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The comrades in International Bulletin January 2024
It was expected but no less painful news. Tonight our comrade and brother Riadh Zhagdane passed away. He joins his wonderful life companion Raoudha who had left us a short time ago.
To write about Riadh is to describe the life and trajectory of a fighter, which is why we called him ‘fedayn’ after the Palestinian fighters he always unconditionally sided with.
Riadh was also a militant communist in his home country of Tunisia, from which he had had to flee because of political persecution.
When he arrived in Italy, it didn’t take him long to become a trade union activist in his workplace and in the logistics category. First with the Sdl and then with the Usb.
For years Riadh had been in charge of trade union work for the Usb in the very tough and conflictual logistics sector. A sector where the class struggle often resembles that of the 19th century and where a large part of the workers are immigrants.
And this piece of the labour world for Riadh was the water in which he swam and fought openly and always in the front row. At one picket the police broke his head with a baton. So much so that we sometimes had to pull him away by the jacket.
Those slogans such as ‘Who touches one touches all!’ and ‘Slaves Never!’, which the logistics workers throw out as a factor of cohesion, redemption, identity, always rang clear and strong in Riadh’s chords, because of what he was doing now and because of what he carried as a legacy of the struggles against neo-colonialism.
Riadh was a combative trade unionist of the first magnitude, but he was also an all-round communist. This is why he almost naturally joined the Rete dei Comunsti.
Riadh is a demonstration of what it means to be a communist within the social conflict. An example for the comrades of the new generation.
It is true that there are deaths that weigh like feathers and deaths that weigh like mountains. For many comrades, Riadh was a mountain, a fighter, our ‘fedayn’.
We salute comrade Riadh Zaghdane with clenched fists and embrace his son Nidhal.
