XII.

THE RADICAL PARTY AND ITS STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN THOSE PLACES WHERE SPRING HAS NOT YET FLOWERED.

THE DEFENCE OF MINORITIES IN ROMANIA.

THE MANIFESTATION FOR THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PRAGUE SPRING.

A LITTLE-KNOWN CULTURAL GENOCIDE, THAT OF TIBET.

THE CAMPAIGN FOR PAULA COOPER AND AGAINST THE DEATH PENALTY IN THE U.S.A.

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE PARLIAMENTARY INTER-GROUPS IN THE EUROPEAN AND ITALIAN PARLIAMENTS.

ABSTRACT: In the twelfth part of his report presented at the Radical Party in Budapest, First Party Secretary Sergio Stanzani

deals with the defence of civil rights in totalitarian countries and democratic ones. The non-violent and the parliamentary initiatives of the Radical Party.

(35th Congress of the Radical Party, Budapest, April 22-26, 1989)

These "springs", furthermore, are not a general phenomenon. The winds of "glasnost" and "perestroika" blow upon the citizens but, unfortunately, not yet on the governments of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, not to mention Bulgaria and Romania.

With regard to the Romanian situation, the Radical Party has taken on itself to promote a series of initiatives aimed at making known to international opinion and to governments the continual violations of human rights, the harsh discrimination practised against the Hungarian minority and other ethnic minorities, the mad policy of destroying villages and forcibly transporting millions of people to the so-called "agro-industrial complexes", the systematic reduction to misery of the entire Romanian population in the attempt to bend it to ever more bankrupt economic plans.

Last October, together with the International Helsinki Federation, we organised and promoted in Rome a great international conference, the first in Europe, on the violation of human rights in Ceausescu's Romania. We also organised demonstrations in front of the Romanian embassies in numerous European countries, and we proposed resolutions and motions to the European and Italian parliaments. We solicited and supported international appeals, above all the one which the great Ionesco, who in 1987 wanted to join our party, was the first to sign.

The question is not only of the rights of minorities in Transylvania, but of the entire Romanian population obliged to bend to the blind will of a dictator, which is by now a problem known to the peoples of European countries and a problem difficult to evade for the governments of the EEC countries as it is for those of the Warsaw Pact which, up until yesterday, respected the opportunism of Ceausescu's nationalistic policies and cheered and encouraged his megalomania.

Even the Czechoslovakian regime seems determined to reject all change in the direction of democracy.

A few days before the great popular demonstration of last August 21, which would have revived the painful memory of the suppression of the "Prague Spring", about twenty Radical activists from various countries, who as a result were expelled for life, distributed thousands of leaflets in several Czech cities and unfurled a great banner in Prague's historical St. Wenceslaus square.

The television service of the Prague regime presented that demonstration as a provocation and "foreign interference" by the Radical Party. And it maliciously attributed responsibility for the great popular demonstration on August 21 that took the form of thousands of citizens and young people parading in the name of Dubcek. This was a propaganda measure to discredit that great demonstration. Our fraternal presence and solidarity, our recalling that twentieth anniversary, reported on television, served only to exhort and encourage.

I will not go into the many actions we undertook during the year for the defence of human rights.

I will only call to mind the recent actions against the massacre that the People's Republic of China is perpetrating in Tibet while the world looks on with indifference. It is a massacre of both environment and civilisation. And there is the long and efficacious action which, thanks to the invaluable, militant and independent action of a few comrades, the Radical Party has managed to secure against the death penalty in the United States, centred on the emblematic case of the very young Paula Cooper.