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30/04/2003 | Letter by Olivier Dupuis to Marco Pannella and copy to all members of the Transnational Radical Party

Brussels, 30 April 2003 Dear Marco, in the last few months and the last few days (and even in the last few hours) it has been my lot to hear some quite incredible things from you, either directly or indirectly. Incredible not only because they are not credible (as well as not being true), but above all because of your continual resort to gratuitous accusations that quite clearly have no basis in reality. While not wishing to deny all my failings, which in any case you and everyone else were perfectly aware of well before the Tirana Congress, it seems to me that at this point I must draw the necessary conclusions, which is why I would like to inform you and all the members of the Transnational Radical Party that if this is the reality of the internal organisation and political relations in which I have to work, a reality that you - not only you, but mainly you - have brought about, then it is clear that I can no longer continue to carry out my duties as party secretary. The matter is clearly and above all political, despite your attempts to pass off a “personal” and psychological (or even psychiatric) reading of my unease and my reactions. This is not the first time I have pointed this out. I did so at the last meeting of the “Radicali italiani” Committee; I had already done so on previous occasions, like for example on the occasion of a meeting of the party “senate” which you - with the support of very few others - turned into a full-fledged “trial” against me. There is an unwritten principle in the organisation and inner workings of the Radical “entity”, a principle whose historical sense and political reality I recognise, according to which the party Secretary (and if I remember rightly in the last fifteen years you have almost always proposed the name of the party Secretary to Congress) must enjoy your trust. There is, however, another principle that ensues from the first, although you seem to have lost sight of it: that you too, Marco Pannella, must enjoy the trust of the Secretary, both in a personal and a political sense. For both these reasons, therefore, the office of Secretary cannot possibly continue to be held by a person who you consider (and who knows he is considered by you) to be a cross between a scoundrel and a born liar, as you said, in my absence, at a meeting - official though not public - of the Radical group at the European Parliament. On my part, it is not only a matter of resigning from my post for reasons of serious political differences. It is also a matter of putting an end to a pretence, of restoring the significance of an “empty” office whose duties I am no longer able to fulfil, neither in a formal nor a material sense. I am the only Radical Secretary, as far as I remember, who has no power, either directly or indirectly, to make use of the party resources (who has no real power to authorise spending, who is not able to use the party mailing-lists, etc.), who has no real power except to take the individual initiatives he thinks necessary, but who continues to be accused systematically - not only by you, but mainly by you - of having most of the responsibility, or rather the blame, for the current situation. There are undoubtedly political differences between us, differences that have become increasingly deep, and in which it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between “internal” and “external”, between things that do not work in our internal life and the effects of this systematic dis-organisation on our external initiatives. But I would like to make it clear - publicly - that I “differ” above all from your attempt to depict my behaviour as “monstrous”, to represent my initiatives as conceived not only without you, but systematically “against” you. My office as Secretary now no longer serves me to fulfil the duties laid down by the statute, but to allow you to exercise absolute, irresponsible control over them. Contrary to what you may think, I have never claimed or desired to “save the party from Pannella”; I am happy with whatever choice you make, whether you choose to be or behave as an autonomous figure, free from statutory responsibilities, with an almost “external” relationship with the Radical bodies and organs, or whether you choose to hold offices with statutory responsibilities yourself. What I cannot accept, very simply, is having to answer for what you do, in turn opting out and then returning to the fold, continually exhibiting that fact that you are external to the organised Radical structures but at the same time remaining the beginning and the end of every single thing organised by the party. I do not think I have not been understanding enough, or even flexible enough, over the years. From 1995 to 2001 I was the Secretary of a party that used almost all its financial and human resources on the Italian political and electoral front, following an ambitious “Italo-centric” design; of a transnational party whose statutory life was frozen, which was increasingly weakened in terms of organisation and increasingly abandoned, also from within, in terms of political initiative; of a party which generated single-issue organisations (No Peace Without Justice, Hands Off Cain, etc. ) that were assigned far greater human and financial resources than the party itself; of a party which was run for five years with a highly original lack of respect for the requirements of the statute, failing to hold congresses - despite my many appeals - but placing itself permanently at the service of your designs in Italy; of a party whose very nature was reduced to that of the foreign section of the Italian party, seriously though inevitably compromising its real transdivisional nature. This is very different, in my opinion, from the decision by some non-Radicals, the members of other parties, to take out membership of our party, either out of respect, sympathy, or interest, with clear benefits for the party and also for themselves. If I have remained in office despite these factors it has not only been out of complaisance, but out of the recognition of a “political priority” which in the face of an ambitious design under your leadership could for a certain period (albeit a rather long period) have involved the temporary abandonment or the substantial reduction of certain transnational priorities and of the transnational party itself. Having said this, and therefore not only admitting but also supporting your leadership, to attribute this “political and organisational suffocation” of the transnational party to my failings is simply untrue. In the six months between the Geneva Congress and the Tirana Congress - that is during the time of your “Presidency” - the party spent more on the transnational project than I was able to spend not just in the next six months but in the whole of the five previous years. And yet I am the person alleged to have destroyed the institutional framework of the party and the transnational perspective. As far as specific political differences are concerned - on single points of our initiative, that is - it seems to me that the campaign on Iraq and the non-campaign on Chechnya are, in their own ways, exemplary. *** Your running of the “Iraq campaign” was marked by the exclusion of any form of real political debate, and by the constant, furious recourse to the charge of technical and organisational responsibilities. When there was any debate, it was more about mailing than about political choices, more about “numbers” than about the meaning of the initiative. Even in public, you did not hide your dissatisfaction - at the work of a section which in any case does not answer to me, but either directly or indirectly to you - but you said nothing about all the work done from the moment we drafted the text of the appeal with Gianfranco; you always excluded not so much the abstract possibility of criticism (no-one was actually denied the right to speak) but the concrete response to political objections on the way the campaign was run, on its Italo-centric character, on the lack of international perspective of the appeal. I realise that you may have judged some of the points that I and other people made to be tiresomely irrelevant, beginning with the criticism of the uncommitted, feeble and in many ways cowardly position of the Italian government and of many sectors of the Italian parliament, despite the fact that they supported your proposal, at least symbolically. I made this point in public at the last meeting of the Radicali Italiani Committee, and in the section of your reply that you devoted to the “psychological analysis” of my character you didn’t even mention the political points I had made, including this one. You can’t turn round now, therefore, and say that it was my failings that prevented us from capitalising on the success of the initiative. *** Even more significant has been your approach over the last year to the Chechen issue: an irritating, almost deliberately flaunted “stop-and-go”, with no end of contradictory actions, omissions, statements and denials. There is no point going over it all again now, partly because it is obvious that our memories will have different nuances, and partly because I have no intention of getting bogged down in the never-ending “historical reconstructions” which you are much better at than me and which are ultimately completely irrelevant. The truth is that our official position on the Chechen question (the Tirana Congress was marked in a significant manner, as you will remember, by the words of Umar Khanbiev and by your reply to his speech) is contradicted by the total cancellation of the question from the agenda of the party’s priorities and initiatives. Despite my repeated requests - and the implicit and explicit commitment which I believe we all took on by making the Chechen question one of our priorities - we have not spent a penny on it (apart from the not inconsiderable sums I have had to spend out of my own pocket). The diffidence and arrogance with which you have dismissed all requests and all initiatives, including those made public or even publicised, is quite simply incredible. We need only think of your treatment of the recent peace plan proposed by the Chechen Foreign Minister for a United Nations administration, which I had largely revealed in the Chianciano seminar last December - without the slightest objection or critical observation by any of the 35 people taking part in the seminar - which after its official presentation was made available in full on our website, and which was subsequently discussed even during the last meeting of the Radicali Italiani Committee. And you, up to that moment, had not said a word. But as soon as I - with the help of several people who had shown an interest in the proposal - drew up the text of an appeal that merely supports a plan whose essential points you had known for months, you saw fit to block it, on the occasion of a meeting (or rather of another trial in absentia) held while I was in Korea with the EP Delegation, arguing that the initiative would be both inopportune and political “madness” in that a “UN administration” in a part of the territory of a country that sits on the United Nations Security Council would not be credible. So should we stop working on Tibet and East Turkestan because they, too, have the misfortune to be colonised by a member of the Security Council? To Maurizio Turco, Danilo Quinto, Daniele Capezzone and Sergio Stanzani your “position” on Chechnya probably seems crystal clear. Frankly, I do not understand it. Personally I do not believe that this campaign carries any particular risk of a rift with the present government, but above all I do not understand why on earth the risk of a rift on international issues with this government - or with any government, for that matter - can make this campaign inopportune, if, that is, it can be opportune to break off, suspend, close down or scale down a campaign whose aim is to try to help to stop a genocide. What, or who, do you not trust? Me, because I have an “obsession” with Chechnya just to annoy you, or the Chechens, who according to you are all - except Umar, the only one, as far as I know, you have ever met - part of the terrorist drift of the Chechen resistance? Or maybe you don’t trust a Secretary who trusts certain Chechen interlocutors? I hear that you now want to discuss the Chechnya issue. But there is little to discuss now, above all when your request for a discussion is just another attempt to put a brake on action. Why don’t you make a “radically correct” proposal on Chechnya, preferably one that doesn’t serve only to appear on the Italian TV news and exhibit Umar like a Madonna in the next election campaign? *** As for the priorities you proposed during the meeting of the extended executive of Radicali Italiani, it is not clear what you want from the transnational party, given that the political platform of RI is based around the issues of the World Organisation of Democracies, the Montagnards and the “Italian case”. On the Italian case, there is nothing to discuss. Just as swallows tell us that spring is on its way, the “Italian case” tells us that elections are on their way, and will mark the analysis of the election results. The same is true of the Montagnards, who have taken the place, in this season’s priorities, of the liberal, free-market, libertarian revolution that was the reason behind the birth of “Radicali Italiani”: “reform of the pension system”, “Article 18”, “electoral reform”, “public debt”, and so on. It is true that Kok Ksor and the other 200 Montagnard members of the TRP were intelligent enough to realise that the party could be a good platform in Europe and at the United Nations. A massive advance, without a doubt, compared to what we did with them and for them when we began with Marco Perduca, four or five years ago, to give them a hand. A massive advance in which the party has invested heavily, in particular with the work of Matteo Mecacci, who in the last year and more has devoted much of his time to the issue in New York, where you sent him without consulting the party organs (or at least without consulting me). When I felt that there was a need for a detailed debate on the campaign for the World Organisation of Democracies, a debate I requested on several occasions following the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq, you and others responded by making it a priority for Radicali Italiani. As if to say, there is nothing to discuss. But now that the question of the WOD has become a priority for “Radicali Italiani”, it raises another problem: that of our position in the Italian arena. Two years after the Berlusconi government came to power, is there really any sense in making the World Organisation of Democracies and the freedom of the Montagnards the priorities of an Italian political force born out of a long battle for the liberal revolution in Italy? Is there any sense in this, except perhaps - as some people have suggested - to enable Radicali Italiani to act as a temporary substitute, given my dreadful leadership of the party, on transnational issues? Personally I do not believe that temporary substitution is a good idea. If there is a serious political problem, replacement is the only solution. *** To come to Italy, is there any sense in prolonging, contrary to our official position - “we are in opposition to the government and in opposition to the opposition” - a long honeymoon, consisting more of compliant omission than of explicit support, with a government whose positions on many issues are unacceptable: on China, which occupies and oppresses Tibet, East Turkestan and South Mongolia and denies the liberty and rights of 1.3 billion Chinese, on Russia, which is carrying out genocide in Chechnya, on Tunisia with its dictator Ben Ali, on the slow but inexorable Japanisation of Italy, on the pension system, the rigidity of the labour market, the health system, and electoral reform, issues that it has failed to address, on the question of drugs, where it is about to return to the worst policies of the 1980s, and more generally on the idea of returning to a conservative normalisation of Italian politics made up of state interference and private complicity with the new system of power? Above all, however, is this policy of support for the government, however bland, really compatible with the unqualified denunciation of the Italian regime, the new “Italian plague” which is already infecting the rest of Europe? Is the definition of the “regime” as the ideology and culture of the ruling classes really compatible with a policy that increasingly chooses the official representatives of this “regime” as the interlocutors of the Radical movement? Is the “alternative” really between a policy of active tolerance of the government and the exclusion of any serious attempt at dialogue with the opposition on one hand, and a policy of unqualified denunciation of the Italian regime, and therefore of both the opposition and the government, and the preclusion of any possibility of joining forces with either side on the other? What’s more, if up to now we have been so much arm-in-arm with the government majority, why couldn’t we have been part of it right from the beginning, free to pull out if and when we felt it to be necessary? All this raises the problem of the relationship between “Radicali Italiani” and the Transnational Radical Party, or rather of the point of having two political bodies. Is there still any sense, apart from a strictly internal “sense”, in keeping two political bodies that deal -or do not deal - with the same issues in the same ways? Should we not perhaps ask ourselves whether we have not ended up living on our past? Whether we have not become parasitically reliant on the friendship and respect of some exponents of the world of politics and of the media - that is of representatives of the regime - for the positions taken up in solitude, mainly by you, over forty years? Are these questions not among those to which we ought to try to find an answer? Are these questions not more relevant than those which you have been raising for months with insults, criticisms, and lies aimed at me? It seems a long time since you always used to say that you were, if anything, a “controlling shareholder”. After that came the period of the “golden share”. Now it is a case of "ownership”, with a few residual rights for party members, who at most can aspire to be “tenants”. As I said in a previous letter addressed to the treasurer and, in copy, to you and a few other people (a letter which you, however, saw fit to publish, though censuring the part regarding my views on Chechnya and on the Berlusconi government), this process is turning your leadership from political leadership into a matter of internal power alone. And it is making you lazy, uninterested in new ideas that are developing in the rest of the world, and intolerant of anything that you believe might contradict this new form of leadership. Your attitude towards me from Tirana onwards has been marked by one constant aim: to prevent me from giving any semblance of organised activity to the party. My organisation of the Geneva Congress, my attempt to bring people and ideas I have tried to develop were labelled as a form of internal electoral “cammellaggio”. Those who worked actively for Geneva were regarded with suspicion, while those who worked actively for Tirana, in the same way (and it was the same people) were benevolently absolved from excessive zeal. After the Tirana Congress you advised me against setting up a board, despite the fact that it was required by the statute, as well as being indispensable to allow us to work together. In going along with your advice it was me, above all, who was wrong. You later decided that this board should be a joint direction consisting of the Treasurer, the President and the Secretary, but ultimately made it impossible for us to constitute it. We decided, in your presence and with your agreement, on a reorganisation of the party mailing lists in order to create one single list - which could then be expanded - with the Italian list run from Rome and the transnational list run from Brussels. Four months after all the lists were transferred to Rome, the part of the “reform” regarding the responsibility of Brussels for the transnational mailing list was abolished. With the result that you now have personal control over the transnational mailing list. Last week, I once again proposed to Danilo Quinto and Sergio Stanzani that we should organise a seminar and then a General Council in mid-May. On the basis of arguments that escape me Quinto replied that the whole thing was not a good idea, while Stanzani said that the seminar should be held after the General Council. I now discover that in your opinion that General Council cannot be convened because it wouldn’t reach a plenum without 25 members of parliament; I find it interesting, in the current internal situation, that you or anything else could think that this is a particularly alarming departure from the legality of the party, and that it would be better not to convene the G.C. at all and therefore not to establish the only forum for discussion with our “foreign” G.C. members, simply because there are not the 25 parliamentarians necessary to complete its composition. Very soon I will probably discover that I am also to blame for not having set up a board, though I (and I alone) proposed such a step on several occasions, while no-one took any notice. We have reached the point where it is possible to do anything in this party outside the prescriptions of the statute - from extraordinary executive committees such as the one in the lead-up to the Geneva Congress to de facto triumvirates (Secretary, Treasurer and President as a single organ) that you recently proposed again. But to do things “simply” according to the statute is always impossible or inopportune. As you will recall, I did not originally stand for election in Tirana. I was satisfied because it seemed to me that despite the insults and the abuse you had hurled at me since the Radicali Italiani Congress last year I had managed in any case to make a contribution to the party and its battles during those months. I did not understand why you put me forward as a candidate in Tirana. I accepted because I thought I would be able to get things done, and because I thought it was also an act of political generosity on your part to which I ought to respond with equal generosity. I realise that I was ingenuous. And I apologise for this to the party members. I think I now understand things more clearly, and for this reason I do not believe that circumstances permit me to continue to be the Secretary of the Transnational Radical Party. This is not a tragedy. I feel disappointment at a human level, and sadness for the important things that the party could (and should) do and that will probably never be done. But no-one can do the impossible. I came to the party just over 22 years ago. I didn’t know who you were. I found out much later. From the moment I met you I have always recognised your political leadership. The other type of leadership, which now seems to take up all your energy, I am not interested in. I am not interested in sharing it. I am also aware of how ruthless you can be. But I am deeply convinced that the party - and you yourself - must restore the conditions of organised life suitable for a party of “shareholder members”, first of all by returning all the economic and entrepreneurial bodies in the Radical area, whose boards include persons directly elected by the party Congress, to a “Radical foundation”. To assume the responsibilities that derive from being a “charismatic” leader is more of a problem for you (but more useful for the party and its members) than to continue to be the “dominus” of a party organised around the charismatic model but in which you no longer assume the charismatic role, but merely devote yourself to internal power. There are obviously many other things that could be said. But I will stop here. In case there may be any misunderstanding, I repeat once again that I hereby resign, and in doing so consequently convene an extraordinary Congress that will be able to accept my resignation. I hope that you will allow this congress to be held. I will obviously not be coming to it as a candidate, nor will I be willing to accept any candidacy. As far as I am concerned, there is no turning back. Before and after putting me forward as a candidate you have never failed to recall that I am a good militant and a good parliamentarian, I have been a terrible secretary. This problem (for me) and this alibi (for you) now no longer exist. Best wishes, Olivier

OTHER LANGUAGES

Lettera di Olivier Dupuis a Marco Pannella e per conoscenza agli iscritti al Partito Radicale Transnazionale