Dear Serbian friends,

as we know and we passionately repeat at every occasion, you are the first and foremost victims of politics - politics which has been translated into war, violence, intolerance and totalitarianism by the Belgrade regime and most of the world. You are victims not only because thousands of young Serbs, Macedons, Bosniacs, Montenegrinos, drafted in the praetorian army, are dying; but also because they are crying and suffering and killing their own soul, while forced to use violence against their brothers and sisters, killing them, destroying their towns and villages, turning them into refugees - episodes reminiscent of the darkest pages of history.

We know that nowadays, in Serbia, those who dissent risk to be lynched as traitors; we know that a reckless demagogy creates fright and hatred against external "enemies" and that this hatred is a real powder keg for the civilian society of Serbia itself.

We know that the democratic aspirations of Serbian women and Serbian men - which are identical to ours and to those of the rest of the world - are nowadays suffocated and derided. Your government's pretension to ask for guarantees for the Serbian minorities in other republics, while at the same time radically denying them for the Albanian, Croat and other minorities in your own country, testifies of an aggressive, violent, intolerant view - a view which is gaining ground even inside your own political, social and cultural life.

Thus, both Europe and Democracy are again the enemies of Belgrade's power, as it used to be during the worst periods of Communist dictatorship, first of all the period preceding the break between Tito and Stalin.

Threatening war as an even larger blackmail is the weapon of the coward and of the barbarian of every color - red, brown or black, yesterday as well as nowadays.

The Radical Party has been clandestinely with you and among you for years, in order to affirm its brotherhood with those oppressed by a dictatorship which was perforce incompatible with tolerance, democracy, and with a free, peaceful, and nonviolent Europe.

Today, following Gandhi's example, the Radical Party takes sides with those attacked, takes sides with the victims' violence against the aggressors' violence. For this reason, some of us will serve unarmed among the Croat defenders, inspired by solidarity and love for life, and in order to defend the rights of everybody, including those who are forced to kill and to use violence abusingly in your name and in your behalf.

Our hope and struggle, like yours, are for a great Serbia - great because of civilization, democracy, tolerance, culture, justice, confederated with the other free peoples of the former Yugoslavia, and associated to the European Union.

Long life to the democratic Serbian people, to democracy, to Federal and peaceful Europe - long life to the friendship and the brotherhood, in a Europe free, interdependent and democratic, of Serbs. Croats, Slovenes, Albanians, Macedons, Montenegrinos, Italians, Germans, Hungarians, Rumanians, Austrians, Bulgarians, Greeks etc.