Léo Matarasso

in Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos (January 1991)

How can an association such as ours, which has set itself the task of “fighting for the right of peoples to determine their own destiny” (art. 2 of the statutes), not feel challenged by the scale of the national demands of the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union? We are being asked from all sides to state our position on these movements, which threaten to break up not only the Soviet Union but also countries such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.
It is not for me to respond alone to such a question, which calls for a wide-ranging debate within the League. Suffice it to recall two essential principles formulated by the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples, which our League helped to proclaim on 4 July 1976 in Algiers.
The first of these principles is that “all peoples have an imprescriptible and inalienable right to self-determination” (art. 5 of the Declaration).
The second is that “all peoples whose fundamental rights are seriously violated have the right to assert them, in particular by political or trade union struggle, and even, as a last resort, by the use of force” (art. 28 of the Declaration).
Between these two principles lies the distance that separates the recognition of a right from the exercise of that right. This situation is therefore somewhat different from the struggles for the liberation of colonial peoples, struggles in which the League was heavily involved.
It was in a context of a general awakening to democracy, i.e. to internal self-determination, that the peoples of these countries were called upon to decide on their status (maintenance of things as they are, autonomy, federation, independence). But it is also against a backdrop of general economic collapse that they must consider the serious risks to which they would be exposed if the current system were to be undermined.
This is why I think it would be a good idea for the French section of the L.I.D.L.P. to organise a seminar devoted to analysing the current situation in Eastern Europe from the point of view of peoples’ rights.
Matarasso, Léo
in: Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos (January 1991)