Subject: (8) from THE RADICALS AND NONVIOLENCE
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1991: APPEAL TO THE SERBS
by Marco Pannella
Dear Serbian friends,
we know, and we repeat it at every opportunity with the greatest conviction
and passion, that you are the main victims of the policy that the Belgrade
regime and much of the world have turned into war, violence, intolerance,
and anti-democracy. Not only because of the death of thousands of young men
in the army - Serbs, Macedonians, Bosnians, Montenegrins - but because they
die, suffer, cry, and hate their own lives while they are forced to lay
waste to lands populated by their brothers and sisters, to kill them, to
force them into an exodus that recalls the darkest pages of the history of
this century.
We know that dissenters in Serbia risk being lynched as traitors, that the
unbridled demagogy inspires fear and hatred, for the moment turned to
invented outside "enemies", but that it risks becoming a terrible
catastrophe for the civil life of Serbia itself.
We know that the yearning for democracy of the women and men of Serbia, the
same as our own and that of most of the world, is now ignored and derided.
The "Serbian" demand for guarantees for the Serbian minorities in the other
republics, guarantees which are denied in your country to Albanian,
Croatian, and any other minority, is the expression of a violent,
aggressive and intolerant vision which will inevitably also emerge with
increasing force within the normal political, cultural and social life of
your country.
Democracy and Europe, in this way, have once more become the enemies of the
Belgrade government, as they were during the worst periods of the Communist
dictatorship, beginning with the period before the split between Tito and
the USSR.
The threat of war as an increasingly vast, cruel form of blackmail is the
weapon of cowards and barbarians, of whatever colour. Now as in the past.
The Radical Party has been among you for many years, clandestinely, to
affirm its fraternity with those oppressed by a dictatorship that is
inevitably incompatible with tolerance, democracy, with a Europe of liberty
and justice, of nonviolence and peace.
Now - in accordance with the teachings of Gandhi - the Radical Party
chooses to be by the side of peoples subjected to war, by the side of the
violence of the victims against the violence of the aggressors. For this
reason, some of us will serve on the front, unarmed, with the defenders of
the cities and the people of Croatia, inspired by solidarity and by love of
life and rights, including those of the people who are forced to kill and
use violence in your name.
Like you, we hope and fight for a Serbia great in civilization, democracy,
tolerance, culture, justice, and the respect for others, a European Serbia,
confederated with the other free peoples of the former Yugoslavia,
associated to the European Union.
Long live the democratic Serbian people, long live political democracy,
long live federate and pacific Europe, long live friendship and fraternity
in liberty, in the democratic and European interdependence of Serbs,
Croats, Slovenians, Albanians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Italians,
Germans, Hungarians, Romanians, Austrians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Bosnians,
Voivodians, Kosovians...
