1

Do You Remember Revolution? The Politics of Narrative, Memory

and Violence

Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University,
cch08@aber.ac.uk

Abstact: This article presents interview material obtained on fieldwork visits to the Republic
of Cyprus and Italy between 2009 and 2010. Ex-militants from four clandestine groups
(EOKA, Brigate Rosse, Prima Linea and Proletari Armati per il Comunismo) were asked to
speak about their entry to and participation in those organisations. The article reflects on how
narratives given by EOKA and anni di piombo militants about the past appear to be affected
by contemporary resistances and struggles. The politicality of their narratives, and of their
perceptions of history, are linked to contrasting post-conflict contexts: the anni di piombo
groups experienced resounding defeat and imprisonment whereas EOKA members have
enjoyed the status of freedom-fighters. The divergent effects of these outcomes upon
narrative, subjectivity and references to history are centrally addressed. The article concludes
by discussing the implications for interviewing practice in contentious politics research.


Introduction The Interview in Political Violence Research

In the year 1983, eleven imprisoned autonomist activists (including the noted theorists
Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno) authored a document entitled Do You Remember Revolution? The
article was presented as an attempt to reclaim the history of the autonomist movement from Italys
pentiti phenomenon, from memory distortion and conformity, and from a judicial desire to equate
subversion with terrorism (Castellano et al. 1983). The attempt was both an objective and a political
endeavour objective because the activists understood history to be knowable and reclaimable from
distortion, and political because history was presented as a gift for future revolutionary struggles.

The study of political violence often produces knowledge about past events but is rarely as
bold as this invocation of history as both political and objective, although the Frankfurt School
Critical Theorists provide the archetypal example of this in wider social science/philosophy (cf. Held
1980: 148-74; Horkheimer 2002). The study of contentious politics, within Social Movement Studies,
and the field of Terrorism Studies split the concepts, attributing politicality to the groups they study
2

and associating efforts for objectivity with their own projects. Objectivity is not used here to
suggest that these scholars understand their research to uncover timeless truths, but rather that the
study of political violence is undertaken to produce knowledge about the causes of terrorism.
Objectivity, then, is used to note positivist inclinations to understand history as knowable (rather
than as irredeemably constructed).

This kind of separation between politicality and objectivity in terrorism research is
problematised in one way by the Critical Terrorism Studies project, which shows how the work of
terrorism scholars is intensely political in its search for the objective causes of terrorism, through its
reproduction of certain discourses about legitimate authority and practices (cf. Jackson et al. 2009).
This will not be the direction taken in this article, though. Instead of addressing the practices of
scholars I will consider the mutuality of politicality and objectivity within the testimonies of ex-
militants, particularly relative to the practice of interviewing.

The Social Movement literatures on political violence and contentious politics often engage
with autobiographical testimony to enrich analyses, something undertaken more infrequently within
the field of Terrorism Studies to its detriment (Horgan 2004). When interviewing is undertaken,
the testimonies of militants and ex-militants are understood relative to their relationship with past
events (cf. Blee and Taylor 2002; della Porta 1992a; White 2007). As such, studies using interviews
with protagonists consider methodological issues regarding the relationship between testimony and
events. Robert White, for example, problematises features of interviewing like miscommunication
between interviewee and researcher, the potentially fallible memories of interviewees, the reflection
of personal bias in testimony and the unconscious reworking of historical facts to make them fit into a
coherent sequence (White 2007). These understandings of interviewing consider the objectivity of
what is said (how it relates to a knowable past), but not its politicality.

A consideration of how ex-militants narrate their experiences will be embarked upon here to
muddy the waters between objectivity and politicality in memory and narrative. This is a different
type of approach to conventional Social Movement and Terrorism Studies research then, as it will
involve reflection upon the politicality of interviewee testimony rather than how it represents past
events. The study of how people speak about the past is known as collective memory research,
narrative studies and oral history when such history focuses on popular memory as a
contemporary object of study (cf. Johnson and Dawson 1998). This type of research looks at the
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political roles played by popular memory, like the linking of past events with contemporary political
and cultural narratives and how changing cultural contexts affect the remembering of past events.

In terms of political violence and contentious politics, examining how interviewees talk about
the past can reveal much about the production of subjectivity in post-conflict situations. Research of
this type has been undertaken by Luisa Passerini, who has conducted oral history studies with
incarcerated women from clandestine Italian organisations such as Brigate Rosse and Prima Linea.
She found important differences in the types of narratives produced in textual and oral testimony, and
in the levels of memory accessible to the women in situations of incarceration and subsequent
freedom (Passerini 1992), subjective location thereby affecting portrayals of the past. Like Passerini,
I have conducted interviews with ex-members of Italian underground organisations. In 2010, I spoke
to ex-militants from the Marxist-Leninist group Brigate Rosse (including one founding member), and
from Prima Linea and PAC.
1
In examining how post-conflict situation influences narratives about
involvement in political violence, I will compare the testimonies of Italian interviewees with those of
EOKA fighters which I collected on fieldwork in the Republic of Cyprus in 2009.

The comparison between protagonists of these conflicts is interesting because their post-
conflict contexts differ so much, and through these contrasts I can examine the types of narratives and
testimonies provided relative to context. While it would be a stretch to attribute victory to the EOKA
organisation, EOKA members were not imprisoned after the conclusion of their clandestine struggle
like the Italian militants were. Instead they enjoyed a legacy as freedom-fighters in post-colonial
Greek-Cyprus - a narrative still endorsed by both political elites and right-wing political opinion in
Cyprus in the years after occupation by Turkey. For example, memorial services for EOKA fighters
killed during the struggle still attract high-level political delegations (cf. Theodoulou 03 April 2008),
and I witnessed this at a service inside Nicosia prison for the martyred EOKA fighter
Kyriakos Matsis while conducting fieldwork in Cyprus. The prison warden who accompanied me
identified the Archbishop of Cyprus, the Defence Minister, and other prominent politicians of the
Republic in attendance. Conversely, Italian interviewees served long prison sentences before
speaking to me and are portrayed in the media as terrorists, even to this day.

This article, then, focuses on how ex-militant testimonies mirror their post-conflict contexts.
It finds that the testimonies and subjectivities of interviewees reflect profound differences between the

1
One PAC interviewee contributed to the autonomi document Do You Remember Revolution quoted at the
beginning of this article.
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semi-victorious and defeated case studies. The EOKA fighters described their experiences in terms of
a continuous nationalist narrative, whereas the marginalised social positions of Italian ex-militants
contributed to a more fractured account of self and of the decision to adopt armed struggle. Victory,
or perhaps the absence of defeat, has institutionalised the EOKA narrative and led to a homogenous
(and exclusionary) portrayal of the past by unreflexive participants. Conversely, experiencing defeat
has led the anni di piombo militants to reflect upon their actions, largely with some degree of regret
and remorse, in heterogeneous and fractured ways. In both case studies, objective claims about
history operated as political tools anni di piombo militants invoked history to open up popular
understandings of the 1970s and 80s, whereas the narrative of EOKA has been used to close down
understandings of Cypriot nationhood.


Cyprus and Italy

As this is a short article I must assume a considerable amount of knowledge about the anti-
colonial struggle in Cyprus and the anni di piombo in Italy. In this section I will provide some brief
contextual and historical information about both, and indicate material for further reading.

While there has been a long history of anti-colonial struggle in Cyprus, the domination of the
island by foreign powers goes back considerably further. For instance Kypros Tofallis has noted the
formation of clandestine organisations as far back as 1879, the year after Cyprus became administered
by Britain (Tofallis 2002: 82), but British control of Cyprus was preceded by successive conquests of
the island by Egyptians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Persians, Ptolemaic Greeks, Romans, Byzantine
Greeks, Arabs, Franks, Venetians and Turks (Mayes 1981: 13).

The escalation of agitation for enosis (accession to the Greek state) under British rule is
connected by scholars to efforts to politically secularise the island. Under Ottoman rule, the Cypriot
Church had enjoyed the position of sole political representative of the Greek community, but the
British administration severed the links between the Church and tax collection, introduced a
legislative assembly with secular representatives and removed certain educational privileges of the
Church (Loizos 1975: 14; Markides 1977). Unrepresentative governance preceded an uprising in
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1931 where Government House was burned down and the subsequent repression implemented by the
British authorities contributed to festering tensions on the island (Cameron 1971).

After participating in World War Two, when Cypriots responded to an apparent offer of
national freedom by the British authorities (Holland and Markides 2006: 215), mass mobilisation re-
emerged in a novel climate of political openness in Cyprus where, for the first time, political parties
and left-wing trade unions were allowed to flourish on the island, destabilising the traditional
hierarchies of power. Archbishop Makarios and his council, perhaps threatened by this, began
fostering the nationalist movement and oversaw a close relationship between the enosis campaign and
the Cypriot Church (cf. Grivas 1964; Mayes 1981; Vanezis 1971; Xydis 1967: 29-30, 69-70). After
the failures of attempts to obtain international sympathy for Cyprus colonial predicament (Makarios
undertook international tours, organised a referendum on independence and even managed to get the
Cyprus question debated by the United Nations), the Archbishop authorised the start of the EOKA
insurgency, which began with sabotage explosions across Cyprus on 1
st
April, 1955. After four years
of guerrilla warfare in the Troodos mountains and urban assassination campaigns against police
officers and British soldiers, EOKA succeeded in removing the British administration from the island
(apart from several sovereign military bases) but union with Greece their stated aim was never
achieved.

Regarding some key features of the contemporary Cypriot context, which informed the
testimonies I collected, the post-colonial Republic of Cyprus was born in 1960 and was led by
Archbishop Makarios until he was deposed in 1974s coup dtat (organised by the dictatorship of
colonels in Athens). An invasion of northern Cyprus by Turkish forces swiftly followed. Makarios
returned to the Cypriot Presidency to lead efforts to dismantle the national partition until his death in
1977 (Mayes 1981: viii-ix), but northern Cyprus remains occupied by Turkey to this day. This was a
matter of great significance to my EOKA interviewees who had risked their lives between 1955 and
1959 to be rid of occupation. Complicated dynamics also underscored their understandings of the
Cyprus problem; the (revered) leader of EOKA, General Grivas, was involved in this ill-fated and
destructive coup dtat which provoked the Turkish invasion. As such, interviewees resented the
Turkish occupation but their testimonies were sometimes underscored by confusion about how the
enosis project (to unite Cyprus with Greece) had gone so wrong. Rather than introducing reflection
upon the role of EOKA in escalating ethnic tensions though, this confusion was resolved in interviews
through demonization of the Turks.

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Ten years after the end of the EOKA militancy, Italy was experiencing the Hot Autumn of
1969. This was a period of intense industrial unrest, where cooperation between the student
movements of 1968 and factory workers led to strikes and mass mobilisation (Della Porta 1995: 108-
9; Drake 1989: 1-2). Social Movement research has detailed the opportunity structures, protest cycles
and pressures which led to the emergence of violent factions within leftist mobilisation in Italy (cf.
Della Porta 1995; Della Porta and Tarrow 1986; Tarrow 1989; Tarrow 1991). In an article of this
length I must assume considerable familiarity with the anni di piombo, suffice to say that Italy
endured such pervasive conflict during those years (roughly 1969-1983) (Glynn 2009) that the labels
creeping civil war or low intensity civil war are sometimes applied (cf. Centro Bull 2007: 8).
Furthermore, it is now accepted that the Italian secret services covertly utilised neofascist groups to
disrupt leftist activities in the 1970s and 80s (Ibid) as part of the strategy of tension used by the
Italian state to counter leftist mobilisation. As these activities involved mass-casualty bombings, the
use of violence by both sides can be understood to invite the description of civil war.


Who Controls the Present, Controls the Past?

The experience of repeatedly listening to and transcribing interviews from both
case studies has led me to note the politicality of what was being said. Many interviewees engaged in
some level of politicisation of the present, whether through criticising other ex-militants post-conflict
activities, challenging official representations of the conflict periods or through asserting that post-
conflict political situations are unjust. The practice of obtaining information about how interviewees
became involved in violent groups was thus not just an objective
2
one; recollections of past events
came packaged with political denunciations of the present.

George Orwells maxim from 1984 (Orwell 1998), quoted above, is a useful
introduction to the overlaps between political power and post-conflict memory. EOKAs struggle was
influential in founding the Republic of Cyprus and the groups narrative has saturated the national
project. Unlike the defeated anni di piombo groups, EOKA are involved with how the present and the

2
Again, I am using objective to relate to activities of knowledge production about the past. I do not mean to
imply that research can exist independently of perception or individual conceptions, rather this article adopts a
critique of such a distinction between objectivity and politicality.
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past are governed in the Republic of Cyprus, through actual political appointments
3
and because the
narrative of their struggle is politically instituted in certain favourable ways (through official
histories, memorials and statues). The governmental Council for the Historical Memory of EOKA,
1955-59 (SIMAE) has funded the opening of EOKA veterans associations in Cypriot towns and
cities, as well as memorial statues and museums to the struggle.
4
The enosis narrative (Cyprus as
ethnically and nationally Greek) borne by EOKA has also been instituted into educational
programmes after the conclusion of the conflict; Yiannis Papadakis has noted that history textbooks
in the Republic of Cyprus place the island within the tripartite Hellenic model of ancient Greece,
glorious Byzantine Empire and modern Greece, and contain unequivocal statements concerning
Cypruss identity as Greek and nothing but Greek (Papadakis 2008: 131-2).

The place of EOKA in the governance of Cyprus present and past contrasts
greatly with the positions occupied by ex-Brigate Rosse, Prima Linea and PAC members. My Italian
interviewees had all served lengthy prison sentences, with one still finishing the community aspects
of his sentence. Most worked in social cooperatives and interpreted this either as part of paying back
a debt to society (Zaccheo 2010), or as a continuation of their left-wing social concerns combined
with the reality of employment options for ex-terrorists (as Susanna Ronconi joked: its the only
field that would accept us! Lets be honest!) (Ronconi 2010). Other interviewees worked in the
private sector, while those involved in political parties and local government could still experience
hostility based upon the perception of them as terrorists. For example, negative material has
appeared on the internet critiquing Sergio DElias election to Parliament, while Marco Solimanos
nomination for political office has created a furore in Livorno despite his conviction being spent
(Ristretti August 10, 2010; Solimano 2010).

These contrasting post-conflict positions for the organisations in Italy and Cyprus resulted in
different (and political) understandings of history being displayed. EOKA interviewees had no
complaints about the way history is represented in the Republic of Cyprus, as they have centrally
contributed to the national narrative. Furthermore, the level of homogeneity displayed and the
preponderance of a historical narrative within testimonies were startling; it was remarkable how many
times the question why did you join EOKA? received a response that began by referencing the
events of 1878 (when Britain took over the administration of Cyprus from the Ottoman Empire) and

3
EOKA fighters to have held high political office in the Republic of Cyprus include Nicos Sampson, Glafcos
Clerides and Tassos Papadopoulos.
4
I visited the EOKA museum in Nicosia during my fieldwork. Visitors pass through the exhibits, including
photos and military memorabilia, until they reach the climax of the museum the nooses used by the British
authorities to hang EOKA fighters inside Nicosia prison.
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which then listed each historical disappointment to the nationalist cause, many of which occurred
before interviewees were born. A comprehensive account of the past has been solidified, even down
to the suspicious agreement on the numbers of Cypriots executed by EOKA as traitors it being
unlikely that records were kept of such things, mid-conflict. Despite this, multiple interviewees
claimed that either 80 or 89 traitors had been executed and that, with effort, records could be
uncovered to prove this.
5


The past having been secured within the narratives and practices of the national project,
EOKA interviewees instead used their testimonies to repoliticise the present. They recalled an
objective (knowable) past to problematise the present occupation of North Cyprus by Turkey and to
occasionally label the contemporary Greek-Cypriot youth as apathetic, unpatriotic and interested only
in cafe-culture. The historical narrative of the heroic Hellenic male fighting for his country, which
they inherited and then embodied
6
, was used to identify a contemporary Cyprus which fell short of its
glorious past. Furthermore, while the Greek-Cypriot youth I spoke to were very reflexive regarding
the partition of Cyprus, EOKA interviewees presented the occupation in terms of a long-standing
stereotypical narrative about Turks.

The appeals by EOKA to an objective history are thus tied into a political rendering of the
present both through the post-conflict solidification and homogenisation of narratives about the past,
and through political critiques of the occupation by Turkey - centred on Cyprus supposedly Hellenic
history. As one interviewee stated:

In every country you go to, there are minorities. But they dont want to rule. Minority in Cyprus
here they want to [...] Go all over the island, find the ruins. Did they find any Ottoman ruins? [...] We
have all the ruins of Cyprus, 2000 years before Christ. All over Cyprus [...] everywhere you see the
temple of Apollo, of Aphrodite. (Sophocleous 2009)

Contrastingly, the politicisation undertaken by Italian interviewees presented a different
relationship between testimony, politics and history. Rather than invoking a stabilised account of the

5
However, I was never shown any records and my requests to see them at the EOKA Veterans Associations
were gently avoided.
6
This is particularly relevant to the identity taken on by General Grivas, who led the EOKA organisation.
During the insurgency Grivas operated under the identity of Dighenis, Digenes Akritas being the mythical
hero of a tenth-century epic set in Asia-Minor (Reddaway 1986: 207) who is held to have defended territory at
the edge of the Byzantine Empire (Barker 1959: 93-5). The legend of Digenes held particular resonance for
Hellenic narratives of Cyprus, as folklore attributes the presence of a mighty bolder off the South-Eastern coast
of Cyprus to his physical prowess.
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past, the mutability and contestability of history often played central roles in these interviews.
Interviewees were often very aware of how the dominant public narrative about the anni di piombo
marginalises the experience of left-wing activists and downplays the scale of anti-capitalist protest in
the 70s and 80s. These Italian interviewees offered testimony not to criticise present political
arrangements they had largely retreated to private lives and withdrawn from comment on politics
but to challenge public memory of the anni di piombo. Unlike the EOKA interviewees, who had
firmly established their narrative of the past, ex-members of Brigate Rosse, Prima Linea and PAC
used their testimonies to politicise the historical record.

This politicisation occurred in two ways, through counter-histories of the anni di piombo (an
appeal to an objective past) or through criticism of how the narrow public memory of the period
serves contemporary political interests. While engaging with these tendencies it is important to note
that the anni di piombo interviewees did not present a homogenous account of what happened; while
the EOKA militants provided remarkably similar testimonies (following the public institution of their
narrative), defeat has not led to a homogenisation of Italian ex-militant testimony. Rather, accounts of
the past were far more heterogeneous.

Interviewees provided counter-narratives to dominant accounts of Italian terrorism which
often repoliticised and challenged existing public histories; for example, the Italian state, covert neo-
fascist apparatuses and even the CIA were implicated as bearing responsibility for provoking the
conflict. These invocations of objective history were always presented with official qualities, through
the mediums of newspaper reports about demonstrators killed by the police, carefully collected
statistics of the deaths caused by state agents rather than activists, and historical examples of the
Italian states anti-democratic tendencies. Most of Roberto Ognibenes (a founder of Brigate Rosse)
answers to questions relied upon an extensive counter-history, where he used objective appeals to the
past to destabilise, and politically challenge, current popular memory. For example, he made an
appeal to secret archives to challenge the official presentation of NATO as an implicitly honourable
actor:

The fact was discovered when they opened the secret archive of the UK secret services, from which a
document said that in 76, here, when the Communist Party had a majority of votes in the elections,
that they [NATO] were considering organising a coup here in Italy. So this is the context. (Ognibene
2010)

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However, the heterogeneity of the anni di piombo testimonies also resulted in contrasting
accounts which refused to apportion blame onto the state for the conflict. Against the tendency for
interviewees to highlight police and state violence as factors in their radicalisation, Maurice
Bignami was keen for me to understand that the urban guerrilla should not be read in a defensive
sense, rather that it was a political instrument (Bignami 2010). Another contrasting account came
from Sergio DElia, who stated that clandestine organisations were a consequence of the development
of Italian mobilisation and its ideological basis. Rather than being understood as a reaction to state
violence, he thought that activist violence was a verifying demon a means of testing whether
revolutionary conditions were present within society (D'Elia 2010).

These contradictions aside, Italian interviewees were more united when asserting that history
reflects the interests of power. Their testimonies often provided both counter-histories of the anni di
piombo and assertions that official narratives intentionally produce reductionist and simplistic
accounts, because institutions have interests in showing these movements like monsters, as if they
had woken up one morning and had arms with them and decided to be violent (Segio 2010). There
were variations in how this political claim was made; some interviewees thought that blatant,
intentional misinformation was undertaken by the state, while others hinted at more subtle procedures
of history-production on the part of powerful interests. Susanna Ronconi, for example, expressed
disappointment that clandestine activists have been denied their dignity as political militants, being
portrayed instead as terrorists, and that the rare enquiries she receives from students mostly
understand the anni di piombo at a surface level. For example, she stated:

Sometimes Im happy if I meet some young people who want to know and who want to ask me
something, its important for me [...] but they say oh yes, Piazza Fontana, Brigate Rosse [but] they
dont know anything about the problem of our democracy. (Ronconi 2010)

So; in experiencing defeat, militants were dispossessed of the ability to produce public
narrative. They left prison to be confronted by accounts of history which they did not recognise. This
apparently resulted in two strategies being used to unite personal recollections with official history:
firstly, there was the approach of understanding official history to be political and intentionally
narrow and exclusionary a dominant perspective within my interview sample. As we have already
seen, this led to the production of counter-narratives, through appeals to an objectively-experienced
past, and also problematisation of the connections between power and public memory.

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Secondly and contrastingly, personal experience and official history could be reconciled
through problematisation of self rather than of public narratives about the past. A number of
interviewees framed their testimonies in terms of explaining their own deviance, thereby accepting
official narratives about the anni di piombo while presenting ideology as the reason for their very
different subjectivities of the past. This perspective was adopted in different ways by three persons I
spoke to, one of whom is now involved in pacifist politics and two of whom are now quite devout.

Contrastingly, the divergent post-conflict situation of EOKA interviewees meant that they
faced few of these problems in governing public understanding of their struggle. They maintained
stable and unproblematised subjectivities within their unbroken historical narrative. The effects of
semi-victory and defeat upon subjectivity will be taken up after a brief discussion of references to
objectivity made by Italian interviewees who, contrastingly, understand history to be mutable.


Objectivity in the Face of Mutability

As we have seen, the Italian interviewees who understood power and history as intertwined,
who understood history as a political narrative linked to powerful interests, still made references to an
objective past. Rather than relenting to the political ability of institutions to mould history as they
choose, interviewees did not surrender the past. Instead they accepted my interview requests in order
to publicise their own accounts of what happened in the 1970s and 80s. This was not an acceptance
of history as entirely objective or as entirely political, but both the testimonies embody a political
challenge to other accounts of the past, through a history presented as objective.

These political appeals to objectivity were also apparent in repeated demands made by Italian
interviewees that I use their names in publications. I was very surprised that ex-militants, who are
often portrayed as monsters in their country, would not only refuse anonymity but also strongly
advocate that I must use their names in order to secure objectivity for their accounts of the past. So,
even when militants understood institutions to have moulded history beyond recognition, they
retained some objective conception of the past such that their names might signal objective
experience of the anni di piombo, and thus true or truer - history.
12


On other occasions, it was made clear to me that I had been successful in obtaining interviews
because I am not Italian. My status as an outsider appealed to several interviewees because they
understood my geographical location to mean open-mindedness, and that public narratives and
occasional hysteria about Italian terrorism would not have affected me. In the nicest possible way, I
have been understood and used as an objective tool for the publicising of their (political) counter-
history.

Furthermore, coming out of the armed experience required interviewees to re-engage, to an
extent, with official discourse. It is in this regard that I would like to posit a final point about
simultaneously political and objective appeals to the past by Italian ex-militants. The process of
rethinking participation in militancy was repeatedly brought up in interviews as a reintegration tool.
Prima Linea undertook a collective rethinking of the armed struggle and of their ideas while
incarcerated, but members of other groups also undertook personal journeys. These processes were
always brought up in terms of re-integration into society and reconstruction of personal identity.
They always involved some degree of admitting culpability and remorse, with either extreme feelings
of guilt or more reserved admissions that the organisations had deviated from their original purposes.

I argue that these processes performed a function for defeated organisations they enabled
ex-militants to negotiate the clashing interpretations of history (official and clandestine), allowing
them to move towards the official account by admitting responsibilities but not requiring them to
surrender personal identity or memory. Susanna Ronconi emphasised to me how important it was for
her to retain her past, despite feeling regret for many things, and how the rethinking process aimed at
negotiating this quandary:

Our attitude was well, we are guilty and we wanted to say that we made a wrong choice, a choice that
was defeated, but that we are still here and part of the history of this country, the political history of
Italy, and thats important [...] I mean I know that I am guilty and that I have been wrong, but I have a
personal and collective history which is inside the history of the political movement of our country, and
for me its important to know that. And it would be important also that other people could know that,
but Im very pessimistic of this. (Ronconi 2010)

The processes of re-thinking allowed some degree of overlap between conflicting discourses
about the anni di piombo to come into existence, an overlap which was workable and liveable, and
13

where reintegration and memory began to coexist. Here the partially political and partially objective
understandings of history took shape. While understanding public memory of the anni di piombo to
be shaped by powerful interests, interviewees could also adopt a position of reflexivity towards their
own experiences finding a middle ground between who they once were, remorse, and a refusal to
accept the label of terrorist.

Through rethinking, the knowable past was reconfigured through a distinction between
who I was then and who I am now. The past became objective in different way it is still
understood as knowable, but the narrative of what happened has been changed. For example, in the
collective rethinking of the history of Prima Linea, it was necessary to amend the narrative to
encompass defeat. Turning points had to be identified where the group went wrong. Objective
history changed in these projects of reintegration and of taking responsibility, and this rethinking
complements a political refusal of the more exclusionary dimensions of official history. The popular
history of the anni di piombo reveals fewer steps taken by institutions to accept their own
responsibilities for the conflict, and is resented by ex-militants because of this. Maurice Bignami
discussed how he risked his life during the rethinking process while the state was unable to accept its
own responsibilities, and how Prima Linea mocked it for this failing:

We deconstructed the idea of the armed fight and reconstructed it in a different way [...so] the
Brigatisti tried to kill me in the jail. And after the 86, disassociation is not only from the armed fight
but is from Marxism. Some of us, after 86, started a theoretical revision of our ideology. [... In the
disassociation document of Prima Linea] we quoted a piece by Farlosci [a pun on fallacy] a fake
author we made up to say we are nothing, but you are less than us; because we could at least reflect
on ourselves, which other political classes cannot. (Bignami 2010)


Subjectivities after Defeat and after Not-Quite-Defeat

The processes of re-integration, re-thinking and defeat shaped the subjectivities of Italian
interviewees in ways that were not mirrored in the case of EOKA. These factors will now be
examined, before the conclusion of the article. Undertaking the Italian case study left me familiar
with two narrative responses to defeat a rethinking which balanced an amended objective history
with a refusal of more exclusionary popular narratives, and a less prominent rethinking which narrated
the past solely around explaining the interviewees own deviance. I was shocked to return to the
14

EOKA testimonies and to see far lees reflexivity on display. The post-conflict ramifications of semi-
victory or not-quite-defeat appear to have had very different consequences for ex-militant
subjectivities. Instead of releasing some of the antagonistic, and in some cases extreme, views which
accompanied conflict, those views still appeared within testimonies. For example, fifty years after the
end of the insurgency Renos Kyriakides still displayed dramatic contempt for the traitors (suspected
collaborators) who were executed by EOKA:

We didnt have any Cypriot who didnt accept EOKA, but some were traitors. A number of them were
dealt with properly [...] we killed them as traitors. (Kyriakides 2009)

Such ferocious statements about traitors to the national struggle, in addition to derogatory
comments about Turkish-Cypriots as causes of instability in Cyprus, were made within a homogenous
narrative which has apparently been stable since the end of the EOKA insurgency. The absence of
defeat (although interviewees sometimes interpreted their failure to achieve enosis as a defeat)
seems to have resulted in little mediation of the more extreme views, as ex-militant subjectivities have
largely remained stable. Ex-militants have not needed to alter or mediate their perspective as they
have been regarded as heroes since the conflict. As a result, fanciful views with little resemblance to
reality were occasionally heard in the interviews for example, when asked to clarify his statement
about British de-Hellenisation tactics in Cyprus, Andreas Angelopoulos (in a seeming non sequitur)
stated that EOKA was ready since 1453, and 1821 (Angelopoulos 2009). While this was perhaps a
rhetorical statement, it requires a mental commitment to understanding Hellenic nationalism to have
existed hundreds of years before a Greek state did. It also requires a primordialist understanding of
ethnicity (cf. Ozkirimli 2000), such that Greek blood inspired the actions of Cypriots just as it did
revolutionaries who shook off the Ottoman empire in 1821.

This was not an isolated incident. The EOKA interviews cohered around these narratives and
perceptions, which showed little change from the organisations mantra in the 1950s. Conversely, the
anni di piombo interviews cohered around commitments to rethinking opinions which were held in
the past.
7
These narrative coherences can be linked to the different post-conflict contexts inhabited by
EOKA and anni di piombo ex-militants. In contexts where participation in a particular insurgency is
glorified, protagonists can continuously embody this subjectivity there is little need to renarrativise

7
Although one interviewee, who asked to remain anonymous, appears to have rethought less than others have.
While he accepted that the armed fight was no longer applicable, the interviewee refused to dissociate from it or
to express any regret. He believed that the contextual applicability of armed struggle would return in the future,
and that the anni di piombo legacy should be preserved as a heritage to those future generations (Maurizio
2010).
15

the past, although presumably some aspects of the EOKA struggle have been highlighted differently
since the Turkish invasion of 1974. In contexts of defeat, where participation in militancy is viewed
with hostility, it appears that protagonists experience a need to reintegrate into the discourse of their
society.

This post-defeat need for change and re-emergence was poetically described by Nadia
Mantovani, and I will quote her at length because her words will communicate this more effectively
than mine:

While in prison, I began a process of non-identification and departure/estrangement [allontanamento]
from my organisation [...] I began a personal journey which involved a political assessment and some
existential rethinking, a process that was very painful, lasted several years, and was made even more
difficult by the fact that it was taking place in prison [...] I did not allow myself to become a part of
[non-violent activism within the prison], due to my visceral refusal of any form of collectivism. [...]
Inside of me there was no desire. So I locked myself up and floundered a lot, before managing to get
myself out of this spiral of depression and negativity. I have been helped by some people [...] and
probably also by the evolution of the times. When the dissociation law was passed, I was at the
beginning of the re-emergence process... (Mantovani 2010)


Conclusion

This article has compared interview transcripts from two very different post-conflict contexts.
It has found that interviewees appeals to an objectively-understood past often come packaged within
political denunciations of the present. Furthermore the subjectivities of ex-militants from the EOKA
and anni di piombo conflicts seem to cohere around the experiences of semi-victory and defeat.
Perspectives on the past thus appear embedded within contemporary contexts; narratives were either
constructed around a search for explanations of previous behaviour (viewed as interesting, or even
deviant, from their contemporary private lives) or were unreflexive and sometimes dogmatic (as was
witnessed in the semi-victorious EOKA interviews). These findings might have interesting
repercussions for the use of interviewing within studies of contentious politics. Not only do they
inform methodological debates about the relationship of interviews to the (objective) past, but they
could open Social Movement research to the narrative studies approach in order to embrace the
intrinsic politicality of memory.

16

The finding which I would most like to highlight, however, concerns the connection between
ex-militants worldviews and post-conflict contexts. While Social Movement studies of contentious
politics can understand ideology as a functional tool used by organisations to explain and mediate
isolation and to alleviate distress at violent conduct (Della Porta 1992b), the continuing adherence of
EOKA interviewees to militant frames in times of peace points to a need for further research. If
militant perceptions were inculcated by the clandestine organisations for functional reasons, how can
we explain their continued presence fifty years after the EOKA insurgency ended?

The testimonies of anni di piombo and EOKA interviews do not reveal a post-conflict return
to a comparatively apolitical stance, so the functional formulation of ideology in contentious politics
research may need to be reconsidered. I will conclude by suggesting that rather than considering
perceptions of the word as ideas, ideology or frames, it might be fruitful to engage with the literature
on subjectivity and how perception and knowledge are always socially and politically produced.
This literature understands the Cartesian subject who can use rational powers to deduce objective
truth as a fiction carried forth from the Enlightenment. Instead, it understands what we say, how we
think and what we know to always be performances of discourses which precede us (cf. Bell 1999;
Foucault 2001; Hall 1992). These types of approaches may be useful for examining how post-conflict
subjectivities are produced either where the possession of power and the ability to make popular
memory result in the continuation of militant narratives, or where subjection after defeat results in re-
evaluation of worldview and fractures in subjectivity. This type of approach may also assist
researchers to cope with the simultaneous politicality and objective deployment of history as a
narrative through which parties govern the present and the past.

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19


Interviews

Cyprus
Angelopoulos, Andreas (24/11/2009), Limassol.
Batarias, Charalambos (17/11/2009), Nicosia.
Christodoulidou, Ellie (25/11/2009), Limassol.
Christodoulides, Marios (25/11/2009), Limassol.
Efstathiou, Augoustis (20/11/2009), Nicosia.
Gregoras, Gregoris Louca (17/11/2009), Nicosia.
Karlettides, Sophoulis (25/11/2009), Limassol.
Kassinis, Ioannis (26/11/2009), Limassol.
Kyriakides, Renos (17/11/2009), Nicosia.
Papares, Avgerinos (25/11/2009), Limassol.
Sophocleous, Thassos (17/11/2009), Nicosia.
Stephou, Spyros (19/11/2009), Nicosia.
Stephou, Maria (19/11/2009), Nicosia.
Spanos, Yannis (20/11/2009), Nicosia.
Varravas, Eliana (26/11/2009), Limassol.
Varravas, Christakis (26/11/2009), Limassol.

Italy
Bignami, Maurice (21/07/2010), Rome.
Cavallina, Arrigo (17/07/2010), Verona.
Cotone, Anna (24/07/2010), Rome.
DElia, Sergio (22/07/2010), Rome.
Mantovani, Nadia (16/07/2010), Bologna.
Maurizio (22/07/2010), Rome.
Nicolotti, Luca (15/07/2010), Turin.
Ognibene, Roberto (16/07/2010), Bologna.
Ronconi, Susanna (15/07/2010), Turin.
Segio, Sergio (14/07/2010), Milan.
Solimano, Marco (19/07/2010), Livorno.
Zaccheo, Ettorina (14/07/2010), Milan.