PeaceReporter - Tears and blood

06/03/2005 versione stampabile

The Italian reporter has been released, but her liberator was shot dead

Giuliana Sgrena, the Italian journalist who writes for the Manifesto newspaper, has finally been released and can return to the bosom of her family and colleagues.

Her release came at the end of negotiations carried out by the Italian secret services. A group of SISMI agents were driving Sgrena to the airport when a USA forces armoured car pointed a spotlight on the car containing Sgrena and three unarmed members of SISMI and then opened fire, killing Nicola Calipari the Italian secret services agent in charge of the negotiations and injuring another. Giuliana Sgrena herself was shot in the shoulder before being flown this morning to Fiumicino airport in Rome, where it appeared that Sgrena was in good condition. The dynamics of the shooting incident are still surrounded in mystery, and diplomatic relations between Italy and the United States were very tense for a while.

"The firing went on and on. The driver wasn’t even able to explain that we were Italians. We weren’t going very fast, given the circumstances", Giuliana Sgrena explained to RAI News 24. The tone of the Italian journalist’s comments has increased the perplexity aroused by the dynamics of her liberation and serves to highlight the American army’s responsibility in the death of Nicola Calipari. The comments of Pier Scolari were, however, even stronger when he explained to journalists waiting outside the Celio hospital in Rome, where Giuliana has been admitted and where she will probably have o undergo surgery on her collar bone, that "the Americans didn’t want Giuliana to get out alive".

29 days have passed since 4 February. On that day Giuliana Sgrena was touring the Baghdad streets, carrying out her usual work and she had just left the An-Nahrein University of Baghdad, where she had gone with a driver and interpreter to interview families who had recently been evacuated from Falluja. Outside the walls of the university complex, the car in which Giulian Sgrena and her team were travelling was blocked by a group of armed men who kidnapped them. The interminable wait for spasmodic news began and, a few hours later, an announcement claiming responsibility in the name of a group calling itself the Jihad Islamic Organisation was broadcast on the internet.

The kidnappers demanded the withdrawal of all Italian troops present in Iraq within 72 hours, sending a collective shiver down the spines of the journalist’s family, her colleagues at the Manifesto and all of Italy, particularly because the demand was identical to the one made when Enzo Baldoni was kidnapped. The day after, 5 February, a second announcement arrived with identical demands.

Immediately thousands of people mobilised both in Italy and abroad, demanding the immediate release of the journalist who throughout her long and illustrious career has never failed to underline her clear opposition to the war, strongly supported by the personal experience of a person who has seen many wars and knows at first hand the suffering they cause civilian populations. On 6 February the Sunnit Council of Ulema, the highest religious authority for the Islamic minority in Iraq, launched an appeal to the kidnappers for the immediate release of Giuliana, a journalist who has always supported the Iraqi people.

The major dilemma that worried everyone was the fact that no one knew the real nature of the group of kidnappers, whether it was a movement that kidnaps westerners in order to obtain a ransom or whether it was a movement that had kidnapped an Italian journalist in order to punish Italy for participating in the conflict. On 7 February an announcement on the internet by the group led by al-Zargawi, the guerrilla leader who is feared above all others, denied any involvement in the kidnapping, casting doubt on the possibility of a political kidnapping. But on 8 February everyone was horrified by the news published on an internet site of the execution of Giuliana Sgrena, echoing what had already happened in the past with Simona Pari and Simona Torretta. The site where the news appeared and the fact that the group who claimed to have carried out the execution had never been previously heard of led to the belief that the news was false, something that was confirmed with a new announcement by the Islamic Jihad Organisation on 10 February repeating the demand for the withdrawal of Italian troops from Iraq within 48 hours in return for the release of the Italian journalist. At this point everyone gathered round and offered their support to Giuliana Sgrena’s elderly mother and father, a proud former partisan.

On 16 February the Al Arabiya satellite channel broadcast a film showing Giuliana Sgrena in tears, her hands clasped together in prayer: In the film Sgrena, speaking first in Italian and then in French, begged her companion, Pier Scolari, and all Italians to ask the government to withdraw Italian troops from Iraq and asked for the photographs she herself had taken to be widely published so that people could see how much the Iraq civilian population was suffering.

On 19 February the Qatar Al Jazeera news programme broadcast four of Sgrena’s photographs showing the suffering of the Iraqi population. The photographs had been collected together in a video made by Pier Scolari and published in the Manifesto. In a demonstration held in Rome that, according to the organisers, attracted 500,000 people, the crowd chanted the slogans "Free Giuliana" and "Stop the War", sending a clear message of peace and support for oppressed people. On 1 March the Internal Minister of Iraq, Falah Al-Naqib, announced that Giulians Sgrena "is alive", but the hope was not supported by any other information and anxiety grew. That is until today’s incredible news: Giuliana has been freed and is alive and well. Now we need to understand exactly what happened and, above all, think about those who are still being held hostage of this war in Iraq: Florence Aubenas, her interpreter Hussein Hanoun Al Saadi, and the entire population of Iraq.

Christian Elia