The news hit us on April 15, 2011: they killed Victor Arrigoni! We were organizing the Biennale Democracy Campus in Turin with hundreds of boys and girls: we talked about it immediately, together.
Vittorio was a point of reference for many of us, a companion of that “Movement of movements” which, like water, flows everywhere, taking different shapes and filling every possible space. We were invited to participate in his funeralwhich took place in a sports hall crowded with a united humanity, made up of men and women who mostly did not know each other but who they recognized immediately.
When I spoke during that ceremony I was holding a bag of earth in my hand, which I would then give to her mother VikEgidia: land liberated from the mafia which came from the San Sebastiano da Po farm, confiscated from the ‘ndrangheta and which we were guarding and transforming into the “Cascina Bruno e Carla Caccia” (Bruno Caccia, Prosecutor of the Republic of Turin, had been murdered on the orders of the ‘Ndrangheta based in that farmhouse, on 26 June 1983).
Years later, in the summer of 2014, I crossed the places of Vik with a delegation of Italian parliamentarians who had left on a mission to Israel And Palestine promoted by Luisa Morgantini, who had been (among other things) vice-president of the European Parliament. I was struck by the affection and respect with which Vittorio was remembered by all those who, on one side and the other, tried to make the logic of nonviolence to the madness of weapons.
Thirteen years have passed since Arrigoni’s assassination and three things seem important to me today indispensable of his fighting experience.
Vittorio was a journalist, one of those for whom honestly telling what happens is the necessary lever to change the world: those who don’t “know” reality live in fact in a world of myths and propaganda, in a world dominated by those it has more power.
Today nosy journalists are increasingly the first, if not the only, target of the criminal violence agitated both by the mafias and by the powers that claim to be legitimate but who have lost the sense of limits. The signals that the Italian government of the heirs-al-quadrato (of the Duce and Berlusconi) is giving in this direction are clear and disturbing, so much so that they have pushed Usigrai to issue an unprecedented statement alarmwhich bluntly accuses the government of wanting to transform Rai into its own megaphone.
Vittorio with his “Let’s stay human” represented and represents all those who to make peace they prepare peace and not the war. Preparing peace to make peace is not empty sentimentality of beautiful souls, but one precise choice cultural and political that leads to concrete decisions in every social field, from the economy to school.
And here too the signs go completely in the opposite direction: war has forcefully returned to public discourse, dressed up as a harsh but necessary way of governing things, with all its horrendous consequences, including the normalization of the concept of “retaliation”, whose infamous meaning we thought we had fixed once and for all in the gravestones of the Fosse Ardeatine.
Instead, the usual Italian government did not miss the opportunity to attack law 185 on arms tradeaiming to empty it completely in order to further favor the interests of those who enrich themselves through the war, with all due respect to Pope francesco who never misses an opportunity to denounce the relationship between the multiplication of wars and the profits of the arms industry.
Vittorio with his staying at Gaza under the blows of the operation Cast Lead of the Israeli army, despite every personal convenience and declining every invitation to save themselves, reminded us once again of an uncomfortable but beautiful truth: humanity one is and human beings everywhere on Earth have the same dignity and aspire to the same freedom: in this they are more similar than cultural and material differences can make them different.
To put it in the words of Elly Schlein: woe betide you if you leave internationalism to the nationalists! The alternative internationalism to the nationalist imposture, the ancient and very young internationalism is that which presupposes an unconquered revolutionary idea: all men are born free and equal.
The circumstances in which Vittorio Arrigoni was killed remain unclear, some aspects of that kidnapping and execution still fuel many questions today. One above all: what did the Italian justice system do? What more could he do? Who knows what they thought in 2011, when they learned of the death of Arrigoni, Andy Rocchelli, Mario Paciolla, Giulio Regeniwho would then in turn pay for the love of the truth and the duty to tell it.
Perhaps it is not too late for someone in Rome to open a new file and place it alongside these others. At stake there is a certain idea of justice, but also of democracy.
Tags: Vittorio Arrigoni years death elements struggle indispensable
