BUILDING BRIDGES WITH THE TRANSNATIONAL RADICAL PARTY

By Dr. Lenora Fulani

From: This Way for Black Empowerment

This week Fulani column . May 8, 1995.

Syndicated in 100 Black newspaper's across country.

I recently returned from Rome, in Italy, where I had the opportunity to address 300 delegates and hundreds of observers at the Congress of the Transnational Radical Party. I presented a detailed report on the emergence of an independent political movement in America, and the particular significance of that movement to the African American community. Delegates from 30 nations - including countries in Africa, Eastern and Western Europe and the former Soviet Union - were quite interested to hear about the development of multi-partyism in the United States.

The Transnsational Radical Party, which originated in Italy, champions grassroots democracy and human rights and has led an international campaign for a moratorium on the death penalty. Its members have been elected to the national parliaments of numerous Western and Eastern European and African countries, as well as to the European Parliament. They are currently lobbying the United Nations to establish an international criminal court to try crimes against humanity, in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. A leading member of the Transnational Radical Party, Emma Bonino, is the Minister of Human Rights of the European Parliament, and has visited Rwanda in an effort to deal with the refugee crisis there.

I was first introduced to the Transnational Radical Party when I had the pleasure of meeting Emma Bonino in New York last year. Emma had come to the United Nations on behalf of the Transnational Radical Party international campaign to abolish the death penalty, an issue which I feel very, very passionate about. I believe the death penalty is morally wrong and ineffective. In the United States, where support for the death penalty is rising, its implications for our community are quite serious. The racism of the American criminal justice system is known throughout the world. America's Death Row is populated predominantly by men of color. In Rome, on Palm Sunday, the Congress participants joined a 10,000 person march on the Vatican to demand the Pope unequivocally oppose the death penalty.

I had heard of Emma Bonino before I had the opportunity to meet her and have her as a guest on my weekly television show. I knew that she was a powerful advocate for humanitarian and progressive social causes. I knew she was a "sister in struggle." But until she and I met, I did not fully appreciate how much Emma Bonino and the Transnational Radical Party believe that there is a profound connection between creating humanistic solutions to the social, cultural, political and economic problems faced by the majority of the world's people and grassroots democratic activism: the participation of ordinary people in the political process.

As part of my address to the Congress, I recalled the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, the great African American scholar, journalist, Pan Africanist and communist, who wrote nearly a hundred years ago gathering that the problem of the color line remains the great unsolved problem of American political, social, cultural and economic mainstream and into diverse power sharing arrangements within the two-party system, the Black community has had the door shut in its face. And the strategy of attempting to force that door open through the Democratic Party has reached a dead end.

Together with several of my closest colleagues in America, including Dr. Fred Newman, a key architect of the independent political movement in the United States, I joined the Transnational Radical Party. As a political activist and a developmental psychologist concerned with creating an international environment for such diverse backgrounds, who had come together at the Congress with humanistic, democratic and internationalistic objectives.

Building a political alliance between pro-democracy forces in Europe, Africa and elements of the former Soviet Union and the independent movement here in the United States is a critical step in creating an international environment for humanism and development.