Rome, 26.4.93

Dear colleague,

After the extraordinary success of the membership campaign in Italy which, as you know, reached and exceeded the target of 30,000 members set by the Congress as the minimum necessary to ensure the survival of the Radical Party (there are now almost 38,000 members in Italy), the next political deadline for the Party is the convocation of the Assembly of Parliamentarians and of the General Council, organs established by the statute, which will meet in Sofia, for the first time, at the end of June.

These meetings were fixed by the final motion approved by the Congress to put an end - in the eventuality of a successful outcome - to the period of transition created above all by the organization of the membership campaign in Italy.

On this occasion, the new executive elected by the Rome Congress - the secretary and the treasurer - will take up their posts in the fullness of their responsibilities.

The General Council, too, will be able to assume the role laid down by the statute, once its final composition is reached when the members elected by the Congress are joined by those elected by the Assembly of Parliamentarians in Sofia.

The Party will thus have achieved the conditions laid down in order to resume its political project. It will, however, have to decide on the initiatives to be undertaken and the programme of activities to be carried out, and also establish the transnational campaigns which will help define the life of the Party until the next Congress, planned for the end of 1994.

The importance of the political deadline represented by the meetings in Sofia is both enormous and evident.

In this letter we wish, in particular, to draw your attention - as a parliamentarian and member of the Radical Party - to the efforts which this deadline will involve: together, at the Sofia meetings, we will have to lay down the common foundations of our actions by choosing the objectives, in general and within the individual parliaments of which we are members, of the initiatives of the parliamentarians who are "also" members of the Radical Party.

For this reason we believe it is worth starting to outline a number of issues and proposals, albeit in a preliminary form, which will be the subject of discussion and evaluation at the two meetings in Sofia. In this way each of you will be provided, sufficiently in advance, with subjects for profitable reflection which, we hope, will stimulate debate and, above all, lead you to propose concrete objectives for the action of the Party with respect to common parliamentary initiatives.

One essential factor to be taken into account in the evaluation and the choice of the issues and the objectives to bring to the attention of the Assembly of Parliamentarians and of the General Council, as well as factors relating to their political weight, their relevance, and their feasibility, is the careful examination of the amount of time and the level of human and financial resources necessary for their implementation.

We believe, however, that we must begin with an issue which transcends the considerations made above: the urgent need to take initiatives which may help to halt the genocide taking place in Bosnia, faced as we are with a situation of continuing tragedy characterized by atrocious and ignominious events, a situation which does not allow us to make any predictions about how it may develop without precipitating towards further horrors.

Genocide in the ex-Yugoslavia

The Radical Party is the only political force - and this is a burdensome honour - that has, for a long time, been denouncing the tremendous responsibility of the West, and particularly of Europe, which has up to now allowed Milosevic's racist regime to carry out the clinical ethnic annihilation of an entire population. If this objective is achieved, there is a real risk that the same treatment will be extended to the population of Kosovo and maybe of Macedonia itself, with unthinkable consequences. The effect on the other ethnic conflicts in progress in Eastern Europe will be devastating.

The important initiatives carried out so far, most recently the campaign for the constitution of an international tribunal for war crimes and for the recognition of Macedonia, do not seem to have been sufficient to alter the determination with which the West is resigning itself to the creation, by means of a series of "modern-day Auschwitzes", of the "Great Serbia"

It is probably necessary at this point to plan a major nonviolent campaign in the countries of the West and the East, accompanied by strong parliamentary pressure.

At the moment we have not elaborated any concrete proposals; each of us must now begin to put forward ideas which must, due to the urgency of the situation, be adopted within the framework of our respective responsibilities: the Radical Party, since its organs have not approved specific proposals, can only contribute towards the co-ordination of actions.

Protection of the environment

Two issues have so far been examined in the light of the meetings in Sofia:

a) the risk of a repetition of the Chernobyl disaster due to the existence in Eastern Europe of obsolete nuclear power stations, and the possibility of a campaign to dismantle them;

b) the pollution of the Danube and an agreement between the countries which the river flows through for better management of its waters.

Drugs

The success of the referendum initiative conducted in Italy by the Radical Party, which has led to the modification of the drugs law and reduced the damage created by the policy of prohibitionism (with the abolition of penalties for drug-users and of the obligation for doctors to report patients who use drugs), has opened a debate on the issue that prejudices any possibility of undertaking an anti-prohibitionist campaign, that is the feasibility of a campaign to modify the international conventions on drugs.

It has been observed that the Convention on drugs of 1961 (and the emendment of 1972), as well as the Convention on psychotropic drugs of 1971, can be denounced by the parties which adhered to them. If, as a result, the number of parties falls below forty, the conventions are no longer valid. It is also possible for the parties to present emendments and, by means of the necessary procedures, to call conferences to discuss them.

With regard to the Convention against drug-trafficking of 1988, denunciations are possible but the convention remains in force.

It is therefore necessary to evaluate the possibility of carrying out campaigns in different countries for the modification of parts of these conventions, or for their denunciation.

The death penalty

After the February Congress of the Radical Party, during which a convention was held for the constitution of an "International League for the Abolition of the Death Penalty by the Year 2000", an international appeal to the United Nations was launched, asking for a general moratorium on executions and restrictions on the application of the death penalty. The signatures collected will be presented to Boutros Ghali on the occasion of the "World Conference on Human Rights" which will be held in Vienna from 14 to 26 June.

After Vienna, we would like to start up parliamentary action to achieve an intermediate objective of the campaign: an end to the death penalty in Europe.

Parliamentarians in both Eastern and Western Europe must, as soon as possible, gather together and send us material on the laws relative to the death penalty in their own countries, and on any bills to modify the laws or to ratify international agreements on the abolition of the death penalty.

The effectiveness of international law and the reform of the United Nations.

After the fall of walls and the thawing of blocs, in the era of planetary interdependence, there is an increasing need for supernational institutions which can be appealed to for the protection of the rights of the individual and of peoples, and which would assume powers for the resolution of the most serious international controversies and to deal with the most dangerous threats to humanity. The Radical Party is no longer alone in upholding the duty and right of interference in cases of violation of the principles of international law, in particular with regard to the safeguard of the inviolable rights of the individual. However, in the face of this demand, increasingly widespread among the general public and a substantial proportion of the political classes, there is no corresponding action to provide the United Nations and the other international bodies with the democratic legitimacy and the instruments necessary to be able to exercise supernational authority and power, also in the form of sanctions.

Very few steps have been taken to get over the old concept of international law and security based on inter-governmental bodies and on national, or at most multinational, defence forces.

Events in the ex-Yugoslavia have tragically shown not only that the UN is absolutely unsuited to carry out the role of supreme guarantor of new international law, but also that its involvement in war zones is even counter-productive under these conditions. When international police forces are obliged to stand by impotently in the face of the genocide being carried out in Bosnia, even to become the instrument of the "ethnic cleansing" of the besieged cities, there is a risk that they will be seen by the victims to be accomplices of the aggressors, a cover for the tremendous political responsibilities of the governments of the West, and in particular of the European Community.

It is therefore necessary to be aware that the new world order of the future runs the risk of reproducing the suffering and the injustice of the order that we have known and that we know, which tolerates or brings about further extermination through famine or war, if it is not based on positive new international law, on new laws that have international validity, and on the democratic reform of the United Nations system.

Without hoping vainly to solve all these immense problems, the Radical Party can, however, aim to deal with some of them, on one hand by identifying those political objectives which can contribute to the gradual transformation of the United Nations system from an inter-governmental organization to a supernational and democratic institution capable of making international law effective and binding, and on the other hand by building an organization of parliamentarians that can impose the relevance, the urgency, the autonomy and the priority of those "foreign policy" issues which up to now have been considered in parliaments as the exclusive responsibility of governments.

One question which the Radical Party has already raised is that of the international Tribunal against war crimes in the ex-Yugoslavia, which was accepted by Resolution no. 808, of 22.2.93, of the Security Council of the United Nations. We will undoubtedly have to follow the matter with attention and make sure that this decision does not, like many others, remain a dead letter, and that the tribunal is actually set up. We have also thought about whether it is possible to organize a campaign, over a much longer period, for the constitution of a permanent international tribunal to deal with crimes against humanity, wherever they are committed.

We have asked one of our members to draw up an initial report on these issues.

Another subject which we have begun to consider with the aim of deciding on possible initiatives is the nature of the forces used by the United Nations in peace-keeping and peace-making operations.

We have, first of all, observed that attention is turned exclusively to the nature and the role of conventional forces, whilst there has been no serious consideration of all those "preventive" actions, of "aggressive" pressure and "non-conventional war", which could make the use of arms to impose the respect of international law unnecessary and non-automatic. At the time of the Gulf War we pointed out the intrinsic contradiction between the desire to guarantee security and the absense of effective controls on the sale of arms to third parties. This is an extremely fertile political field for the circulation of information between parliamentarians of different countries and for the organization of common initiatives to put a stop to the proliferation of arms, particularly at a time in which international treaties on disarmament and the scaling-down of national armies are bringing an enormous quantity of low-cost weapons systems onto the market.

We also pointed out, once again at the time of the Gulf War, that while we all attach great importance to the power of the mass media and their capacity to influence people's behaviour, no initiatives have been taken, except for those carried out in the past with regard to the USSR, to provide the UN forces with suitable instruments to oppose totalitarian regimes on the level of information. The constitution of assignment forces for the United Nations, maybe formed of young people who have chosen to do civilian service rather than military service, trained in this type of "non-conventional war", could be an objective to be pursued both in parliaments and through nonviolent actions of civil disobedience.

On this issue, too, we are carrying out a preliminary study which will be circulated before the June meeting.

Finally, the question of the status of the Radical Party with the United Nations. A special study has been commissioned to evaluate the practicability and the utility of applying for recognition by the UN.

The right to language and to an international language.

At the February Congress of the Radical Party we presented a project for a transnational campaign in support of the right to language and to an international language. We must involve an increasing number of parliamentarians and citizens in Europe, and particularly in the European Community. In mid-1994, the next European Parliament elections will be held, and one of the issues that we must bring to the attention of the general public is precisely that of the right to a "federal" language as a fundamental right in the construction of the United States of Europe.

With regard to Esperanto as a lingua franca for Europe, we will present a detailed plan of initiatives at the Sofia meeting.

Other initiatives

- Transbalkanic railway. The Radical Party has been asked to support the realization of this railway, which would allow better connections and greater integration between Macedonia, Bulgaria and Albania, and could be extended to Turkey, the Ukraine, Romania and Moldavia.

- Somalia. Beginning with the UN intervention in this country, we could resume the campaign to involve the Security Council of the United Nations in the problem of famine. In particular, it could be possible to resume and update the UN Assembly Resolution which asks all industrialized countries to devolve 1% of their GNP to help underdeveloped countries.

Non-autochthonous minorities in the Baltic states. The exclusion of the Russian and Polish minorities from rights of citizenship and the right to vote in the Baltic countries is a violation of international law. It has been noted that on 13 May, during the session of the Council of Europe, Estonia will be formally accepted as a member. The Russian-speaking minority in Estonia had on several occasions asked the Council of Europe not to accept Estonia's application for membership until the question of non-citizenship had been resolved. On 11 May, on the other hand, the application made by Lithuania, where there is a similar problem with the Polish minority, will probably be accepted. An international conference on these issues, "Baltic States: citizenship and individual rights in the light of the international conventions", will be held at the Congress Centre in Tallinn, Estonia, from 21 to 23 May.

- Albania. Due to the closeness of Albania to Italy and the fact that many Albanians speak Italian, it is worth considering the idea of broadcasting Radio Radicale programmes in this country.

We have tried, in this letter, to set out some considerations which we hope you will want to develop and extend, and look forward to receiving your requests and responses.

Best wishes,

Emma Bonino Sergio Stanzani

President First Secretary

Paolo Vigevano Marco Pannella

Treasurer President of the Federal Council

NB - We have also sent this letter to 1992 members who have not yet enrolled for 1993, in the belief that this is due to the fact that many of them were waiting for the result of the membership campaign in Italy, and also to the delay in starting up the membership campaign in other countries. We would like to point out, however, that only those who have enrolled for 1993 can take part in the Assembly of Parliamentarians, and therefore in the General Council.