ABSTRACT: The necessity for the Security Council of the United Nations to intervene to stop massive starvation in the South of the world. The possibility of using the armed forces for emergency actions.

(Notizie Radicali n. 54 of 5 March 1986)

Allow me a chronological, so to say, premise of our meeting: the day before yesterday, the Holy Father John Paul II received the council of Food and Disarmament International; it was an act of dialogue, of encouragement, of friendship, and was such more in the intentions than in the actual meeting.

I would like to say that all the words of John Paul II, the words and the pain that he expressed on abortion as the essential element to pursue hope, the right and the duty of life, should be not used for our purpose, but should be a conscious, fundamental element of our history - and so they are - ; otherwise the illusion of a partial, and not great and not ambitious defense of life is doomed to fail.

Allow me to conclude this premise in this manner, which I want to be formal: that even on this, if we have been divided when it was necessary to choose the most suitable laws of Caesar, the most suitable universal norms to attempt to fight the scourge and the tragedy which we were denouncing, in the passive indifference of most people, Adele Faccio, Emma Bonino, Gianfranco Spadaccia embodied the imperative to defeat this tragedy and this scourge, to turn them into responsibility of life, to destroy the noxious concept of entrusting Caesar or the State with choices of conscience; and that of entrusting to terror and to fear the continuation or not of a beastly creation, instead of elevating oneself and urging the conception, the Christian conception, of life or not.

We have thus reached the core of the problem: rights. And we listened to it yesterday from Professor Bedjaoui: the positive right to live must be armed with sanctions, armed with the consciousness of all of us. We must become the army of the enforcement of right; we must support life and oppose the widely spread fact that the achievements of juridical science, and not only of juridical science, that history and power refuse to turn it into an applied science, the application of science and conscience, entrusting doctrine to the abstractions and brutality of the logic of things, which is in itself a logic of death, making it into a law which is by respected by power and not by law and right.

I believe a campaign can only start from this consciousness: the Nobel prizes have written it in that political manifesto, absolutely political, deliberately political which has lead to the upturning of history, and for the first time in history we have 95 Nobels, I believe 70% of which living, who have signed a political manifesto which requests the formation of new parties, new organizations. Parties in favour of life, parties formed in "part" to win or to lose, to convince, to make the law of conception, of fulfilment of the right to live into the major premise of the organization of certain individuals.

Therefore I believe that after the Manifesto of the Nobels, after the deliberation of the European Parliament, after the Italian and Belgian laws, not after their enforcement but after these votes, today, through the papers of the twelve (for the moment) heads of state, another step has been taken for the application of rights and for the clarity of the party creator of life and rights everywhere.

These heads of state remind us that three years ago, in the Caribbean, and that in Berlin the following year, during a meeting of the EEC Acps, thanks to the unanimous support of the Acp countries and in spite of the opposition of many Europeans, a proposal of ours was passed: the guarantee of the priorities of the urgency, of the right to life, of the right to development, of the right to so-called bourgeois or revolutionary freedoms.

Contextual. What do you think of the fact that 12 heads of state insist on pretending this kind of interpretation of their text? Dear friends, men and women of the West, let us be sincere: when in our countries we see 100, 200, 300 deaths as the result of the madness of terrorism, no wonder the Parliament immediately declares and promulgates emergency laws, abandoning for a while the constitutional, bourgeois ones. This is because, confronted with the madness of terrorism which can cause up to 100, 200, 300 deaths, political democracy can no longer be a weapon in the struggle against terrorism.

And someone would want to make us believe that in countries in which millions of children and elderly die because of the international, political, economic, legal disorder, the disorder and order of Cancoon - and they die because of political choices which have or have not been made - it is underdevelopment which does not allow for a full expansion or the adoption of a liberal, Anglo-Saxon or democratic Constitution.

What an absurdity!

We have to put ourselves in a condition through which we can become a "task force" so that we can enforce the laws and if necessary change the laws of our country.

One more example: we know that in our countries we will have a more or less 5% increase in our national product because of a drop in oil and dollar prices.

We can calculate 5% for 1986: if we had the faculty, the capacity to propose new laws immediately, to act in the European Parliament (and perhaps we are on the way to that), we could for instance claim that 20% of this gift of history, this 5% which governments will have at their disposal, be allotted for an integrated, interdependent intervention. Therefore, let us decide for wisdom instead of utopia; our duty is to require the conversion of military structures and military expenditure. This is the reality and the historical power of our Western countries: the West is over-armed, let us convert these armies, let us break the lobbies of freights and cargoes, using aircraft, navy, moving the Fleet. This could be done each time there is a famine. It is possible. The soft technology, the traditional one used by the old military European engineers of Engineer Corps would be ideal for the reconstruction of land and environment.

Therefore, we will go on with these 2 proposals: task force and revision of the law. The European Parliament has considered, through the interpretation of Prof. Bedjaouni, that in the disposition of some articles of the UN Treaty we can consider it the right and the duty of the Secretary General (being a massive starvation a security and peace problem) to intervene legally, not only with task forces but also requesting the compulsory application of the international agreements which have been ratified but not applied.

Not only we Italians, but also you friends of the Acp, must speak out: Italy and Europe have not ensured that which was promised and announced in exchange for money or charity. We must move at once.

Integrated help; at the same time it is necessary to act within the UN in order to plead the cause.

If we will move more quickly, refusing the blackmail from the so-called "pragmatists", if we will understand that the problem is to be truly and effectually what we are at heart, that is, a party for life, law and action, if we will be capable in the next 16, 18 months of making the Food and Disarmament administration a reality not only for the wealth or poverty of those who are part of it, not alive through increasing contributions, then I believe we shall soon be confronted with the terrible, great responsibility of seeing, thanks to the existing law which allows it, the UN troops operating as such on the front of integrated intervention. That is to say the area which demands a precise political intervention on the public debt of that country and of that place; with the excellent indications provided by Susan George, the escalation of public debt and of foreign debt with the investment which is applied in the appropriate fields of reconstruction of the territory and the environment. These days we are comin

g out with the new great weapon of this political declaration engaging us and not only us but the 12 heads of state, each for his own country. We wish that they increase in number and we are grateful to them because they have given us, apart from hope, integrity of judgement: to fully understand which is the integrated, necessary way to assert the right to live, to develop, to freedom, to political democracy, to pluralism. These ideals must be pursued together, otherwise if separated they will disappear.