Riot Politics

ITALY THREATENED WITH CIVIL WAR, shrieked wire-service bulletins last week.

Italy was threatened with nothing of the sort. The fact was that Italy's Communist Party had made a major effort to topple the Tambroni government, had succeeded only in producing a series of bloody riots up and down Italy that unhappily cost eleven lives, but left the vast mass of Italy's citizens indifferent and even outraged.

It all began when the small neo-Fascist party scheduled a party congress in Genoa. The Communists, who have been chafing under the political ostracism they have suffered of recent years, saw a splendid opportunity to take advantage of the smoldering resentment many Italians felt when Fernando Tambroni accepted the support of the 24 neo-Fascist Deputies to form his government. As the neo-Fascists assembled, a gang of Red-led picketers charged into the Piazza de Ferrari. Genoa's celere (riot police) were waiting for them. They circled around the rioters in jeeps like Indians around a wagon train, clipping heads with their stout billies and gradually narrowing the crowd down to a hard core. Special riot trucks doused the demonstrators with automatic hoses.

When the melee was over, some 200 were in jail, several hundred more injured.

Raising the cry of "Fascism," the Communists briskly organized other riots, happily saw many non-Communists join them for once in common cause. In Reggio Emilia in northern Italy, a policeman was trapped in a crowd of Communist toughs. He panicked and began shooting, and five rioters were killed.

In Rome, a crowd including 50 parliamentary Deputies led by tough, balding Communist Giancarlo Pajetta and Republican Ludovico Camangi marched to Porta San Paolo to lay a wreath on the Partisan Plaque, which commemorates Italian resistance to the Fascists during World War II. The celere, under orders to permit no demonstrations of any kind, quickly moved to disperse the mob. The crowd charged the police, heaving bricks and wielding staves. Then a troop of mounted carabinieri rode into the mob.

Moments later, Pajetta strode into the Chamber of Deputies dramatically waving the blood-smeared shirt of Socialist Deputy Gianguido Borghese, who had been hurt in the cavalry charge. "Assassins!" shouted the Communists, and the chamber quickly became a free-for-all. Communists and Christian Democrats knocked aside ushers, grappled along the chamber's steep aisles. Only after hours of battling was order restored.

Next day the Reds called for a nationwide general strike. But the cry went largely unheeded, even by many of the Communist-dominated unions. Premier Tambroni turned down a resolution calling for a 15-day truce between the rioting factions. Argued Tambroni: established governments maintaining law and order do not make truces with the forces of violence.

Though Italian Communist Party Boss Palmiro Togliatti mustered thousands of mourners at the funeral of the five Communists killed in Reggio Emilia, the riots had served to rally non-Communists temporarily to the support of the Tambroni government. But there was little rejoicing among liberal Italians, who recognized the neo-Fascists as a constant source of similar trouble for the government. Wrote Pundit Enrico Mattei: "The Tambroni government cannot go while there is violence. But when the violence ends, let it go in favor of a more representative government stronger and better equipped to cope with sedition."

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