ITALIAN PEASANT REVOLT

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 70, Issue 119, 4 March 1950, Page 5

ITALIAN PEASANT REVOLT

Idle Land Seised In Calabria ROME, March 3. Peasant couriers, riding on mules and sometimes running barefoot, last night raced through remote hilltop villages in Calabria, Southern Italy, to rally the country folk for the latest upsurge of the “peasant revolt.” The relays of couriers carried from village to village a three-word message, “To the land.”

Men, women and children grabbed mattocks and ploughshares streamed down the hillsides to stake claims on derelict estates. It is estimated that 100,000 acres of uncultivated land has been seized by individual families and village co-opera-tives. In many cases, it is land from which the peasants withdrew last November after threats and promises from the Government and the landowners had checked their revolt. Since then, the revolt has gone underground, breaking out only occasionally in sporadic land raids which the land bailiffs and riot police quickly suppressed. The Italian Government has repeatedly assured the peasants that their problem was being treated with “the greatest possible urgency,” but within the last few days the peasants have spontaneously risen again. Communist and anti-Communist peasant unions last night demanded from Calabrian landowners and the Government: (1) Guaranteed employment for peasants; (2) the redistribution of 50,000 acres of idle land; (3) wage contracts; and (4) public works. Beyond formal requests to evacuate, the police made no move to eject the peasants from the land they occupied. The Catanzaro correspondent of “The Times” says the peasants have vowed that they will not be ejected from the land they have seized. The present revolt is the biggest so far staged, and is spreading rapidly. The correspondent says: “In contrast with what happened in the region last autumn, the peasants this time are being supported by labour unions of all political shades, and the white banners of the Christian Democrats minglqd with the red flags of the Communists at the head of the columns which marched to the land to be occupied.”