii themselves pause. After hailing the execution of Moro as an act of "revolutionary justice." Renato Curcio, now on trial in Turin for armed insurrection, shouted to those assembled in the crowded courtroom last week: "Perhaps you have not understood what has happened in these days or what will happen in the coming months for Italy!" In fact, everyone understood only too well. In murdering a man dedicated to the principle that people who differ could find common cause. Moro's assassins had neither divided nor conquered but united the nation in a new determination to preserve that vision.

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