Shadow Behind the Edge
All human beings are born free and with equal dignity and rights. They have a mind and a conscience and they shall interact with spirit of brotherhood.” This is the wording of the 1st article of the Universal Declaration of the Human Rights drawn up in 1945. Mankind and its dignity of individual was defined a san insuperable borderline, a fixed point which cannot be left out of consideration, a starting point from which everything must come from and develop.Seventy-five
years later, these words sound as a far echo. The force of those words
seams dissolved, thwarted by the distance between the ideal and the
actual conditions. The verb becomes an empty frame, a nonsense, without
the disrupting power for which it had been pronounced. The
ideas, even the most noble ones, to be able to have the weight they
deserve, must necessarily be put into practice. The ideas end up
confined in the world of utopias, and utopias are too far away from the real world to be used as a point of reference. Thus,
even the 1st Article of the Universal Declaration of the Human Rights
looses its actual value when the reality it refers to denies it,
ignores it, forgets it. This is why the banks break up, the words
crumble, and the rights are lost in actual living everything becomes
licit and possible. The
traffic of human beings and the condition of refugees everywhere in the
world are a witness of the distance between the ideal values and the
values actually applied in reality More than a next target, a mirage
difficult to reach. Escaping. Running away toward the north where, it is said, the
rights are respected and people still have a value. Therefore, the
desert, the heat, the thirst, the human being traffickers, the prisons,
the laws against immigration, the police. And then the imprisonment centres, hunger, forced repatriation, the refugee centres: all walls that these persons have to pull down to be able to be free again. The
Eritrean dictatorship forces thousands of persons to abandon their
country, their village, their family. They run away trusting in a
better future: from Sudan, through Egypt, Israel and Syria. To reach
Europe. To be trafficked, exchanges, sold various times to the traffickers, raped, beaten, and transported as merchandise in red-hot container through the Sudan desert. Most of them end up in prison -
Epyptian or Lybian lagers. The only alternative to imprisonment is the
refugee centres in Ethiopia. Here, thanks to the intervention of UNHCR and above all of dott.sa Fessaha of the Gandhi NGO, these people can live in a decent way. In the centre of Mai Aini, consisting of mud and metal plate houses, tents, emergency shelters, the Eritrean refugees built schools for their children, small handicraft and commercial as well as meeting points for the whole community. In the Mai Aini and in the Mai Sebri centers, 45000
persons are sheltered. Many of them have been living there for more
than three years, waiting for being welcomed by a foreign country,
which will never happen.
The hope to be free men again in Eritrea is the hope with which these
people plans the future, imagines and dreams about it. To exorcize the
present talking about a different future without walls and bars, means
giving back a meaning and strength to the words, granting
them new energy. In place like these, in the middle of dust, poverty,
suffering, mankind dignity meaning is built up again. The Declaration
of Humn Rights is not etched on polished marble s labs, but scratched
with the nails on skew and rusted plated, held together by a few twisted links and by the indestructible volition of a few persons of good will.