Catholics, Communists end romance
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Italy splits over divorce referendum
By GEORGE ARMSTRONG
(C) 1974, The Manchester Guardian
ROME—Italy’s dreaded anti-divorce
referendum will take place this spring:
that is the consensus among the Italian
political leaders who were still hoping until
last weekend that the country’s first
popular referendum might be avoided,
even if it required a desperate and devious
parliamentary maneuver.
Senator Amintore Fanfani, the Christian
Democrat Chairman, has published his
“non possumus’’ bill-his party could
not be party to a revision of the present
divorce law, even if that were the only
way to derail the referendum.
This means, in effect, that the political
parties have no option but to bow to the
Constitution and let the referendum take
place. (Since the 1972 elections, the pro
divorce parties no longer have a
parliamentary majority; the Catholics
and Neo-Fascists could kill a new divorce
bill.)
ITALY’S FIRST divorce law was passed
three years ago. A group of hard-core
Roman Catholics immediately began
collecting signatures for a referendum
which would allow the voters to rescind the
divorce law or uphold it. The referendum,
as the people’s corrective arm, is
guaranteed by the Constitution, but it has
never been used.
The vote was to have been, by law,
during the spring of 1972, but President
Giovanni Leone dissolved Parliament
one of the reasons being to postpone the
referendum. In 1973, it was discovered that
the referendum could not be held in 1973
either
Throughout last year there was much
talk, but no action, on the idea that if the
divorce law were modified by Parliament
it would no longer be the 1970 law but a new
model. This, it was dubiously argued,
would stop the referendum as it had been
called to test the 1970 law.
WHAT FANFANI now has said is that
his party could not even vote in favor of
modifying the present divorce law because
the Catholic party remains opposed even
to an “improved” divorce law.
This would seem to have pulled the
carpet from beneath that house of cards
which was to be the “new” divorce law.
The politicians are in a pre-alarm state,
the Communists especially.
Since the Communist leader, Enrico
Berlinguer, has called the divorce law “an
acquisition of a civilized society,” and
since the number of divorces granted here
in the past three years has been low
compared with that in other countries, one
may ask, why all the backstage thunder?
For the Communists, the referendum
will oblige them to reverse their gears and
return to their principles, always difficult
for a large political machine, particularly
if that machine has been racing alongside
the Catholic machine lately, each machine
making cooperative noises to the other.
NOW THE ROMANCE between Italy’s
two major parties must come to a
screeching halt. The Catholics and the
Communists must to back to their posts, to
prepare for the referendum fight. A
romance has been nipped in the bud by
divorce.
For nearly three years, Italian political
commentators have repeated the phrase:
“The referendum will split the country in
two,” They seem to think that the
referendum will begin another was be
tween church and state (“open old
wounds”), with the subsequent revival of
anticlericalism. They may be wrong. The
Italian voter may be wiser and freer than
they think.
The vote of the practicing Roman
Catholic is negligible. The only real risk to
Italy from the referendum is that the pro
divorce forces do not have a network of
parish priests who can organize the voters,
particularly those who are guilty about not
being “good” Catholics.
As Socialist Chairman Francesco de
Martino says: “It would be extremely
serious for our democracy if its first
referendum should result in abolishing a
democratic law.”
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‘Watergaffe’
Bugging scandal breaks in France
PARIS—Despite the barely disguised snickering
in French government circles over the Nixon ad
ministration’s Watergate travail, officials here give
every appearance of making similar errors in
handling a major scandal of their own.
More than a month after sophisticated bugging
equipment was found by accident on the new
premises of Le Canard Enchaine, the French
satirical weekly, the government has been em
barrassed by what looks like an effort to stall the
judicial investigation.
French public opinion is becoming increasingly
persuaded that the government ordered the bugging
because it was being regularly needled by the
Canard’s scoops.
AT STAKE in the present case—another
similarity to the situation in Washington—is
defiance of the courts.
In the French case, the Direction de la Sur
veillance du Territoire (DST), the French counter
espionage organization roughly equivalent to the
By JONATHAN C. RANDAL
(C) 1974, The Washington Post
Federal Bureau of Investigation, has refused to let
its agents testify on the matter.
No longer does Prime Minister Pierre Messmer
suggest that the whole operation was a put-up job
staged as a promotion stunt to boost the Canard’s
sales.
President Georges Pompidou, at his traditional
New Years’s meeting with the press, insisted that
what the weekly dubbed “Watergate” was just a
“prank.”
WEEK AFTER WEEK, too much information
about the bugging attempt has come to light
thanks apparently to leaks from disgruntled
members of the police—to lend much credibility to
the government’s protestations of innocence.
From the start—and much to the anguish of the
entire government and more especially Interior
Minister Raymond Marcellin and the DST—the
Canard has printed the names and job descriptions
of DST agents who installed the bugging equipment
while disguised as “workmen.”
The DST’s line of defense is that the Official
Secrets Act—covering everything from industrial to
military spying—excuses its agents from testifying.
THE CANARD'S lawyer argues that the bugging
attempt was a classic case of invasion of privacy
unrelated to espionage.
Although neither the French constitution nor
political tradition recognize executive privilege or
contempt of court in the U.S. sense of the terms, the
DST’s brief still goes against French law, if only in
the name of the equality of all citizens before the
law.
The French judiciary showed courage im
mediately by assigning two judges to the Canard
case, largely because it decided—most unusually—
that the police could not be trusted in the in
vestigation at all.
As eminent lawyers have spent the past month
pointing out, the investigating magistrate’s own
inquiries are always conducted in secrecy and thus
neither DST agents nor any other Frenchman—up
to and including Pompidou himself—can legally
avoid giving testimony.
THE INVESTIGATING magistrate may or may
not decide that the DST is correct in asserting that
secrecy is warranted in the case, but he must first
hear the witnesses.
Indeed, DST chief Henri Biard apparently sought
to buttress his case by addressing a letter marked
“Confidentiel defense,” or roughly top secret, to
Alain Bernard, the senior investigating magistrate
on the case. According to leaked press reports, the
letter charged that various Canard staffers were
“sympathetic to a foreign power,” a charge that
would have been senous enough to stop the in
vestigation there and then, if the judge had agreed.
Unfortunately for the government and Biard, DST
agents have in the past testified in trials in public—
or in private if secrets were involved. Even agents
of the French equivalent of the Central Intelligence
Agency have appeared in French courts.
UPON CLOSER examination, the DST appears
involved in delaying tactics. Yes, the agency says,
the DST top officials—but not the agents actually
accused of the bugging job—might be willing to see
the judge. A DST agent was “on an operation,” was
the explanation offered as to why he could not see
the judge to back up another DST man’s alibi that
he was not present in the Canard offices the night of
the bugging.
The DST’s refusal to permit agents named by the
Canard to testify fits in with a general government
reluctance to allow civil servants—-or ministers—to
appear in court or before parliament inquiries.
The Fifth Republic has proved to be remarkably
successful in bouncing back from other damaging
scandals. But the government’s present evasive
tactics, rightly or wrongly, are generally taken as a
backhanded form of admission.