Press Release

Military missions abroad:
the cry of pain of thousands of people continues to be ignored

Rome, 15 July 2021 - "We remain baffled by the refinancing of the Italy-Libya cooperation agreements and, more generally, by the absence of a real discussion on the reasons for the failure of some international missions such as Afghanistan". This was stated in a statement by Angelica Romano, co-president of Un Ponte Per. "We proceed in reiterating the missions out of an act of ideological faith, deliberately ignoring the cry of pain of the thousands of people held hostage in Libyan prisons or refusing to explain to Italians and Italian women what all the billions spent in 20 years of participation in the war in Afghanistan, which cost over 250,000 victims, 53 of whom were Italian, were for.

Once again, Parliament has chosen not to address the consequences of the agreements with Libya: violence, abuse and torture in defiance of human rights and international conventions. Continuing to delegate to the various Libyan militias the management and containment "by any means" of the flow of migrants is bound to produce new unbearable tragedies.

"Italy needs to radically rethink its international missions, shifting the weight of participation towards development cooperation and support of local civil societies. On the migration side, it is also necessary to strengthen the system of humanitarian corridors to allow for legal migration and to remove these people from human trafficking,' said the other Un Ponte Per co-president Alfio Nicotra.

As a non-governmental organisation that has been active in the Middle East since 1991, we believe it is imperative to give voice and strength to Iraqi, Lebanese, Afghan and also the nascent civil societies in Libya. We have a duty to support them by initiating a people-to-people dialogue, starting from the bottom.