ABSTRACT: The greetings of the Federation of Italian Greens read to the PR's Fourth Italian Congress (Rome, January 9-12, 1992) by Francesco Rutelli.

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The Co-ordinating Committee of the Federation of Greens, meeting in Rome on January 10 in preparation for the Federal Assembly scheduled for Chianciano from January 17-19, presents its greetings to the Italian Radical Congress.

After having discussed the relationship between the Greens and the Radicals, the Co-ordinating Committee expresses its appreciation for the Radical Party's decision to create a trans-national group and its agreement with the basic reasons for this action.

The planet is nearing the year 2000 on the verge of an insupportable ecological and social situation for the life of the ecosystem and the more than 6 billion people that will be living in it who will become 10 billion by the year 2030.

A special feature of 1992 will be the Earth Summit in Brazil which gives every indication of being a gigantic failure in the attempt to make the countries and peoples of the North and South co-responsible in the fight against poverty and form an interdependence that would create greater equity.

The destruction of the Communist regimes opens disquieting prospects of explosions of nationalism, violence and growing environmental and social crises that may be end up being governed in an authoritarian rather than a democratic way.

For these reasons a vast and incisive commitment on the precise issues of democratic federalism, ecology, human rights, non-violence, and anti-prohibition of drugs on a trans-national level seems to us more opportune and necessary than ever.

Given the concrete, democratic organisation of this Trans-national Party, the adesione diretta of the Greens to the PR can only be broadened and a conversion of initiatives be realised on environmental problems. One should remember that Adelaide Aglietta (1), a Radical Party member, in recent days was re-elected the president of the Greens group in the European Parliament.

The Co-ordinating Committee of the Federation of Greens hopes that the Congress of Italian Radicals will make a strong and clear contribution to this nascent trans-national project.

With regard to Marco Pannella's reflections and proposals presented at the last Greens Convention, they will be attentively discussed - along with all the other proposals and opportunities that have been brought up - in the next Greens Federal Assembly. We are considering various ideas, but all of them hinge on the conviction that ecological politics and the politics of ecology have a crucial place in Italian society and must be strongly and convincingly represented in the next Parliament too.

On the Italian side of the picture, the Greens are ready to agree with the Radical Party's position of not presenting oneself as one of the groups of a political panorama more and more fragmented and in crisis, but to try to constitute a site for dialogue and confrontation for the reform of politics in our country.

For this reason too we will follow your work attentively, which we hope in friendship will be truly successful.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) AGLIETTA, ADELAIDE (Turin 1904) - Presently President of the Greens Group in the European Parliament, she has had several terms as a deputy in the Italian Parliament and was Radical Party Secretary in 1977 and 1978, the year in which she was chosen for jury duty in the Turin trial of the Red Brigades and Renato Curcio. She was a promoter of the CISA (Italian Centre for Sterilisation and Abortion) in Turin.