Word: italianity
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French President Nicolas Sarkozy is used to his decisions sparking street demonstrations, but he probably hadn't counted on Italian citizens flocking to picket the Elysée Palace. That's the threat Sarkozy now faces after reversing a pledge to extradite a former Red Brigades member Italy has convicted of murder. Amid accusations of justice denied, the Italian Association of Terrorism Victims says its members will travel to Paris on Saturday to denounce the reversal, which was at least partly the work of the President's Italian-born wife, Carla Bruni...
...only the latest twist in the long, tormented, and increasingly surreal relationship between Italy and France over the treatment of former leftist terrorists. On Oct. 12 the Elysée confirmed Sarkozy had annulled a government decree issued in June to deliver former Red Brigades member Marina Petrella to Italian authorities. Italy has long sought the return of Petrella, 58, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1992. The court found her guilty of participating in 1981 terrorist actions that resulted in the killing of a police officer and the kidnapping of a judge. She absconded...
...victims of extreme leftists who terrorized Italy during the 1970s and 1980s weren't outraged enough by Sarkozy's climb-down on Petrella, their fury was presumably further stoked at learning the back story of the move: Sarkozy's Italian-born wife, Carla Bruni, and her sister, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, had lobbied the President not to extradite the gravely ill Petrella to Rome - it even fell to the sisters to personally break the news of that reprieve to the former terrorist. "We could not let this woman die," Bruni told the daily Libération Monday in explaining her intervention...
...First Lady's role, saying that it is Sarkozy who must take responsibility for his actions. "We ask a very simple question to the French authorities and the French people: What if the situation was reversed? What if French people had been shot and murdered and kidnapped, and the Italian government was providing sanctuary to the culprits?" Della Rocca said Petrella's medical condition would be cared for just as well in Italy, which has a health and legal system renowned for protecting the rights of the infirmed. "The irony anyway is that for the victims and survivors...
...Evidence that the support the Bruni sisters added - aided by wider French public opinion sympathetic to Petrella's cause - had begun softening Sarkozy's position became clear as the summer advanced. Even as he wrote Italian authorities in July promising to deliver Petrella once her French administrative appeals had been exhausted, Sarkozy urged clemency in light of the prisoner's perilous health - a suggestion swiftly rebuffed by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Rome. Less than a month later, a French appeals court ordered Petrella's release from custody at the request of French justice officials...