Date: Wed, 18 Feb 1998 12:00:43 -0600 (CST)
From: Dennis Grammenos <dgrammen-AT-prairienet.org>
Subject: M-I: Italian Nobelist urges inquiry into rape charges



----------------------
Italian Nobel prize winner urges inquiry into rape charges

Copyright  1998 Reuters News Service 

ROME (February 17, 1998 4:30 p.m. EST
http://www.nando.net) - Italy's Nobel Prize-winning
dramatist Dario Fo has called for an urgent
inquiry into allegations paramilitary police ordered
neo-fascist thugs to gang-rape his wife to punish
her for her leftist views.

In an open letter to President Oscar Luigi
Scalfaro, Fo said an investigation into the alleged
1973 assault on Franca Rame would help Italy
come to terms with its violent past.

Fo, who was awarded the Nobel Prize last
October, was arrested in 1974 during a
performance of one of his plays and in 1980 the
couple were refused visas to enter the United
States because of Rame's involvement with the
far left.

Fo said a failure to probe the charges would
prove that corrupt police officers, so often the
targets of his theatrical satire, enjoy the
protection of the Italian state.

"Dear Mr President, this week's newspapers
have reported that several top officials from the
Pastrengo division of the Carabinieri paramilitary
police ordered the rape and torture, 25 years ago,
of Franca Rame, my wife," begins the letter,
copies of which were sent to the media.

"Franca and I are outraged and shocked," Fo
wrote, detailing allegations made last week by
Carabinieri officer Nicolo Bozzo, who was on
duty at the Pastrengo barracks in Milan on the
night Rame says she was raped.

"We are not thirsty for revenge," the writer
added. "We do not ask for (the culprits) to be
punished with anything more than the long,
tedious and empty lives they are quite certainly
living already.

"No, the issue is a different one. Reaching a true
understanding of the crimes of the past is an
essential step in the growth of any civil society."

Rame, Fo's wife for more than 40 years, says she
was abducted as she walked down a Milan street
on March 9, 1973, and raped by a gang of five
men.

In an interview with La Repubblica newspaper
at the weekend, the writer-actress, who has
performed in many of her husband's plays and is
widely regarded as his artistic muse, recalled the
attack in graphic detail.

"I can remember it as if it happened yesterday,"
she said.

"They put a pistol in my back and the next thing I
knew I was thrown in the back of a van. I don't
remember their faces, even though they only put
their masks on afterwards, in the dark of the van.

"When they dumped me near the park my clothes
were ripped and I was bleeding. I just had one
thought -- to get home to Dario and my son
Jacopo. They (the attackers) told me that if I
talked, they'd kill me."

Rame said her attackers burnt her with cigarette
ends and cut her with knives.

No one has ever been charged.

In 1987, a former neo-fascist jailed for his part in
the bombings and shootings which rocked Italy in
the 1970s, said Carabinieri officers had ordered
right-wing extremists to rape Rame in retaliation
for her outspoken leftist views.

The claim was neither investigated nor
substantiated.

Then, earlier this month, Milanese political
historian Biagio Pitarresi said he too believed
Rame was the victim of a politically-inspired
rape.

"The assault on Franca Rame was the idea of
Carabinieri from the Pastrengo division," Pitarresi
stated bluntly, saying he had interviewed officers
from the Milan barracks.

A week later, Bozzo, who was a junior officer at
the time of the assault, said he had seen one of
his superiors "celebrating" the news that Rame
had been abducted and raped.

Fo and Rame's work has frequently brought them
into conflict with the Italian establishment.

His best known play, "Accidental Death of an
Anarchist," is based on the true story of a railway
worker who fell out of the window of a Milan
police station in suspicious circumstances.

"Mr. President, see what you can do," Fo wrote
in his letter to Scalfaro. "We await a firm and
concrete response.

"If not, the usual culprits will once again know
that the institutions, with you at their head Mr.
President, are there to protect them, and not
those who have had to suffer something no
human being should have to suffer."

By GIDEON LONG, Reuters.



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