ABSTRACT: "It is necessary to change our political will, it is necessary to impose a politics of life, of peace, of disarmament, of non-violence. It is the only realistic one, the only one whose results are not impossible, the only one which is rejected and censored. These are the premises on which the campaign against death form starvation is based: invest the United Nations Security Council with the imperative of saving tens of millions of people; raise to 1.4% of the national gross product the contribution of all states for aid to under-developed countries. The announcement of the Survival March on Easter Day in Rome.

Il Messaggero - March 1980 - from "Marco Pannella - Writings and Discourses - 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982)

The massacre continues. By now one has lost count of the dead assassinated by the terrorists... two hundred, three hundred? It cannot be tolerated any more. At the beginning of the year the President of the Republic said that we are at war with the killers. Since then, the distorted laws, the government budget, the increase in victims, the condition of justice and of the prisons, all seem truly to testify to some kind of state of war against the persisting infamy of a few dozen or a few hundred helpless people. For them nothing is sacred anymore, not even life.

For them? Only for them? Who is going to throw the first stone? If this massacre continues, the extermination - more and more scientific, more and more certain - of tens of millions of people every year from starvation and malnutrition will spread. Ten million dead in recent months, ten million more in the coming months. Where is the scandal? Not life seems sacred, but death, extermination, murder.

The UNO, the FAO, the World Food Conference, the Carter Commission, the Brandt Commission, the Club of Rome, the UNETED, the President of the Republic, President Giscard d'Estaing, Ambassador Gardner (US Ambassador to Italy, ed.) the European and the Italian Parliaments, all of them, all of them agree in their official documents and pronouncements, which we have collected, that no one dies from lack of food but from "political will" - or the lack of it, which amounts to the same thing.

This year about 650 billion dollars will be spent on armaments: about 1,600 billion lire a day. And enough explosives exist in the world to kill every person alive thirty times over, the total extinction of humankind. This year the mortality rate for death from undernourishment and hunger will not only increase again, but its growth rate will be the highest in recent years. The FAO had already foreseen it. Last February 19 in Brussels, at a public hearing in the European Parliament that we had organised, in answer to a precise question of mine, this was confirmed by the president of the World Food Conference, Mr. Tanko, by the vice president of the Carter Commission and by the president of the "North-South" Commission Willy Brandt - by all of them together.

These predictions are all underestimations of the reality. In general they do not take into consideration the collapse, the breakdown that is now irreversibly looming over the "economies" of the Third and Fourth Worlds because of the energy situation and the price and investment policies of the OPEC, for which the poor countries, those of the Fourth World, are the first to pay the price. Whatever "aid" still manages to get to those places, reduced by our generation to the condition of a Buchenwald, as are all the under-developed countries of the world - this "aid" is absorbed with few exceptions by the ruling class, "revolutionary" or "conservative" as the case may be, to feed a minority of the citizens or to arm the military. Often those who govern the starving are the new "Nazi-Stalinists", are a part of the world that creates starvation, are a part of our world. The Carter Commission has ascertained that the cost of enough grain to feed the world's starving for a year is equivalent to the cost of five su

bmarines presently under construction in the USA. But it is useless for me to continue writing about all this: the "surpluses" which we keep regurgitating about, the food surpluses, make a pair with the regurgitations about our "knowledge". Projects, programs, food strategies, national and international commitments, specialised agencies, technicians and volunteers, missionaries and mercenaries, all are growing exponentially. What we must do is more than evident. What we actually do is create a massacre.

We in Rome do it, perhaps more than it is done in most other places. We need to change our political will, we must impose a policy for life, for peace, for disarmament, for non-violence. It is the only realistic one, the only one whose results are not impossible. It is the only one which is rejected, censured. We must become men and women of hope in opposition to the desert of desperation to which we are resigned. For more than a year we have been saying it, fighting for it. From all over the world they are beginning to agree with us. We don't want to sate ourselves on this. This is not what we hunger and thirst for. After a year of work, of study, of hunger strikes and parliamentary actions; after our tasks in Rome or in Cambodia, in Ottawa and in Strasbourg, we now know that the goals were correct that led us to the first big Easter march, from Porta Pia to the Quirinal Palace (the residence of the Italian president, ed.), from the Quirinal to the Chigi Palace (the seat of the Italian Senate, ed.) from the

Chigi Palace to Montecitorio, to the Madama Palace (the Italian Chamber of Deputies, ed.), and finally to St. Peter's, to Pope John Paul II.

The Security Council of the UN must immediately be given the imperative of saving tens of millions of children, of people already in agony or about to begin their agony.

All countries must immediately offer 1.40% (0.70% x 2) of their gross national product for the same end, for aid to development. International treaties having the force of law in our countries not only allow it but demand it. Our country should take the initiative rather than remaining in last place - faced with 15 million children dying of starvation - among the industrialised nations, which is to say in first place among the neo-Nazi exterminators. A general mobilisation is needed, we must act rather than keep spouting impressive logical or pacifist slogans. We must offer something of substance, not just words, to save life, to save this world. With our non-violent comrades, Christians, Socialists, Radicals, we have begun an action, not merely symbolic, for undernourishment. On March 30 we will begin a mass hunger strike, the first Gandhian Satyagraha in the West, the first in almost fifty years. From Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday we will organise a series of public events, with people doming from al

l over Europe, to gather together, we hope, in a second march of life, of peace, of disarmament in St. Peter's Square.

In order to give life (literally) to hope, to give life to those whom we are exterminating, we propose an immediate mobilisation in the family, the schools, offices, factories, villages, churches, public offices, and in the unions and political parties.

This year too, the Committee for Life, Peace and Disarmament, open to all, can constitute the meeting place and co-ordinating center. In spite of the fact that its last year's aims - as some of us foresaw - failed disastrously. Or perhaps just because of that. Everything must be subordinated to this hope. If the press will help us it will completely fulfil its task of informing. From Rome the spark may come that will set ablaze this war against death in which all must join.

For now, write to us c/o the Chamber of Deputies or c/o Il Messaggero.

Our hunger strike this year will join our lives to those of millions of others. We will be saved with them or defeated with them. But quite beyond our conscience choices, this, I believe, is the destiny of us all.

And now we are waiting. With trepidation, but with hope.