ABSTRACT: The Republics of Slovenia and Croatia have become independent in the course of elections or referendums whose entirely democratic nature nobody has denied. These Republics offered a Yugoslavian Confederation within the framework of an Association with the united Europe. To recognize these historic events, instead of denying them in a cowardly and stupid manner, was and is a requirement for peace.
(The Party New, n.4, September 1991)
As we write these words, in what was once Yugoslavia military forces continue to unleash their deadly weapons on the peoples which used to make up the country. The traditional pacifists, like the democrats satisfied with "real democracies", are tormented, desolate, and all but silent in terms of actions and alternatives to what is happening.
For ten years the activists of the Radical Party, as well as its political leaders and parliamentarians, had been trying to avoid the inevitable, calling out in the streets and the squares, in the Parliaments and the seats of Yugoslavian power. "Europe Now", political democracy, or else chaos, desperation, and social, economic and moral failure. This was our cry, at first subdued, and then more and more urgent. This is why we tried to hold our Congress in Zagreb in 1989; in the end we were only able to hold our Federal Council in Slovenia.
In the Parliaments of Italy and Europe, with greater force and regularity, we tried to make reason prevail. Instead folly and blindness were to prevail, in Europe, in the world, in Yugoslavia.
To dispatch WEU forces would be pointless, maybe even counterproductive. It would signify the further Lebanonization of the "ex-Republic". It would be the silence, frequently deadly, of reason and of the reasonable. For some time the Radical Party has been abandoned by those who chose it there, during the dictatorship, the victims of a national-democratic illusion, or rather of a national-partycratic illusion. But we want to bring our belief to your attention: if we do not fight radically for liberty and democracy, immediately, in Serbia and in Belgrade; if we do not fight against the national-Communist, racist, authoritarian, if not totalitarian policy and power of the Serbian President Milosevic; if we do not become aware that in Serbia, it is not only the Albanian people of Kosovo, but democrats themselves, who are in danger from the single-party system, much more so than in the past, then we will not get to the root of the tragedy.
In Kosovo, the oppressed Albanians have not taken up arms, they do not counter violence with violence. But must Europe, and Italy, forget them, betray them and abandon them for this reason? Or should we not now ask for the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the UN, break off all relations with the central Government, a futile cover for Serbian violence, despite the good intentions of President Markovic?
The Republics of Slovenia and Croatia have become independent in the course of elections or referendums whose entirely democratic nature noboby has denied. These Republics have offered a Yugoslavian Confederation within the framework of an Association with the united Europe, with the European Community. To recognize these historical events, instead of denying them in a cowardly and stupid manner, was and is a requirement for peace. What is not necessary or useful, on the other hand, is peace for "Yugoslavian" unity, which is dead and buried, for now, through the fault of Serbia.
The Radical Party is not yet able to operate as a large Party, a large internationalist, democratic and transnational (and therefore also Yugoslavian) force, but the discussions of the first session of the Federal Council - an embryonic version of the transnational body which it must become - allowed us to draw up a political document, which is also a proposal for action, on the situation in what was formerly Yugoslavia. The document, reprinted on this page, is the fruit of the awareness of the situation that the Radical Party has reached over the last few years, and is binding only for the executive organs of the party.
