Page 328 - Encyclopedia Of Terrorism

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308———Red Brigades

were involved in a bombing in London in March 2001; factory workers who had abandoned the official
others attribute the attack to the Continuity IRA, saying Italian Communist Party. The brigadiers claimed to
that the Real IRA has suffered defections to that group. follow pure Marxist-Leninist doctrine, in which a
A few months later, three Real IRA members, small group of revolutionaries is supposed to inspire
Fintan Paul O’Farrell, Declan John Rafferty, and massive worker uprisings through attacks on the polit-
Michael Christopher McDonald, were arrested for a ical structure.
bombing conspiracy that involved seeking funding The Red Brigades began by distributing pamphlets
from Iraq; the men were convicted in May 2002 and and releasing statements that attacked the government
given 30-year sentences. In summer 2002, security and Italian industrialists. In the early 1970s, they
experts in Britain warned that the Real IRA might be orchestrated a series of bank robberies and bombings,
planning assassination attempts on prominent politi- but they did not emerge as a significant force until
cians in a new bid to sabotage the peace process. members kidnapped prosecutor Mario Sossi in 1974.
He was released unharmed in exchange for eight
imprisoned Red Brigade members. The group then
See also CONTINUITY IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY; IRISH
began to concentrate on kidnappings as its main
REPUBLICAN ARMY; OMAGH BOMBING
tactic, snatching business leaders and government
officials. If demands were met, the hostages were
Further Reading
often released unharmed; if they were not, the victims
CAIN Web Achieve: Northern Ireland Conflict (1968 to the were usually executed. Initially, the Italian govern-
Present). http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/. ment and security forces had little success in stopping
Holland, Jack. Hope Against History: The Course of the brigadiers; prominent Italian officials and busi-
Conflict in Northern Ireland. New York: Henry Holt, nessmen hired armed bodyguards.
1999.
McKittrick, David. Making Sense of the Troubles. Belfast: In 1978, the Red Brigades seized their most
Blackstaff, 2000. famous victim, Aldo Moro, the reformist leader of the
O’Brien, Brendan. The Long War: The IRA and Sinn Fein. scandal-plagued Christian Democrat Party that had
2nd ed. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999. ruled Italy since the end of World War II. On the
morning of March 16, 1978, the day Moro was to
announce that the Italian Communist Party would
become part of a new governing coalition, he was kid-
RED ARMY FACTION. See napped by the Red Brigades, who saw his attempts to
BAADER-MEINHOF GANG OR bring the Communists into government as a threat to
JAPANESE RED ARMY. revolution. For 55 days, Moro was held in a secret
location; the Red Brigades released his increasingly
desperate pleas for the government to attempt to
secure his release. The prime minister refused to
RED BRIGADES negotiate. Thousands of police conducted the most
intensive investigation in modern Italian history, but
aka Brigate Rosse
turned up nothing. On May 9, 1978, Moro’s body was
found in the trunk of a car in Rome. The case remains
The Red Brigades were a Marxist terrorist group a seminal event in Italian politics, in part because of
active in Italy throughout the 1970s. the lengthy series of criminal trials that followed, but
Since World War II, in which Communist-led resis- also because of the many conspiracy theories that
tance fighters contributed decisively to the Allied sprang up around his abduction and murder.
victory in Italy, the Italian Communist Party has been When Moro was kidnapped, the Red Brigades
a potent force in that country’s politics. By the late were at the peak of their power, with an estimated
1960s, the party was more interested in attaining par- 1,500 active volunteers. The volunteers were orga-
liamentary power than in fomenting revolution, and nized into columns—areas of the country overseen by
when student protests swept across Italy, the party did a single individual who served on the executive com-
little to aid the protesters. The Red Brigades were mittee, the Red Brigades’ ruling body—with each
founded in Milan in 1969 by former students and column further subdivided into four- or five-person