Rome, December 27, 1989 (NR) - Marco Pannella, President of the Federal Council of the Radical Party declared:

"The last hours are bringing worrying news of the Rumanian situation. The political force which is the ex-Ceauscescian current ruling group, is more and more rigorously relying on that force which is the army. The executions which seem to have been and still are going on, are or seem to be of a purely Communist brand, both in their concept and in their implementation.

The nonviolent, liberal, democratic, federalist and anti-nationalist Radical Party which is no less antimilitarist, transnational and transparty, must remember - itsef too, and not infreqently, first and foremost - that its existence and its response to the tragic problems of our epoch are and must be also rooted in Rumania, must also be Rumanian, Hungarian, Yugoslav, Czechoslovak, and Russian. For two decades at least, the Radicals of the Radical Party have been the only "western" party which with its militant activities in the countries of Central and East Europe both denounced and tried to blame the regimes of real socialism and the complicity of the countries of real democracy with them. This is why the Radical Party is in danger. Real democracy, partitocratic and anti-democratic, in so many aspects, polluted by war and cohabitation with real socialism, is producing an incredible suffocation of rights and freedom in Italy. And at the same time, it is wounding to death the United States of Europe pro

ject, in an EEC where Parliament has less power at this point than a Russian or East European parliament. The transnational, transparty, fedralist, nonviolent, liberal-democratic Radical Party, in its concept of rights and political procedures, is the increasingly necessary and urgent answer for East Europe too.