Posted on 03/20/2002 5:31:53 PM PST by aculeus
A SENIOR Italian government adviser on labour relations was murdered by gunmen apparently opposed to his proposals to make it easier to sack workers.
Marco Biagi, 52, an affable professor responsible for drafting the government's package of labour market reforms, was shot dead by two attackers while cycling home on Tuesday night in Bologna, the nerve-centre of the Italian far Left.
The murder is the most dramatic evidence so far of the political tension welling up in Italy since the Right-wing government of the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, took power last year, backed by the "post-fascist" National Alliance and the anti-immigrant Northern League led by Umberto Bossi.
The Italian government said last night that the the killing was carried out by the Red Brigades for the Building of the Fighting Communist Party, an ultra-Left terrorist group descended from the Red Brigades which traumatised Italy in the 1970s and 1980s.
Scientific evidence linking the Red Brigades to the killing emerged last night.
Claudio Scajola, the interior minister, said ballistics experts had discovered from marks on bullet casings found at the scene that the gun used to kill Mr Biagi was also used in the Red Brigades murder of a political consultant, Massimo D'Antona, in 1999.
Mr Berlusconi vowed to press ahead with efforts to overhaul Italy's economy despite the intimidation, saying he would mobilise all the full force of the state to crush a movement "fed by hate".
Mr Scajola cut short a trip to America. He described the killing as "an attempt to spread panic and anxiety, to suffocate every peaceful debate, to create a deep fissure in Italian society."
Prof Biagi, a socialist moderniser, is the third labour reformer to be assassinated by Italian terrorists in four years.
Trade unions are in uproar over his proposals to change Article 18 of the Italian labour code, which makes it almost impossible for employers to lay off workers.
Yesterday, Italy's three biggest unions called a two-hour general strike to protest at Prof Biagi's murder, calling it a "barbarous act against democracy", but refused an appeal by Mr Berlusconi to abandon plans for a protest strike in April aimed at paralysing the economy.
Prof Biagi lost his bodyguard protection after the September 11 attacks in America, when police were needed for other duties.
His death came a day after he wrote a column for the Italian business daily Il Sole 24 Ore praising the free-market agenda agreed by European Union ministers last weekend in Barcelona.
Is THAT legal to print???
Let's see how our "unbiased" media handles it.
And now left wing terror strikes. It could be a pattern for the future.
It's not clear what ideological appeal the radical left packs now, but the image of left wing terror renascent is quite a change from the usual wailing about the radical right.
European Leftists have appeared as centrists in the 90s because they didn't challenge established institutions in the short run, and because they assumed society was inevitably moving in their direction. If it becomes clear that on immigration, taxation and other issues society isn't going their way, a turn to extremism and violence may be in the cards. Left-wing violence also hurts left-wing parties at the polls, since the public is appalled by the defenses intellectuals concoct for terror.
But the old line about the difference between "right-wing" and "left-wing" terrorists being the difference between "cat sh*t" and "dog sh*t" might also be remembered.
Don't tell our lefties.
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