Press Release

Caravan for Ukraine, Nicotra: 'Stop the war-mongering single-mindedness'

The co-president of Un Ponte Per, Alfio Nicotra, travelling to Ukraine on behalf of the NGO taking part in the caravan for peace, issued the following statement this morning from Gorizia.

Rome, 1 April 2022 - "We left this morning from Gorizia for Lviv (UKR) with a caravan of hope and solidarity that features that Italian civil society unjustly put on the index because it is pacifist, by so many politicians and too many mass media. The war-mongering single thought risks leading Italy to a witch-hunt unprecedented in the history of republican Italy. Hunting the pacifist, the CGIL, the ANPI, the director of Avvenire. The Pontiffhimself is censured and mocked.

A little less than 30 years ago I was among the 500 pacifists who violated thesiege of Sarajevo, and today I relive that spirit, that being, as Don Tonino Bello called us, 'the UN of the peoples' that opposed the sloth of the UN of the powerful.

As then, instead of weapons we put our bodies on the line, our deep repudiation of war, which has always driven us to be on the side of the victims of conflict. We say No to Putin and No to NATO. We stand by the Ukrainian people, who are under the bombs. We stand by the Russian people, who are paying for the belligerent propaganda and warlike choices of their government. To our Russian pacifist brothers and sisters, who risk jail and repression to say No to war, goes our embrace and support.

Come and see us, film us, listen to those who say we are equidistant, that we put victims and executioners on the same level. Let them learn that there is another political proposal, one of bridges, of negotiation, of building communities in solidarity, of non-violent resistance to the invader, which has the undoubted power to build a common future for this land, for everyone.

We go unarmed to Ukraine not only to bring humanitarian aid and to secure as many women and children as possible. We set out so that the international community understands that it cannot allow the massacre to be carried out and the biggest rearmament plan since the end of World War II to be planned on the skin of the Ukrainian people.

We of Un Ponte Per have known in these 30 years of world war in pieces, the horror of the bombs, the crimes of the never-intelligent missiles, the white phosphorus thrown on Falluja, Aleppo gutted by cluster bombs, the buildings folded in on themselves in Belgrade.

War is always the same, and the order it claims to build carries within its bosom the reasons for new insecurities and conflicts.

We are here, in this diverse and composite caravan, to testify that only peace is a good investment. No more wars! Bridges, not Walls."