ABSTRACT: On 31 December, during a press conference held in Osijek, Croatia, Marco Pannella, a member of the European Parliament and President of the Federal Council of the Radical Party, explained the reasons for the nonviolent action undertaken on the war-front.

(THE PARTY NEW - N. 5 - FEBRUARY 1992)

I am wearing the uniform of the Croatian army, partly as a symbolic, political and civil act, because this uniform now represents the fight for the right to life and the life of rights, for all of us, Serbs, Albanians, Macedonians, Italians, Germans, Frenchmen, Russians or Englishmen, the inhabitants of the world. It represents the ideal of and the hope for democracy and peace. I am grateful for and fraternally proud of this, a clear act of faith and the desire to bring honour to us, to myself, for the beliefs of the nonviolent, transnational and transdivisional Radical Party, for the aims it is trying to pursue in our time and our society.

If we are strong enough, this initiative will lead to the organization of a system of "brigades of nonviolence" as the embryo of an international force for the protection of individual rights and the rights of entire peoples around the world. As a representative of the European people, of the European Parliament, with my fellow Radical Party parliamentarians and activists, I am here to fight against the re-emergence of the shameful Europe of the 1930s, which allowed, through its cynicism and its pseudo-democratic leaders (then as now), the rise of Fascism, nationalism, Communism, and the spread of war and massacre.

With the uniform I am wearing today, I have the duty to testify that we are Croatians, Europeans, and also soldiers.

I do so with the wish, above all, that the Serbian women and men in all the Republics, wherever they live, and all their friends and relations, may have a year of freedom, democracy, peace, tolerance, happiness, and good health.

We respond with love and hope to the aggression of those who have made the Serbs into agressors, assassins or victims. From the trenches where we will spend this night and the days to come, we are fighting and will continue to fight for them, too, as brothers and sisters, despite the torment which we are experiencing and which they have been forced to inflict.

Finally, we denounce the shameful conduct of the UN, which encourages the Serbs to fight by declaring that it will not intervene until peace has largely been reached.

The supporters of nonviolence, the anti-militarists, the democratic federalists, the Europeans, the internationalists, and the people of goodwill in the transnational, transdivisional, ecologist Radical Party lay claim to the honour, the pain and the joy of being on this front for a free Croatia, a free Serbia, a free Kosovo, a free Macedonia and a free Bosnia-Hercegovina, a free Europe. Where there is freedom and democracy, there will also be peace and tolerance, justice and fraternity. u2e. Our warm thanks go to the many Croatian people who are enrolling in the Radical Party to make it stronger. We desperately need them. To all the women and the men of this land, and of the whole world, may 1992 bring their deepest hopes to life, and may it bring love, if they have sewn and tended it.