ABSTRACT: Letter whereby the Radical Party Secretary General, after providing essential information on the ongoing political campaigns and on the initiatives it has not been possible to launch, invites members to join the radical party for 1994.

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Baltimore, November 17th, 1993

Dear friends,

in February this year, when the "Italian miracle" ensured the survival of the transnational and transparty radical party of 1993, we knew the question of the party's existence would emerge anew in early 1994. The funds raised thanks to the generosity and confidence of the 37,000 Italian members (over $8 million) allowed us to cancel pre-existing debts and finance the activities of the last ten months. But the remaining funds will be finished at the end of January. We knew a one-time contribution of that amount of money was insufficient to guarantee the life of the party, and we said that only 30,000 members, paying the "Western" membership fee every year, could ensure the survival, the ideas and the hopes of the radical party.

The 37,000 Italians who joined for 1993 have allowed what we call our "social reason" to survive: meeting and mutually supporting each other in a party which, through nonviolence, can create supranational individual law and obtain effective supranational institutional achievements capable of guaranteeing it.

Last 2 November in New York we presented the United Nations Secretary General Boutros Ghali with 75,000 signatures gathered throughout the world for the petitions for the immediate establishment of the International Tribunal to prosecute the crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia.

The inauguration today in The Hague of the International Tribunal is on the one hand a step in the direction of an international jurisdiction - i.e. the creation of a permanent tribunal for the prosecution of the crimes against humanity committed in every part of the world - and on the other hand a first result of our initiative. There is no turning back: the war criminals will have to be prosecuted and punished. Nonetheless, on thanking me and through me all signatories, Mr Boutros Ghali quite rightly underlined that the initiative could fail without the support of parliamentary groups, cultural personalities and non-governmental organs. Therefore, efforts need to be made so that that the Tribunal be given the technical and financial means to function and so that the rapists, the torturers and above all the "war lords" be prosecuted by the judging court.

I am writing these lines from Baltimore, where I shall be attending the "Transcontinental Conference on the harm Reduction Policy" organized by the "Drug Policy Foundation" and by the "European Cities on Drug Policy".

This afternoon, in front of the representatives and mayors that signed the Frankfurt resolution, I will illustrate the key points of our initiative on drugs, i.e. challenging the juridical and institutional instruments underlying the prohibitionist strategy. These are: the Vienna Convention of 1961/1972, the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances and the 1988 Convention on drug traffic. Moreover, saying that individual freedom is in jeopardy when a state wants to interfere with the personal lives of its citizens by penally prosecuting behaviours - such as drug-taking - which do not, per se, damage other citizens. Also, I will say that the radical party will continue supporting personalities such as Justavo Degrieff, procurator general of Columbia, or Jaime Paz Zamora, president of Bolivia, who believe that the war on drugs is a lost war, and that "legalization is the only possible solution today".

When you will receive this letter, the founding congress of the "International League for the abolition of the death penalty by 2000" will have taken place in Brussels. The aim of this League is promoting and organizing a step-by-step abolitionist campaign to be carried out in the coming seven years. It will identify the intermediate political and juridical objectives with the purpose of scrapping the death penalty from the penal regulations and the constitutions of all countries of the world.

In these months we have instead been unable to launch three other objectives decided by the resolution of the General Council of Sofia last July: an environmental initiative (the creation of a Pan-European community of major rivers and waterways; the right to information; the initiative to close down dangerous nuclear power plants and enhance energy efficiency, especially in the central-eastern part of Europe); the commitment in the parliaments and international organizations to support the circulation and progressive (formal) adoption of an International Language; the creation of a parliamentary newsletter and the setting up of the relative facilities at the various parliaments.

This not by lack of will, but by lack of money and resources.

Once again, we will endeavour to obtain the money we need from Italy, which is in the middle of a dire crisis which, if unchecked, could have dangerous effects. The party system and the use of public money for private purposes on the one hand, and the disrespect of the rules and of the law on the other, have brought about an explosive situation, where it is hard to foresee any democratic operativeness in the short and medium term.

Early in November we opened the membership campaign for the radical party of 1994 in Italy, by sending twenty issues of a daily newspaper to the 37,000 members for 1993. It was a considerable financial effort ($120,000) which, along with other means which we will need to devise during the campaign, we hope can help reconfirm the number of Italian members of 1993 also for 1994.

The appeal I am addressing, dear friends, is to guarantee your enrolment for 1994 as soon as possible. In 1993, some 5,000 non-Italian citizens, living in over 60 countries, have joined the party. They include 17 members of government, 19 members of the European parliament, 531 national MPs, 35 members of assemblies of non-recognized assemblies and representatives of over 80 national political formations. The quality of the commitment of each of them has allowed our ideas to live and circulate from Moscow to Ouagadougou, from Kiev to Tirana, from Bucharest to Zagreb, from Tbilisi to Sofia, in extremely difficult and often desperate situations.

I'm thinking in particular about our comrade and friend Mohamed Kresevljacovic, the mayor of Sarajevo, which is still under siege among the indifference of the rich and wealthy West. That same West is giving life, in this end of century, to evils we believed to be forever buried: extermination, war and fanaticism. With the exception of the 37,000 Italians, the West seems to ignore the Gandhian non-violent hope of the Transnational and Transparty Party, of the party of the right to life and of the life of rights.

Only by joining the radical party for 1994 can this hope be fulfilled.

I look forward to reading your names on the enrolment coupons and on the letters where you will confirm your decision to be part of the radical party wherever you may live.

It is a hope addressed to you and to myself.

Sincerely,

Emma Bonino