Years of Lead, the appeal of French intellectuals: “No to the repatriation of exiles”

PARIS – “The Italian political exiles in France”. This is how the former terrorists refugees in France are called in the text of a collective of intellectuals that he signs on The world an appeal to defend the “Mitterrand doctrine” in the face of new requests for the extradition of exiles from the Years of Lead who found refuge in France.

“Reaffirm the ‘Mitterrand Doctrine‘on political exiles – the title reads – does not mean giving Italy lessons in matters of justice. “A sentence that is contradicted when the signatories write that the former terrorists (they are never called that but always” exiles “) were welcomed “because, in certain cases, the conditions of the functioning of the Italian justice system, dictated by the need for an urgent response to the terrorist tendencies of social protest, paradoxically led to the fear that not all the guarantees of fairness were respected”.

The appeal comes out a few days after the meeting between the Minister of Justice Marta Cartabia and its French counterpart Eric Dupond-Moretti which could lead to a turning point on the extradition affair. The Guardasigilli delivered a list with eleven names of Italian fugitives, four of whom were sentenced to life imprisonment and received in France according to what the then Socialist president had decided at the Elysée. “This political decision that allowed far-left militants to be welcomed in France in the 1980s must be protected,” write some professors, philosophers, lawyers, some very little known in Italy. Among the most famous names are the writer Annie Ernaux and the director Robert Guédiguian. The petitioners recall that the Italian “exiles” had publicly declared that “they were abandoning political militancy, that they considered their past activity as finished, and that they were renouncing violence”.

The promoters of the appeal do not spend words for the victims of terrorism and their families who have been waiting for justice for decades. From their point of view, “the war is over” and it is time to move on. “Today – the text continues – the exiled Italian militants who arrived in the early 1980s are 40 years older. They are now well into retirement age. They have been journalists, restaurateurs, doctors, graphic designers, documentary makers, psychologists. They have they had children and grandchildren. They never stopped repeating that the war is over; that they have long been strangers to what they had been, never refusing to admit their responsibility. ” “It is these women and men, 40 years later – it continues – that the accounts are asked”, “in the name of a justice that decrees that forgiveness is equivalent to oblivion, that amnesty is always a betrayal, that reconciliation is worth less than the reopening of wounds “. In conclusion, the signatories reiterate that defending the “Mitterrand Doctrine” is a way of reaffirming “that the conception of justice as a pure instrument of revenge, even 40 years later, is contrary to what we continue to consider as an enlightened functioning of democracy. “.