[letter received in Radical Party NY office from Chong-Yeong LEE, president of Universala Esperanto-Asocio]

4 Feb. 1996

Dear Mr Busdachin,

This is to express our gratitude to you for receiving the delegation of Univerala Esperanto-Asocio and shared your valuable time, when we visited your office a week ago.

Our discussion with you on the need for a common language in UN and your opinions on some of the problems associated with raising the language issue in the UN system was very useful for us to plan for our future course of action.

We were specially interested in the possibility of NGO representatives jointly recommending to the UN regarding its language policy. Should such possibility arises, for example during one of the forthcoming NGO meetings, we expect your active support or even initiative on the improvement of language policy of the UN, based on linguistic simplicity, neutrality and democracy. The Universal Esperanto Association, one of the NGOs registered with the ECOSOC, will support your progressive efforts to bring up the language problems as one of the agenda to be studied within the context of the UN System Reform Programme. Please let us know immediately if you feel our support or participation is required. You can give a call to our representative office in New York [...] or directly at our Central Office in Rotterdam, or directly to me.

In this regard, we have recently received an encouraging statement from Ms Bonino, the Secretary General of your Party, regarding the need for joint efforts to pursue Esperanto as an auxiliary common language for democratic international communication. By a separate mail, we will send you the original Italian version of the Ms Bonino's statement.

If you are interested in personally observing how Esperanto works in practice, you are more than welcome to the 81st World Esperanto Congress to be held in Prague, Czecho, from 20-27 July 1996, in which about 3000 people from over 60 countries are expected to participate. This is the only large scale international congress where no interpreters are employed. We will be happy to provide you more information about the Congress if requested.

Sincerely yours,

LEE Chong-Yeong

President

Universala Esperanto-Asocio