Subject: POLITICAL INITIATIVES OF THE TRANSNATIONAL RADICAL PARTY
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(1) POLITICAL INITIATIVES OF THE TRANSNATIONAL RADICAL PARTY
by Emma Bonino, Secretary of the Radical Party
Sofia, 15-18 July 1993, Radical Party General Council
ABSTRACT: On assuming the functions of political secretary of the radical
party after her election at the Congress of Rome in February 1993, Emma
Bonino outlines the programmatic lines of initiatives which are considered
a priority in the new transnational dimension. The long report is
introduced by three paragraphs (The reasons of the Radical Party; Tasks and
priorities of the Radical Party; Scenario of possible initiatives) which
underscore the apparent discrepancy between the political situation ("The
international events of these last years would seem to have fulfilled most
of the political aspirations which the radical party had historically
promoted...") and the reality, with the "governments' incapacity to
prefigure a new world order based on justice, the rule of law and the
capacity to guarantee safety and development to all". Several examples are
provided of this world crisis, from Yugoslavia to Somalia. This
acknowledgment reveals the need for the transnational radical party to
assume the responsibility of starting a series of initiatives apt to
rectify or modify this tendency.
The report then outlines the fields of intervention which Emma Bonino will
privilege during her mandate. They concern a) The United Nations and the
need to enhance and democratize it; b) the former Yugoslavia and the
possible political initiatives to be taken; c) the environment; d) drugs;
e) AIDS; f) the International Language.
A more detailed explanation of this division is provided in the report.
For reasons of space and convenience, please refer to the ABSTRACTS that
precede each paragraph for the contents of the chapters corresponding to
the above division.
CONTENTS
Radical Party causes
Tasks and priorities of the Radical Party
Possible initiatives
1. UNITED NATIONS:
- Permanent International Court
- Court to judge war crimes in the Ex-Yugoslavia
- A parliamentary body at the UN: the options
- General Assembly of parliamentarians from
UN Member States
- Considering the options
- Redefining the UN's peacekeeping role
and strengthening humanitarian action
- A Civil Guard for democracy
- Abolition of the death penalty by 2000
- Rights of national minorities
2. EX-YUGOSLAVIA:
- Refusing to recognize the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia
- Protecting Kosovo
- Macedonia
- The Balkan Confederation
3. ENVIRONMENT:
- Campaign for the protection of the environment
and for ecologically sustainable development
in Central and Eastern Europe
- Campaign for efficient energy networks and
for the closure of dangerous nuclear power
stations
- Campaign for the institution of a European
great rivers and waterways community
- Campaign for the right to information
4. DRUGS:
- The Anti-prohibitionist policy
- Campaign for the denouncement of the
international Conventions on drugs
5. AIDS:
- A pragmatic strategy
- Initiative in the ambit of the WHO 6. INTERNATIONAL
LANGUAGE:
- The right to language
The choices
Which is the right instrument for these
campaigns?
(The motion approved by the XXXVI Radical Party Congress - 4-8 February
1993 - made the Scretary responsible for presenting "the political
initiatives agreed with the outgoing organs", at the first meeting of the
General Council. The following people collaborated on this document:
Angiolo Bandinelli, Giandonato Caggiano, Roberto Cicciomessere, Marco De
Andreis, Sergio D'Elia, Gianfranco Dell'Alba, Olivier Dupuis, Giorgio
Pagano, Mauro Politi, Danilo Quinto, Filippo di Robilant, Mario Signorino)
Radical Party causes
It would seem that the majority of the Radical Party's political - and
historical - aspirations have been realized in the international
achievements of recent years.
Many things have changed, in fact, since the first Radicals undertook
nonviolent political actions in countries governed by a totalitarian regime
and - in total isolation - asserted their right of interference, wherever
it wasnecessary, to obtain respect for those rights of the individual
protected by the covenants and resolutions which are binding for all UN
member countries. The dominant political culture - and not merely
communist ideology - affirmed instead that the protection of individual
rights had to give way to the principle of national sovereignty. By
hypocritically sanctioning the principle of "non-interference in a
country's internal affairs", which permitted dictators in Eastern Europe
and the South of the World to massacre their own people, the West has stood
by and watched - and in so doing condoned - the genocide of entire peoples,
and the most brutal violation of the rights sanctioned by international
agreements. Today, the right/duty to interfere and protect inviolable and
inalienable human rights is being upheld by the most important
international institutions. The UN Security Council has also been able to
carry out peacekeeping and peace-enforcing actions to affirm this right in
numerous countries.
However, ten years after the Radicals presented many requests formalized in
acts of parliament, the permanent members of the Security Council have once
again indicated population growth, poverty and environmental disasters as
being "new threats to peace". In the early Eighties we asked the Security
Council, unfortunately to no avail, to take emergency action to stop death
from starvation in the South of the World, as it constituted a serious
threat to international security.
(After meeting no. 3046 held by the Security Council and attended by Heads
of State and of Government, John Major, the then President, issued the
following "Statement" on 31 January 1992: "the absence of war and armed
conflict between States does not necessarily ensure peace and security.
Unstable non-military sources in the economic, social, humanitarian and
ecological fields, have become a threat to peace and security. The UN, as
such, must through its various Organizations, make every effort to solve
these problems"..."The Security Council recognizes that peace and
development are indivisible and that lasting peace and stability require
efficient international cooperation to eliminate poverty and to promote a
better quality of life and greater freedom for all.
The Radical Party's long-standing antimilitarist campaign, whose principal
aim is, in the final analysis, to transfer national defence and security
privileges to supranational institutions, has begun to stimulate the first
political and operational responses. Now that the "enemy" is no longer
knocking at the door, many countries are abandoning the formerly upheld
military doctrine and considering, more and more, the possibility of using
armed forces within the sphere of the UN to further international
cooperation. Neither do they exclude the possibility of a nongovernmental
UN military force being set up under an international command. There is
still a lot of resistance as regards Article 43 of the UN Statute being
enforced in full, but the fact that the biggest powers prefer to operate
under the umbrella of the United Nations rather than under their national
flags is quite significant.
(1. In order to contribute to maintaining international peace and
security, all Members of the United Nations undertake to put at the
disposal of the Security Council, upon its request and according to an
agreement or to special agreements, the armed forces, and the assistance
and facilities, including the right of way, necessary to maintain
international peace and security.
2. The aforesaid agreement or agreements will determine the number and
type of armed forces, their degree of preparation and their general
dislocation, and the nature of the assistance and facilities to be
supplied.
3. The agreement or agreements will be negotiated on the initiative of the
Security Council, as soon as possible. They will be concluded between the
Security Council and individual Member States, or between the Security
Council and groups of Member States, and will be subject to ratification on
the part of signatory States, as provided for in the relative
constitutional regulations.)
The above examples would appear to indicate the existence of a general
agreement to build a new world order based on the effectiveness of
International Law and on the capacity of the supranational institutions to
defend the rights of individuals and to uphold democracy in every part of
the world.
Unfortunately, the real situation is very different - even though there has
been certain progress in the direction many people hoped for - and the
refusal of the supranational organizations to put a stop to ethnic
cleansing and genocide in Bosnia and Hercegovina, and their acceptance of
the new borders that Serbia and Croatia have redefined with war, provide
the most dramatic evidence of the crisis in which the UN, the CSCE and the
European Union find themselves, and also their incapacity to lead
governments in developing a new world order founded on justice and law, and
guaranteeing security and development to everyone.
The fact is that, on the one hand, the UN is entrusted with greater
responsibilities while, on the other hand, it is devoid of the legal,
operative and financial instruments to effectively carry out its
international role, so that the majority of resolutions passed by the
Security Council remain dead letters. It is significant that while the
number of peacekeeping missions has increased with respect to the past,
only one dollar out of one thousand, five hundred dollars spent on national
defence by developed countries is assigned to UN missions. It also looks
as if the fight against poverty and death by hunger in the South of the
World will also fail miserably, in that national contributions are being
progressively reduced and the project to assign at least 0.75% of the GDP
to this cause, as provided for by Resolution no. 2626 of the UN General
Assembly in 1970, has been abandoned. The Earth Summit held in Rio was a
virtual failure and the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna also
resulted in very little being done. In particular, while there is a
supranational and, indeed, global awareness of problems concerning the
environment and of the urgent need for international "laws" and individual
policies on development, democracy, security and international cooperation,
there is also a total lack of giuridical and political instruments which
permit us to go beyond borders and the power of the State. All the
projects devised to control international arms trafficking have also been
dumped. Lastly, the problem of the democratization of the United Nations
is mostly discussed outside this institution at present. It would appear
that governments are more interested in increasing the number of permanent
members on the Security Council rather than in reforming the UN and its
decision-making procedures, also by creating a parliamentary body within
the UN structure.
This crisis at the UN - which we hope is part of a maturing process - and a
number of errors that have been committed, like those in Somalia, risk
destroying the prestige that this institution enjoys. It is echoed by the
failure of the constituent European Union which has clearly demonstrated
that it does not wish to be the ultimate authority or federative model for
all the countries of the former Soviet Union which, beset by internal and
regional nationalist conflicts, are nevertheless trying to develop new
democratic systems. Blinded by economic, political and social crises, EC
member countries have avoided assuming any kind of role, not only towards
the Former Yugoslavia but also towards all those countries which had
actually shown interest in progressively becoming members of the Community,
in the hope that this would make it easier to resolve national conflicts.
The same lack of involvement and indifference are displayed towards the
terrible tragedies that are being enacted in so many parts of Central and
Eastern Europe as well as in the territory of the Ex-Soviet Union, starting
with Nagorno-Karabakh and Kosovo.
The crisis which the international system finds itself in, is also partly
caused by the policy on drugs which increasingly reveals its
"self-damaging" character, and seriously damages the individual's rights.
The prohibitionist policy imposed at an international level is, in fact,
right off target, and countries are powerless to do anything about the
devastating effect this policy has had on their respective social and legal
systems; neither can they do anything about political and economic systems
being corrupted by the laundering of vast profits made by international
criminal organizations and local mafia gangs.
Finally, we are witnessing a diminishing interest in international affairs
on the part of the "political families" of industrialized nations. Even
the parties with a strong Europeanist and Federalist tradition have, in
reality, given up their commitment to building the European Union. Thus it
happens that public opinion in industrialized countries is more widely
informed about international events and, consequently, has a more clear
understanding of the interdependence between its own well-being and
security, and that of other less-developed countries. Public opinion is,
therefore, visibly concerned by the international community's incapacity to
put an end to the horrors of war and genocide - now that they can no longer
use the Soviet bloc's opposing any act of interference in national politics
as an excuse - and to guarantee that fundamental human rights be respected;
and by national leaders who behave as if all this had nothing to do with
politics, government programmes and economic choices.
This lack of political commitment makes it very easy for emergent
nationalist and xenophobic forces to focus political attention on internal
crises.
Tasks and priorities of the Radical Party
This situation of crisis in international politics and in the supranational
institutions is worsened by the confusing "foreign policy" of many
countries including the US, because of the choices made by the Clinton
Administration, and Russia, because of the all-to-obvious problems that
abound in home politics. The governments of major powers seem to be quite
unaware of the dangers which will threaten the entire world if they accept,
once again in the name of "realism", a precarious state of peace in
exchange for recognizing regimes which have consolidated their power with
racism, totalitarianism and ethnic cleansing; and if they agree to the
annexation of territories obtained with acts of war. Neither do these
governments show any sign of investing more resources in the strengthening
of the UN and other institutions of a supranational nature, in an attempt
to avoid even more serious defeats for democracy in the future.
Furthermore, there has been no inversion of the prohibitionist policy on
drugs, apart from the UNDCP (the UN organization which specializes in this
field) changing its mind on a few minor issues; and the attempts to
promote, and make binding, certain conventions on the environment during
the Rio Summit, actually met with very little success. In the last
letter sent to all members of the General Council and to all
parliamentarians who are members of the Radical Party, we said: "It is
very important to realize that the much-heralded new world order risks
creating suffering and injustice, in the same way that the old world order,
risks tollerating and provoking death from hunger and war, unless it is
founded on new positive international law; new individual laws that are
enforced supranationally, and on the democratic reform of the United
Nations."
But how can a small Party with just tens of thousands of members, who are
mainly from Italy, Eastern Europe and Africa, presume to go against the
current and to to modify international policy, even if only by a hair's
breadth?
This is the question we must try and answer at our Assembly, knowing full
well that the strength of an idea is not always proportionate to the number
of people who initially give it their support, but rather lies in being
aware that the decisions taken and documents produced will not bring
important results simply because they have been approved. In order to be
effective, each decision must indicate objectives, procedures, time limits,
and resources necessary.
For these reasons, we must adopt specific criteria in choosing of our
political campaigns - even if this will sometimes be painful - and resist
the urge to deal with every urgent issue regarding the abuse of human
rights.
The first criterion to be adopted when choosing our political campaigns,
therefore, is that of their being able to produce concrete results within a
specific time. In other words, we have to select precise goals, adopt
realistic procedures for their realization, and give ourselves the
necessary time to do this. We must reist the temptation to limit ourselves
to drawing attention to problems and "taking a position" on every human
rights issue. We must only engage the party in an initiative if we are
sure that it will produce results.
The second criterion concerns the human and financial resources necessary
to effect each campaign. It is always work out an approximate budget for a
campaign, which should only be undertaken if it can be carried through with
the resources available. If further resources are needed, it is necessary
to specificy where these will come from before embarking on an initiative.
The third criterion governing the choice of political priorities should not
be based on our illuding ourselves that we can resolve the immense
problems of this world "globally" but on our being responsible enough to
deal with just a number of them, not so much by focussing on increasing the
authority, the responsibilities and the power of the supranational
institutions, but rather by endowing these institutions with a legal and
democratic legitimacy and with the instruments that are indispensable for
exercising authority and power, also as regards punishment, at a
supranational level.
Possible initiatives
On the basis of the above criteria, I have started to develop the ideas for
political campaigns and initiatives outlined in the first letter of April
1993 (sent to all parliamentarians who are members of the Radical Party and
to the members of the General Council) in order that we might discuss them
at this Assembly, when we have all the necessary elements. The choice of
initiatives will also be governed by other elements contained in the
Treasurer's report.
These initiatives can be divided into the following five groups:
1) UNITED NATIONS: a permanent International Court and International Court
to judge crimes in the Ex-Yugoslavia; a parliamentary body at the UN;
redefining the UN's peacekeeping role and strengthening its power to
intervene on humanitarian issues; abolition of the death penalty by 2000;
rights for national minorites.
2. EX-YUGOSLAVIA: Refusing to recognize the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia; Protecting Kosovo; Macedonia; the Balkan Confederation.
3) ENVIRONMENT: Campaign for the protection of the environment and for
"ecologically sustainable development" in Central and Eastern Europe.
4) DRUGS: Denouncement of international conventions which impose
prohibitionist policies.
5) AIDS: A pragmatic approach; initiative in the ambit of the WHO..
6) INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE: The right to language.
(more)
