ABSTRACT: The President of the Republic says we are at war against terrorists. One loses count of the victims. But another massacre is in progress: the silent one of extermination from hunger with its tens of millions of victims. People are dying not because there is no food but because there is not the political will to procure it, whereas the food surpluses of the industrialised North present an economic problem. The United Nations Security Council should be invested with the power to deal with the food security of millions of people. The nations must immediately earmark at least 1.4% of their budgets for the same purpose. The Radical Party is committed to promoting a general mobilisation on this problem and their militants to a single symbolic action of undernourishment.

(IL MESSAGGERO, (1) March 1, 1980)

(The Radical Party leader Marco Pannella, who is a deputy in the Chamber, has sent us the following letter which we are pleased to publish.)

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Mr. Editor,

The massacre continues. By now we have lost count of the people murdered by the terrorists: two, three hundred? This cannot be tolerated any longer. The President of the Republic says we are in war against the killers. Since then the laws in disarray, the the government budget, the increase in victims, the condition of justice and of the prisons, all seem to testify truly to a kind of war against the persistent infamy of some tens or hundreds of helpless people. For them there is no longer anything sacred, not even life.

For them? Only for them? Who is going to throw the first stone? If this massacre continues, the extermination - even more scientific and precise - of tens of millions of people every year from undernourishment and hunger will spread. Tens of millions of dead in past months, tens of millions more in the next months. What is the scandal? That death, not life, extermination and murder seem to be sacred.

The U.N., the FAO [Food and Agriculture Organisation], the World Food Council, the Carter Commission, the Brandt Commission, the Club of Rome, the UNCTAD [United Nations Commission on Trade and Development], the Pope, the President of the [Italian] Republic, President Giscard d'Estaing, Ambassador Gardner [U.S. Ambassador to Italy], the European Parliament and the Italian one - everyone, everyone - in the official documents and declarations that we have gathered, everyone is in agreement that no one dies for lack of food, but for "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 there is in the world enough explosives to guarantee the death of every human being thirty times over, the total extermination of mankind. This year the mortality rate from undernourishment and starvation will not only increase again but will be the highest in recent years. FAO had already foreseen this. Last February 19 in Brussels, during a public hearing we organised at the European Parliament, to a precise question of mine in this regard, President Tanko of the World Food Conference, the vice president of the Carter Commission and Willy Brandt, President of the "North-South Commission" all replied in the affirmative.

These forecasts are below the true figures. In general no consideration is given to the collapse, the ruin that by now irreversibly threatens the "economies" of the Third and Fourth World countries because of the energy situation and the OPEC countries' investment policies and prices which are mostly paid by the poor countries, by those of the Fourth World. The "aid" that still reaches such places - the Buchenwald to which our generation has reduced the entire underdeveloped world - are absorbed by the ruling classes, whether they be "revolutionary" or "conservative", with very few exceptions, to nourish the minority of the citizens and to equip armies. Often those who govern the hungry belong to the world of those who create hunger, the world of the new Nazi-Stalinists, our world.

The Carter Commission has calculated that the mount of gain necessary to prevent undernourishment in the world for a year is equivalent to the cost of 5 (five!) submarines presently under construction in the U.S.A.

But it is useless for me to talk of these things, sir: the

"surpluses" we spew out, the food surpluses, go together with our "knowledge surpluses". Projects, programmes, "food strategy", national and international commitments, specialised technical and voluntary agencies, missionaries and mercenaries, are growing exponentially. What we ought to do, everybody knows. What we actually do is exterminate people.

In Rome it is done as much and perhaps more than elsewhere. One must change one's political will, one must impose a policy of life, of peace, of disarmament, of non-violence. It is the only realistic thing, the only one whose results are not impossible. The only one which is rejected and censured. We must all become men and women of hope and oppose the wasteland of despair to which we resign ourselves. For more than a year we have been saying it, have been fighting for it. In all parts of the world they are beginning to agree with us. We do not want to be content with that. After a year of commitment, of study, of hunger strikes and parliamentary actions; after having been at our task in Rome, Cambodia, Ottawa or Strasburg, we now know that our goals are just which led us to the first great Easter march from Porta Pia to the Quirinal, from the Quirinal to Palazzo Chigi and Montecitorio, Palazzo Madama and finally to St. Peter's to Pope John Paul II.

The U.N. Security Council must immediately be given imperative authority to save tens of millions of children and others who are already in their death throes or inevitably about to enter them.

Governments must immediately contribute 1.4% (0.70 x 2) of their gross national product for the same purpose, for aid to development. International treaties having the value of positive law in our countries not only consent to it but demand it. Our country must take the initiative and instead it has remained immobile - in the face of 15 million dying children - in last place among industrialised countries, which is to say in first place among those causing the neo-Nazi extermination.

We need a general mobilisation, no more chatter or tragic and impressive pacifist mottoes, but deeds. We must give substance, not just words, to life, to the salvation of this world. With our non-violent comrades - Christians, Socialists, Radicals - we are already engaged in a not merely symbolic action of 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 we will organise, with people coming from all over Europe, a series of public demonstrations, in order to meet all together, we hope, in a second march of life, peace and disarmament in St. Peter's Square on Easter Sunday. We propose that immediately, in the families, the schools, the offices and factories, the small towns, the churches, public offices and union and political ones, we will organise ourselves to give life (literally) to hope, to give life to those whom we have been annihilating.

This year too the Committee for Life, Peace and Disarmament, open to all, can be the co-ordinating and meeting point, despite the fact that - as some of us had foreseen - it fell atrociously short of its last year's goal. Or just for that reason. Everything else must be subordinated to this hope. If the press will help us, Mr. Editor, if it can fulfil its whole task of supplying information, Rome can be the sparking point that will ignite this war against wars and death in which everyone must join.

For now let everyone write to us c/o the Chamber of Deputies, or, if you think it possible, c/o "Il Messaggero".

Through our hunger strike, this year, we will bind our lives to those of millions of others. To be saved with them, or to be defeated with them. But apart from our conscious choices, this, I think, is the destiny of us all.

And now we wait. In trepidation, but in hope.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) A popular Rome daily.