Sunday 17 April 2011

Stay Human












There are men who struggle for a day, and they are good.

There are others who struggle for a year, and they are better.

There are some who struggle many years, and they are better still.

But there are those who struggle all their lives, and these are the indispensible ones

(Bertolt Brecht)























Vittorio Arrigoni, killed in Gaza a few hours after being abducte at the age of 36, asked us every day at the end of his articles to:
Stay human

Every day for years, Vittorio recounted in words and images, independently and impartialy, the real life, the struggle for survival of 2 million people imprisoned in Gaza, besieged , bombarded, starved, humiliated.

Vittorio chose to stay in that hell to help those who couldn't leave and to break the silence of indifference about the Gaza Strip, which had become a black hole in reporting, in politics - a gigantic black mark on the ethics and collective morals, smeared with indifference and complicity in the horror.

Vittorio has been murdered. His death today tears aside the veil that covers the Strip and speaks. You can still speak to us all, Vittorio, even though you are no longer here. You can still show us that injustice is insupportable.

Vittorio lived in Gaza for years. He chose to stay there, with his eyes to witness and with his body to show solidarity, because he had seen the theft of land, of water, the demolition of houses, the destruction of farms and of fishing boats (he was injured while accompanying fishermen pescatori, trying to protect them with his body from the armed attacks of the Israeli army, just like Rachel Corrie, killed at Rafah because she put her body between a bulldozer and a house).

Vittorio had seen people with cancer sent back at the Eretz crossing between Gaza and Israel "because of security issues". He had seen Palestinians treated with disdain, beaten, humiliated. He had seen the desparation of the fishermen who were prevented from fishing and he had seen the desperation of the farms, clinging to an olive tree while a bulldozer dragged it away. He had seen women give birth behind a mound because it was impossible to get to the hospitatl. He had seen fear and terror in the eyes of children and he had seen their broken bodies. He had seen premature babies die because the electricity was cut off for 30 minutes at the hospital. He had met girls and boys who had known nothing but sorrow since they were born. He had felt the cold that penetrates the bones in the freezing Gaza nights, without heating, without light. He was in Gaza during operation Cast Lead (December 2008 - January 2009) and witnessed the destruction of thousands of houses and the illing of 3000 people, including hundreds of children, who certainly were not firing rockets.

“Stay human”, Vittorio always said. Wherever we are from, we are part of the same community. Every man, every woman, every child on this planet, wherever he or she is born and lives, has the right to life and dignity. The same rights that we claim for ourselves belong to all the others, without exception.

We embrace the familiy, the volunteers of the ISM, he friends, the young people of Gaza who mobilised to try to save his life.

Let's stay human even if all around humanity seems absent.



Stay human for him, Vittorio Arrigoni, just, passionate, human


I am sure that the greatest contribution we can offer to the memory of Vittorio is to continue to work to support the population of Gaza and of Palestine in there struggle for freedom, justice and human rights

Mairead Maguire (Nobel peace laureate)



Thursday 14 April 2011




The gaze of women.

L'Aquila: Everyone has looked, but who has really seen it?

The committee Donne terre-mutate launches a national encounter.

To bring women from all over Italy to see L’Aquila as it is.

To smell the scents and touch the broken remnents and to hold hands.



Donne terre-mutate Call us to L'Aquila 7 and May

www.laquiladonne.com

Saturday 9 April 2011

An Arab, a Jew, a human. We remember Julian Mer Khamis









Juliano Mer Khamis, Israeli actor and director, was the son of Arna, a Jewish Israeli woman, founder of the theatre school in the Jenin refugee camp, and of Saliba Khamis, a Palestinian from Haifa.











In 2006 he opened the Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp, as a school of theatre for Palestinian girls and boys, as a space for expression and freedom where they could “Find a new horizon, preserve their values of liberation and not fall into the trap set by the occupation to become the mirror image of their enemy. But for this it's necessary to construct a strong identity that doesn't give way to sendiments of revenge, that is based on universal values, culture, consciousness: If someone kills your daughter, and you have the strength to not kill his daughter, you have the strength to resist and to maintain your values. Then you will be able to beat them because you are stronger as a human being”.

For Juliano, this was the real struggle against the Israeli occupation because "What occupation is doing is destroying society”. But it was also a struggle against all fundamentalism to "build on the basis not of tradition or religion, but of freedom, of democratic structures, of a high level of education, of free opinion, of culture... To combat tradition is to combat the occupation”.

This commitment to freedom, starting with children, was an annoyance to those who did not share his dream of being“the connection, a door, a window”.


On 4 April, Juliano was killed by an armed man, his face covered, who had waited at the entrance to the refugee camp.

We will keep alive his memory and his dream of freedom

Friday 1 April 2011

War is never the solution


Operation Odyssey Dawn in Libya started with the usual pretext: to defend the civilian population - this time from the attacks by the forces of Gaddafi, up to a month ago, the firm ally of those who now bomb him.

We've seen the results of the military interventions and of the lies told to us about Iraq and Afghanistan: thousands of civilians killed and, after so many years, peace is still far away.

As the democratic organisations in Afghanistan say: “For the price of one day of war, we could have built all the schools and hospitals that we need and we could emerge from underdevelopment”.

This intervention is also in violation of article 11 of the Italian constition which repudiates war, and in which it is specified that not only wars of aggression (an offense against the freedom of other peoples) but also war as tool for resolving international conflicts: even if we are right in a conflict, our fundamental law prohibits us from imposing our point of view by force of arms and instead suggests that we use all diplomatic and legal instruments.




And we have many questions


  • Why has the international community only now realised that Gaddafi is the head of an authoritarian regime?
  • Why did the Italian government sign a economic-military treaty with Libya, which it has not cancelled with the necessary parliamentary vote?
  • Why did Italy sell arms to Libya?
  • Why did the Security Council of the UN vote for a resolution that allows anyone to go and bomb Libya, rather than defend the civilian population by sending an interposition force of civilian observers to verify the truce declared on March 18.?
  • Why did the UN choose ex-colonial countries with large-scale economic interests in Libya to defend the rebels rather than countries that are really neutral in the conflict?
  • Why does the fate of the Libyan opposition provoke so much international indignation and the intervention of NATO while this doesn't happen for other countries (Palestine, Bahrain, Sudan) ?
  • Why has the Saudi regime sided with the Libyan rebels while repressing any attempt at democratisation in their own country and sending soldiers to repress protests in Bahrain(45 dead in the last few days)?
  • Why do solidarity and respect for human rights not apply to the thousands of people who have been washed up on our shores in flight from poverty, conflict and dictatorship?

We are not indifferent to the fate of the Libyan population, just as we were not indifferent to the fate of migrants imprisoned in Gaddafi's camps as part of the treaty that our government with the support of the opposition signed with Libya and reconfirmed yesterday by parliament to allow deportation of immigrants to Libya. However, we have seen that military interventions are bound to fail from our experience of Kosovo (now a large US base) Somalia, Iraq, and above all Afghanistan where none of the declared humanitarian aims have been realised.

We consider humanitarian intervention to be a complete deception, not just because by definition we are against any war but because past and present experience prove it.

At the same time, migrants arrived at Lampeduas are abandoned in inhuman conditions, together with the local population, by the authorities who should take care of them, out of respect for those human rights that the "defend" only with weapons.

We refuse the military response to conflict.
We oppose the use of Italian military bases for this intervention.
We call for a real and effective arms blockade to all parties in the war.
We call for a cessation of the bombing.




War cannot be humanised. It can only be abolished
Albert Einstein