Oppressed. Subservient to backward societies. In need of help to free themselves. This is the perception that is still widespread in much of the western world with respect to the women who inhabit the Arab world. Women who have instead written fundamental pages of feminism in their countries, protagonists of a history that is often little known in the West.
In the contexts in which Un Ponte Per has been working for over 30 years, we have met and supported hundreds of women struggling to break down the walls of stereotypes and oppression; to be self-determined, free, participating. We have met them in Iraq, in Syria, in the refugee camps of Lebanon. And we are seeing them in Palestine, resisting brutal genocidal aggression but continuing to fight to live and bear witness.
We met them determined and free: 'free to break'.
With them in mind, last December we launched a campaign with this name, dedicated to Syria.
On the occasion of this 8 March, we want to relaunch and expand it. Thinking of all the women we have met on our path, and first of all the Palestinian women. Each of them represents herself and together a collective. Each of them has a name and a story, but represents many names and infinite stories. These stories we have tried to tell, thanks to Rita Petruccioli's beautiful illustrations.
8 March has never been, nor will it ever be, an anniversary. It is for us another day of struggle, which we share with millions of women around the world.
I took part in the Revolution from day one. Together with my comrades, we put up the first feminist tent in Tahrir Square,' says Zahra. "I came to the square as a citizen, a woman and a mother to claim my rights. Our tent gave a voice to those who had none and fought for all Iraqi women who demanded a life worthy of being called one.
Un Ponte Per has been present in Iraq for over 30 years. In our long journey alongside civil societies, we have dedicated much of our work to women, to fight gender-based violence together, to support their participation in public life, to support women activists in building networks that continue to fight to win their space and their right to self-determination. Together with them we produced, among other things, the booklet 'The Voice of the Revolution', which tells the story of the protesters who took to the streets in 2019-2020.
"I wanted my sons and daughters to continue their studies, and to have a better life than mine," Asmaa says. "The regulations imposed by Daesh during its occupation transformed and limited our lives. Now the situation is changing. Thanks to my shop, I am a completely new woman".
Un Ponte Per has been working in Syria since 2015. Over these years we have met so many women and worked with them in extensive protection programmes, to ensure safe spaces from gender-based violence, access to education, economic independence, medical care. We dedicated the first 'Free to Break' campaign to them in December 2023.
"With basketball my life changed, before I had nothing to do but go to school and then come home," says Ameena. "I never let go of the ball, even when I walk down the street. It makes me feel strong and safe."
Un Ponte Per has been present in Lebanon since 1997. We work mainly in the Palestinian refugee camps, guaranteeing the right to education and health to Palestinian and Syrian-Palestinian refugee children through distance support programmes. We support the Palestinian Youth Club, a group of 80 Palestinian athletes in the camp, and together we built the first sports centre in Shatila
"Hello everyone. I am Bisan from Gaza. And I am still alive."
"Today my heart broke once again. My little girl asked me to show her the photos from when she was born. I realised they were all in our PCs, left under the rubble of our house. I won't be able to show her the photos. I will never see them again'.
"I know I should have left. But I couldn't leave my Gaza alone."
Un Ponte Per does not operate directly in Palestine. We did not agree to submit to control and blackmail by the Israeli authorities, and we have always believed that the Palestinian issue needed a political solution, as well as humanitarian intervention. We have been in Palestine for years as volunteers and activists. Following the unprecedented emergency created by the Israeli offensive against the Gaza Strip, we launched the 'Water for Gaza' campaign in February 2024, to support our local partner - the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) - and bring clean water to the Gaza Strip.
Thanks to the 'Free to Break' campaign: immediate care and protection for women and girls survivors of violence.
Cases of gender-based violence tragically increase in war contexts. Lower wages, unsafe working environments, reduced access to education expose women to less access to services and early marriages. All factors that increase the risk of gender-based violence.
Un Ponte Per has created safe spaces in Syria to provide protection for women and girls survivors of gender-based violence and child marriage. And supported clinics to ensure reproductive health and psychosocial support.
Lasu, Protection Specialist in Raqqa with Un Ponte Per, says:
"We work to ensure protection and rights for children exposed to violence, child labour, early marriage.We help them to identify the risks and provide them with the tools they need to report incidents of violence and abuse, especially prevalent among girls and young women".
In Syria, women and girls pay the highest price for the war. They are the first to lose the opportunity to study, to be exposed to violence, to be discriminated against. And the last to be supported.
In North East Syria after 13 years of conflict still 2 million people are in need. The emergency affects women and girls differently and contributes to gender-based violence, economic inequalities, child marriage and child labour. Defending the rights of women and girls in Syria is crucial to ensure protection and active participation in the public life of their country.
Un Ponte Per has been present in Syria since 2015 to bring care, medicine and protection to all and sundry, rebuilding a free, public health system and providing essential health services such as field clinics, hospitals, training and protection for the mental and physical wellbeing of the population, particularly women and children.
"They experienced things that even we adults could not have managed. When we arrived in Raqqa they didn't play with their schoolmates, they didn't even have friends, they didn't trust anyone. They were dark and shy.Today they smile and manage to form relationships with their peers,' says Nada, the mother of Mariam (8), Bissan (11) and Ghazal (13).
Syria continues to be squeezed between a humanitarian and economic crisis. Humanitarian needs are at an all-time high after more than 12 years of war and in the wake of the devastating double earthquakes that hit the region in February. According to the UN, nearly 12 million people - more than half of Syria's population - do not have enough food and another 2.9 million are at risk of starvation.
In 2020 Un Ponte Per opened 3 Safe Spaces in Raqqa to provide safe places, protection and psychological wellbeing for women and children.
In our Safe Spaces, anti-violence and child protection workers coordinate to ensure a specialised psycho-social support pathway, depending on the case.
In particular, thanks to the 'Free to Break' campaign:
Un Ponte Per launched the 'Free to Break' fundraising campaign in December 2023 to ensure child protection, economic participation and access to care for women and girls in Syria in the three Safe Spaces in Raqqa and in clinics and hospitals across North East Syria.
The campaign was created in response to the crisis of women's and girls' rights in the country: in Raqqa, 60 per cent of boys and girls do not go to school; every year, 25 per cent of girls in the country are forced to get married before they turn 18; only 7 out of 100 women survivors of gender-based violence have access to psychological support and protection services; the health system is collapsing and especially in camps for displaced people, health is an emergency.
The 'Free to Break' campaign has enabled us to support Syrian girls and women who, amidst many obstacles, are today breaking down walls of stereotypes and oppression to rebuild their dignity and determine their own future.
by Fabio Alberti, founder of Un Ponte Per
A grey veil seems to cover Kathmandu when you see it from the porthole. Upon landing, one realises that it is not fog, but pollution. Kathmandu is one of the most polluted cities in the world, due to its location in a basin and the development of civil motorisation. A continuous darting of motorbikes slaloming between pedestrians, small Korean and Chinese cars and old Bees converted into collective taxis. A continuous traffic jam. Apart from this, Kathmandu is a marvellous city, immersed in a restrained spirituality that accompanies the lives of Nepalese men and women and made manifest by the omnipresence of temples and small temples, Hindu, Buddhist, Indo-Buddhist, dedicated to a vast pantheon of gods, including a living goddess. There are more temples in Kathmandu than churches in Rome, in a country where mixed marriages are still celebrated without one of the spouses having to change religion. A country governed by a leftist front, Marxist Leninists and Maoists included, but where the privatisation of education and healthcare imposed by the International Monetary Fund can be felt in the streets by the huge number of private clinics and schools and agencies for study abroad, and where the inhabitants of the shacks on the river bank are threatened with collective eviction in honour of the city's 'beautification' process imposed by the new tourist vocation suggested by the World Bank, as a way of development after the reconstruction in large part by the 2015 earthquake.
Kathmandu thus welcomes, from 15 to 19 February, with its contradictions and thanks to a powerful mobilisation of trade union forces and the NGO Federation of Nepal - thousands of affiliated NGOs working in all fields, almost a state apparatus - the thousands of activists convened here from all over the world and especially from South Asia. Perhaps more than a World Social Forum, in fact, this was a continental forum: from the Indian subcontinent there were truly masses present, numerous delegations, made up of activists, but also simple participants in the many social movements that animate the political life of Nepal, India, Pakistan, the island of Ceylon, Bangladesh. And then presences, albeit more limited, from the Philippines, Korea, Africa. The European and American presences are almost symbolic. From Italy, in addition to Un Ponte Per, there were Legambiente, committed since the network to the defence of the high mountains, as well as Unione Inquilini and a few local organisations. They were three days of well-attended discussions, conferences, presentation of projects, convergence on common actions: over 400 meetings on a very wide range of topics, all of a high level and many reporting on social struggles. As in the style of the Social Forums, no official conclusions, but many statements on different topics that together make up the political programme of the possible alternative. The forum was organised in a park in the centre of the city, with large tents hosting the seminars, around a large central square surrounded by small stalls offering food, local handicrafts, most often related to projects to strengthen women's economic autonomy, as well as documentation material on activities and issues. A spatial organisation that favoured exchange and encounters between the people who swarmed that space, moving from one seminar to the next. Here the word socialism is still pronounced with a strong sense, but even more pronounced is the word colonialism, which recurs systematically and in different forms and adjectives in almost every debate. What Europe has put under the trapet by pretending to forget where its wealth comes from is still on the table here and waiting to be addressed. An example of this was the seminar on the 'Decolonisation of Development Aid' in which we, as Un Ponte Per, participated in the run-up to a campaign to establish a day of remembrance for the victims of colonialism.
"We don't want your aid any more, nor do we want to submit to the conditionalities you impose in order to grant it, including gratitude," it was said. "Instead, you still have to repair the damage of colonisation, to which we must add the damage of climate debt"; "It must be the recipients and not the so-called donors who decide where and when to allocate funds". A radical stance especially against aid from states and the World Bank, which often entails the obligation to privatise and liberalise economies. But Western NGOs have not been spared either. The South, at least this South present here, which has grown and networked thanks to the World Social Forum process, is aware that it does not need to go to the Europeans for lessons and that it often knows more than the 'kids who, with no specific knowledge of the place, come here and think they can give directions'. It is clear here that the relationship between northern and southern NGOs must change. Also climate change, another pervasive issue; just as pervasive now is the damage that the populations of these continents are suffering and expect to suffer as a result of the continual rise in the climate, mainly caused by European and US industrialisation, which have discharged far more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than they would have been 'entitled' to in a fair way. Here the issue of global warming is not only a question of the policies to be followed in order to avoid the continuous rise in temperature, an issue on which the social movements are very committed, but it is also an issue of climate justice that claims the existence of an ecological debt of the West to the global South that must be paid off and that is in addition to the colonial debt. War, on the other hand, has not been much of a topic. The impression is that the war in Ukraine is seen by most as a small intra-European, 'inter-white' war, with a certain annoyance towards both contenders, NATO and Russia. Rather, eyes seem to be focused with concern on the South China Sea, as the place where the global war between the West and China is likely to break out. Natural and unanimous identification instead with the struggle of the Palestinian people, against the decades-long occupation. It is a spontaneous solidarity between former colonised and colonised, even with some sporadic excesses. However, the flag that flew the most at this forum was the Palestinian flag, quite a difference from previous meetings in which the Forum had held a more cautious attitude by not taking a position and considering the issue at least partly controversial. The damage Netanyahu has done to the image of Israel and the Jewish people, measured here among the vast majority of the world's population, is incalculable. Here one really realises how much of the globe's white population is an exception, and how marginal Europe is. And of this smallness of ours it will be good to realise.
Text and photos by Fabio Alberti, article originally published on 1 March 2024 on serenoregis.org
by Fabio Alberti, founder of Un Ponte Per
"I have in my eyes the dreadful scene of the waves of an enemy sea that, after swallowing dozens of people, tosses what remains of a lifeboat of hope, stranded and then destroyed, near Crotone. Only the last known shipwreck. How many unknown ones we do not know by definition.
But we do know that there will be many more because a forced conduit is in operation, forcing growing masses to emigrate, a sort of watering hole that no one seems to want to turn off.
So take this as an outlet. And forgive some inaccuracies.
But I wonder why, out of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of committees, associations, organisations for assistance, relief, and defence of the rights of migrants, not a single one can be found that asks the Italian government and the European Union for something concrete to protect the right of those who live in the Global South to remain in their own land in dignity and safety? Why do we have to hear the fateful and hairy 'let's help them in their homes' from the Lega and instead there is no concrete indication of what this means?
Why do we keep accepting and repeating the phrase 'they flee from war and hunger', as if war and hunger were midsummer fortunes and not products of human policies, without ever mentioning those who provoke war and hunger, organise it, and practice it.
Don't we have more to ask for than welcome? And if we do, why don't we do it in the same tone of voice? Why don't the demonstrations we make on the issue of emigration carry the sign 'No more colonial exploitation' high in the front row ?
However, this concentration on the issue ofreception (don't get me wrong, necessary and rightful) has ended up shifting the issue of emigration from a political and rights issue to a mere humanitarian one, so that it almost seems as if reception is a pleasure to be done out of a good heart, 'humanitarian' indeed. And not, if not a right, as it should be the right of every human being to be able to take up residence wherever he or she wishes, at least a duty, ofEurope, being itself, with all the evidence, through ecological debt, through arms trafficking, through its colonial past, the cause of the evil that it attempts to confine across borders.
For this is the truth that we all know, but too little is said.
The wars from which those who migrate flee are fuelled, when not provoked, wanted, organised as part of the struggle to grab land and raw materials for industry in the North. Of course there are local causes, but these are intertwined with legacies of colonialism and above all with the activity that the former occupying powers continue undaunted to produce in determining governments and policies. And not a few African leaders have been in trouble for denouncing the interference of the former colonial powers, Thomas Sankara for one.
The adverse climatic conditions that force migration are a direct consequence of Western industrial production, since it has been calculated that African populations produced less than one tenth of the carbon dioxide caused by European overdevelopment. There is therefore a European debt to Africa that should impose the reception of a surveyed share of the 216 million potential environmentally displaced persons predicted by the World Bank. So much for humanitarianism. Here, reception is a duty.
The hunger that forces people to look elsewhere for sources of life does not come from nowhere or even 'from nature', but from, among other things, the transformation of subsistence agriculture into monocultures for export resulting from integration into the world market, with whose proceeds the richest fractions of the population buy goods produced in the North, often imported at the expense of local production that has been denied protection as a result of liberalist trade treaties.
Corrupt regimes, swallowing up resources, holding populations hostage by stealing futures and resources are often 'friendly' regimes, supported, fortified, sometimes installed by western countries. And economic policies that have not allowed development are often advised, when not imposed by a monetary fund dominated by the US and European nations.
All this is known to all. Or at least to us. It is not everything, of course, but it is a significant part of the phenomenon.
Why then do we clamour for the revision, or cancellation depending on the radicality or point of view of each, of the legislation that prevents migrants from entering Europe and do not demand, demonstrate, petition in the same way and with the same force for example to demand a revision of trade policies, from the BITs to the free trade agreements, through which the European Union and Italy with it, continues to maintain unequal terms of trade with African countries?
Why do we accept that only those who, whether militias or smugglers, are only the last link in a chain of causes that lead to the deaths of thousands of people that has at its origin multinational crime syndicates that plunder resources by exploiting those who work for starvation wages?
I know very well that there are those who, much better than I, have already said these things and who have studied and written about Italian and European foreign and trade policies towards Africa. That I am not saying anything new, but don't hold it against me if I say that the public confrontation seems to be only between those who ask for hospitality and those who do not want to give it. Instead, the responsibility of foreign, economic, commercial, military, in essence neo-colonial, Italian and European policies as the cause of emigration does not seem to be on the agenda, and therefore neither is that of actions to overturn them.
Perhaps there is a need to build a platform for a new foreign policy that seriously focuses on the right to stay as well as the right to emigrate. Perhaps the fight for reception would also have more force, because it would be part of a process that at least calls for, if it cannot yet envisage, a reduction and then an end to this epochal deportation of the people of Africa (and not only) that not the sea, but politics, transforms into bodies carried by the waves."
** By 'reception policy' I mean here the claiming, advocacy, and campaigning policies that focus only on the humanitarian aspect of reception and end up being at the expense, in fact, of a discourse on rights, an analysis of the causes, and therefore the claiming of actions to change Italian and European foreign and trade policies necessary to put an end to the obligation to emigrate.
Article originally published on 2 March 2023.
Two years have passed since 24 February 2022, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began.
Since that day, the public debate has been poisoned by a bellicose logic that has ended up disfiguring the very face of the European Union. We at Un Ponte Per joined the 'STOP THE WAR NOW' caravans , bringing solidarity to the aggrieved population and strengthening our conviction - demonstrated by the festering conflict - that there is no military solution to the war.
We never called for the surrender of Ukraine, which has, of course, the right to resist the invader. But we have reminded governments to read in full Article 51 of the UN Charter, which states the right of the attacked country to defend itself; but until the UN Security Council, i.e. the international community, has taken the necessary steps to restore peace and security through negotiation and diplomacy. Instead, for the past two years we have witnessed the total cancellation of all acts of diplomacy and the renunciation of politics to choose other paths than that of arms and military confrontation.
After two years of war, more than 14 million people in Ukraine are in need of humanitarian assistance, some 6.5 million have left the country and 3.5 million are displaced. In Russia, Putin is stepping up the repression of dissent and the criminalisation of pacifists - as evidenced by the sentencing of Boris Kagarlistky to five years in prison - while he continues to hide the numbers of soldiers killed or wounded, estimated at around 300,000.
The massacre on both fronts must be stopped and wemust continue to demand the withdrawal of the occupying Russian forces.
From the beginning we have been active in supporting the Ukrainian people in dealing with the dramatic consequences of this war and in defending pacifists and conscientious objectors in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.
We have supported Russian activists who have fled abroad in building counter-information and condemnation campaigns against the war to be spread within the country.
Together with our local partners, we now work in Ukrainian schools to strengthen the social cohesion of young people, with programmes dedicated to trauma management, psychological first aid and peace education. We have involved more than 200 schools in this process. The schools themselves have been involved in the production of podcasts, so that the children can tell their stories, with the hopes and wishes of those growing up with bombs in their ears.
With our Civil Peace Corps, we are working on theinclusion of the Ukrainian refugee community in Romania, with a particular focus on women and young people.
In the last 6 months we have continued to support the legal costs of threatened pacifists, such as Olga Karatch of 'Our House', who has been fighting for human rights in Belarus and for the right to conscientious objection to military service for years. Olga is persecuted and faces the death penalty in her own country, where she is considered a 'terrorist'. Just yesterday she was awarded the Alexander Langer prize in Montecitorio.
We join Olga's appeal, launched from a stage in Rome last October: 'The European Union must return to its role for peace, standing firmly for a cease-fire and working for a political solution to the conflict'. Words we have made our own.
Let us stop this self-destructive spiral, let us shout together our NO to war. Only peace is a good investment.
83 years ago. On 19 February 1937, Italian settlers, backed by the Royal Army, took to the streets of Addis Ababa in what has been described as 'the most furious black chase the African continent had ever seen'.
Ethiopian men, women and children were lynched in the streets, their homes set on fire and property destroyed. Twenty thousand Ethiopians, perhaps 30,000, lost their lives.
On this anniversary, which is celebrated as Remembrance Day in Ethiopia, we want to remember the too many victims of Italian colonisation.
The massacre of Addis Ababa, like that of Debora Libanòs, like the mustard bombings, like the deportation to concentration camps of the population of the Gebel, like so many other crimes, have for too long been expunged from the collective memory, erasing over half a million victims in the 70 years of Italian colonisation.
The oblivion of colonialism, in Italy as in Europe, prevents us from understanding the dynamics behind the migrations and conflicts in West Asia and North Africa and exposes us to the risk of repeating that history.
Thisis why we applaud and make our own the proposal to establish a 'day of remembrance of the victims of Italian colonialism' and propose to the organisations of Italian civil society to start a common campaign to obtain the establishment of such a day.
For adhesions of individuals and organisations write to decoloniale[at]unponteper.it
In the Nineveh Plain in Iraq, between Mosul and Bashiqa, we have been working for many years. We were there before the advance of Daesh (Islamic State) in the area brought destruction and years of fierce occupation; before the battle to liberate it brought further devastation, and a very high price for the civilian population. When it came to rebuilding, therefore, we did not back down. And indeed, among the longest-running commitments - and with the greatest satisfaction for the results achieved - was our 'Salamtak' (Arabic for 'Your Health'). Supported by the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation (AICS), and by the generous donations of the people who responded to our appeal, 'Salamtak' was able to operate from 2018 until the end of 2023.
Six years of work and a shared journey with the local population, which has seen the construction of health centres where none previously existed, the rehabilitation of existing ones, the training of specialised personnel and the sensitisation of communities on the right to physical and psychological health, all with one goal in mind: to guarantee, especially to women in the area, access to their rights.
That to sexual and reproductive health, first of all. But also to pre- and post-natal care, to family planning so that they can choose if and when to have children; to psychological support, where years of wars and conflicts have confined these aspects to emergencies. In a word: self-determination.
"Salamtak" was an important intervention because Iraqi women and girls still face many obstacles when it comes to access to sexual and reproductive health and rights. Discriminatory beliefs, limited independence in decision-making, lack of income and education, and lack of awareness regarding the availability of medical services are just some of the difficulties they still face. As always, war carries a double price for them to pay. That is why, over the years, we have tried to inform them of their rights, accompany them on the path to claiming them, provide them with centres where they can meet other women and find the care and attention of highly specialised workers.
Coordinating the programme over all these years was our Lia Pastorelli, Programme Desk of Un Ponte Per.
"'Salamtak', for us at Un Ponte Per, has represented an important commitment to support the populations of the Nineveh area affected by the devastating effects of the war and the Daesh occupation. During these six years, we have dealt with the serious material damage and psychological challenges resulting from these conflicts together with them, and we have worked our way out of the emergency,' he tells us.
"We have assisted more than 30,000 people in six years and visited an average of 15 per day."
The people we have taken in have averaged between 13 and 65 years of age and have come to the two centres for high-risk pregnancies, maternity services, maternal and child care, infertility, polycystic ovary syndrome, gestational diabetes up to ovarian cancer. The largest numbers of visitors were young women between the ages of 18 and 34.
Among them was 33-year-old Afrah, with four children, who faced significant challenges during her maternity journey. Returning to the area after living for three years in a camp for displaced people, Afrah became aware of the 'Salamtak' programme through a community health worker.
"Afrah had lost a baby two days after birth due to an infection. She was terrified that it could happen again. With the support of 'Salamtak', which provided her with psychosocial support and medical care, Afrah discovered a dysfunction in her gestation. Thanks to a timely diagnosis and the necessary treatment, she was able to carry her last pregnancy to term safely,' Lia recalls.
She explains how, along with the programme, the country has also changed. The way the community - and women in particular - began to perceive their rights and ability to self-determine. 'We have seen the impact of our work: today women are more aware of their rights and the possibility of claiming them,' she explains.
"In the first years, we tried to improve health services in the health centres that were left standing during the war. In particular in Mosul, Bashiqa and Nimrud, areas that paid a very high price, and where we managed to reach more than 12,000 people. In addition to this type of intervention, however, we have always wanted to combine it with extensive community awareness work: we have organised dozens of campaigns to break the social stigma and isolation of people who need psychological support,' Lia explains. "Then we focused on increasing the presence of medical personnel in the various health centres: this allowed an increase of more than 270% in the number of accesses to the guaranteed services".
In the last phase of the project, which ended in December 2023, we joined forces with our partner Solidarité International, and focused particularly on the Mosul area. Once a Daesh stronghold in Iraq, Mosul still bears the marks of war.
"Mosul was a major challenge for us," Lia recalls. "We wanted to increase the quality and accessibility of sexual and reproductive health: women and girls accounted for more than 90 per cent of those reached. Consultations, basic diagnostic examinations and screening, pre- and post-natal care, therapeutic treatments, prevention and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, family planning, were the focus of our work. Without ever forgetting maternal and child health care services through paediatric consultations, integrated with mental health and psychosocial support'.
Over the past months, we have worked tirelessly to expand our impact in the Iraqi women's community and ensure medical care and the right to health for all.
And on 31 October, we finally reactivated the maternity ward in the 'Hamam al-Alil' hospital in Mosul. "An important milestone to ensure the right to a peaceful pregnancy and quality care for women in the area",
emphasises Lia.
The new maternity ward offers essential services including antenatal and postnatal care, as well as educational programmes covering family planning and breastfeeding. It also guarantees 2-3 safe deliveries per day and provides an average of 250 consultations per month to women and their babies. The facility serves over 39 surrounding villages, totalling approximately 120,000 people.
But 'Salamtak' also supported the only public hospital in the Nineveh governorate that cares for burn patients, the Al Hurok Hospital in Mosul . There, we equipped two emergency rooms, inaugurated a few days before the terrible incident that hit the city of Qaraqosh in September 2023, which were thus able to be operational to respond to that emergency.
Our work has always been carried out in collaboration with the local authorities, and in particular with the Directorate of Health in Nineveh, which we accompanied to address structural deficiencies and the lack of trained personnel. "We have involved 112 members of the medical and paramedical staff of the directorate in the training, so that our intervention is no longer necessary and the local authorities can continue on this path independently," Lia explains.
"Of course we are not abandoning any: we will always remain available for advice and counselling," she emphasises.
We therefore continue to walk alongside the women and communities of Nineveh, as we have always done. But being able to hand over the health centres to the Health Directorate is a major achievement for us. It means that Iraq, at the centre of endless humanitarian emergencies in recent years, can slowly get back on its feet, rebuild from its rubble, imagine a future in which emergency interventions are no longer necessary, and we can simply build, together.
We have been working in the Palestinian camps in Lebanon for more than 25 years and know very well the possible consequences on the lives of these people of the choice of some governments, including Italy, to suspend funding to the UN agency UNRWA.
"Cutting funding to UNRWA means not only cutting back on the services that are offered in the Shatila camp or in Lebanon, but in the entire Palestinian diaspora that we can also find in Syria and Jordan," said David Ruggini, Head of Mission in Lebanon of Un Ponte Per.
In 2022, UNRWA provided assistance to some 5.9 million Palestinian people, guaranteeing education, health services and food. The desired suspension of funds represents a frightening slice - some 57 per cent - of the budget that allows these livelihood services to be provided.
A cut that threatens to deprive Palestinian children of the chance to go to school or have access to water or essential medical care. In other words, it means letting these people most likely lose the minimum of dignity and access to rights that keeps their lives going.
"If these policies towards UNRWA continue, the Palestinian children will not have schools, hospitals or medical services to turn to," said Mr. Kassem, founder of Beit Atfal Assumoud, a Palestinian organisation with which we run our Family Happiness Distance Support programme in Lebanon.
What we are witnessing seems to be yet another act of collective punishment against one of the most harassed populations of the last century. The consequences of these choices will affect the lives of millions of people who, in many cases, have never even set foot in Gaza or Palestine.
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In Lebanon, Un Ponte Per ran photography workshops with Palestinian children from the Shatila Refugee Camp. The popular pedagogy initiative, aimed at stimulating self-recognition, self-expression and awareness of one's own emotions, also brought surprising results in terms of "mapping the needs" of those living in the camp.
Images have always been a very strong tool to tell about oneself and one's relationship with reality. They are a way of defining each person's story and that of the world around them.
The images(and narratives) of marginal contexts, however, are often imposed by others, by those who do not live those contexts. It happens in our suburbs, which are often superficially recounted in the mainstream media as places of degradation and suffering, without any investigation into the root causes of those phenomena.
Together with about 20 of them, aged between 7 and 11, we organised a photographic workshop of self-narration, even building a small darkroom.
"How do you live your home? What do you feel when you walk down the street? What do youlike and dislike about what you see?" were some of the questions the children tried to answer through pictures.
During the workshop, they also learnt how to build a small handmade darkroom with which to develop their photographs. But above all, they learnt to tell a story, an emotion and even themselves and their own story, through the use of images.
Developing a deeper knowledge of the place experienced often means stimulating a sense of belonging and caring for what one has around one. The children indicated through images what they really needed, building an autonomous narration of their own reality and identity, which can be really important in a key of active, aware and participating 'citizenship'.
[Citizenshipis perhaps an oxymoron, as Palestinian people in Lebanon are not citizens and their status is that of 'refugees', now for several generations].
The result of the workshop is what we could call a very accurate 'map of needs' of the camp, really powerful because it was built from the bottom (in all senses) and by those who live that context every day on their skin, amidst deprivation and invisibility. These were truly exciting days, which show us that the path taken is the right one.
The initiative was realised in the spaces of the Shatila Sport Centre, a multifunctional centre located within the refugee camp where children can play and practice various sports, receive educational support, and take advantage of language, drawing and art courses.
A space that has been renovated, equipped and is still supported with funds donated to "Emergenza Libano" by the private donations of Un Ponte Per and is now attended by about 100 children.
We would like to thank Daniele Napolitano for having imagined, organised and conducted the workshops, with the support of the Peace Corps of Un Ponte Per, Majdi Adam and the girls of Basket Beats Borders who every day carry on an extraordinary work with the children of Shatila.
Jewish people, members of the Roma and Sinti, LGBTQI+ and differently abled communities, militant communists and anti-fascist dissidents, Slavic citizens were rounded up by the millions in every part of Europe, imprisoned, humiliated, stripped of all human dignity, tortured and killed with summary executions and in gas chambers. In the name of the 'purity of the race', an attempt was made through horror to turn the wheel of history backwards, reducing humanity into first-class and inferior persons whose every right, including the right to life, was violated.
Nazi-fascism was born from the fertile womb of Europe: that of racism, of nationalism, of the ideology of white supremacism, of the traumas and brutalities produced by the First World War, of colonialism according to which there are chosen peoples to whom everything is due and peoples who must give up their land, leave or be subjected to a regime of occupation and oppression.
MEMORY is not only the dutiful remembrance of what has been but also imperative so that those horrors are NEVER repeated. On this day so sacred to humanity, our thoughts go not only to the victims of that time, but also to the civilian populations suffering the brutality of war, the destruction of their homes, hospitals, schools, universities, civil infrastructure. To those deprived of food, drinking water, medicine, and forced into the cold and weather. To the children who are cannon fodder for collective punishment or attempts at ethnic cleansing.
Un Ponte Per unites yesterday's memory with today's: we do so in our daily commitment to stop the massacre in Gaza, stop the bombing in Syria, support the Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian conscientious objectors. In standing side by side with Iraqi, Jordanian and Lebanese civil societies and in supporting those in Israel who shun war and oppose their government's apartheid policies. We recall how the preamble of the United Nations states that the peoples of the world united 'TO FREE HUMANITY FROM THE FLAG OF WAR'.
A commitment that must be carried on every day.
