ABSTRACT: We men and women of science, of letters and of peace, are addressing an appeal to all people of good will, to the powerful and the humble, in their different situations of responsibility, so that the dozens of millions who are starving and undernourished, victims of the international political and economic chaos which is prevalent today, may be restored to life. This objective, proclaimed by 113 Nobel prizewinners, has become a political must for the Radical Party.

By means of laws for the immediate rescue of millions of people, the Radical Party is counteracting the political failures of "aid" and technical co-operation in the third world, responsible for the exploitation and degradation of immense areas in the Southern hemisphere. An international campaign, an extraordinary collective "Satyagraha" involving thousands of people, with hunger strikes, marches, and acts of civil disobedience, in order to assert the right to live. The first law for survival was passed in Belgium. The Italian parliament has earmarked more than a million dollars. But it is not enough. International mobilisation for life has been made useless by the egoism of the national States. Failure or defeat?

("Single issue" booklet for the XXXV Congress of The Radical Party - Budapest 22-26 april 1989)

Politics become democracy when they propose a choice of clear alternatives, when they allow everyone to express himself in an unambiguous way with a "no" or a "yes". For years the political world, international agencies and private organisations have explained to us the various "strategies" to accelerate the development of the Third World, they have illustrated the macro- and micro-projects of co-operation with the hungry people in the South. They have exalted the programmes of industrialisation or have denounced the waste of Western aid to the poorer countries but no one has said what each single citizen could do apart from useless almsgiving, to stop the tens of millions of people, on the threshold of the year 2000, from dying of hunger, of suffering, of thirst. It was the beginning of the year 1979 and the umpteenth UNICEF warning that 40 million people would, quite certainly, die of hunger during the year, risked being removed, not only from the conscience of the individual, but most of all from go

vernment policies simply because nobody proposed clear alternatives, the possible solutions from among which it would be possible to choose. We said at that time that no development strategy, none of the co-operation projects, not even a denunciation, no matter how sacrosanct, of the exploitation carried out by the industrialised North would have had political morality or historical exactitude if it put aside those 40 thousand children, men and women condemned to be exterminated not to die, as if by some natural event by hunger. The choices which individuals, communities, parliaments and governments should be called upon to make should have been clear: how much money to save how many people in what space of time. Every hesitation about how to save so many human lives, in a society capable of walking on the moon or of saving two whales trapped in the Alaskan ice, should have been seen immediately only as an excuse. Every hesitation as regards how to find the money necessary, in a society capable of spe

nding millions and millions of dollars each year on arms should be rejected as obscene. We have said that a society incapable only of saving from death by hunger millions of people would certainly not be capable of solving the much more complex problems associated with development, with industrialisation and with the debts of the poor countries. It was then necessary to acquire the possibility of measuring, in an unambiguous way, the efficacy of aid from the rich countries by means of a sure index of the drastic reduction in the mortality rate. The Radical Party, therefore, asked for laws which would explicitly define the number of people which it was reckoned would be saved from death, the type of funding to be used and the time needed. Laws, financial sacrifices about which each person could and should say "yes" or "no". We put forward these thoughts, these apparently simplistic objectives, to the highest representatives of science, to people honoured for their commitment to peace and to the most im

portant names in economic research: an unexpected and sensational number of Nobel prizewinners, initially 53, later rising to 113, signed the text which was to become known all over the world as the "Nobel Prizewinners' Appeal". "To give back to life millions suffering form hunger and underdevelopment" became, in 1979, the political imperative of the Radical Party. We do not have a book available to show the exceptional and, perhaps, unrepeatable role of non-violent politics that the Radical Party has played in the struggle against extermination by hunger; to tell of the extraordinary collective "Satyagraha" which has involved men and women of every nation and every political opinion in the international campaign of the Radical Party. In the following pages we can propose only a chronological outline of the most important moments in the Radical campaign for "millions alive now" as well as the two fundamental texts of the political culture of the "right to life" and of "the life of rights" that we have tri

ed to propose. But we have been beaten. If our aim had not been to make governments and peoples commit themselves to saving millions of people in the South from extermination by hunger but only to stir up the problem of hunger in the world, we could declare ourselves satisfied. The Radical Party's initiative has, in fact, brought about the passing of the first of the Belgian "Survie" laws and, subsequently, the Italian law which set aside over a thousand million dollars to be used within 18 months to rescue from death by hunger, by means of special interventions, the largest possible number of people. The Radical campaign shifted to governments and to the political arena what had been relegated to the conscience and generosity of the individual, to the exclusive competence of international agencies and private associations. Millions of people all over the world have been involved and mobilised not only in a gesture of true human generosity but also, with popular petitions, demonstrations and non-viole

nt actions, in the real and concrete objectives of parliamentary democracy. Also on the occasions which we have provided, the voices of the principal moral and religious authorities have been raised to warn the political forces of the danger to peace, to security and to democracy of this immense army of desperate men who have nothing left to lose nor to defend. Not even their own lives. All this has not been enough to change that same political culture which tolerated, in the name of an improbable peace, the extermination of millions of Jews by the Nazi regime or which has remained indifferent for 8 years to the carnage of the Gulf War, providing, rather, arms and ammunition to ensure the death of more than a million Iraquis and Iranians. We have not been able to arouse the moral and political revolt against the extermination which might have raised the hope of living, not only for millions in the South laid low by hunger and by thirst, but also for millions of Westerners degraded by obesity and by le

gal drugs more so than by illegal ones. A mainly Italian party, the Radical Party, could not have done it. Perhaps the transnational party we are trying to create during these months will succeed in doing it. But if this project fails it is as well to be aware of it then so will the possibility to return to a renewed, more forceful fight for life.