1st part
The sun was already shining when I woke up in the morning.
I felt good and trusting. Ready to believe that life was worthy. I had forgotten where I was, which world was mine.
The 8 o’clock news wiped out my sunny mood.
“The ethnic cleansing carried out by the military forces keeps on making more and more victims. Tonight an entire village was emptied, its male inhabitants shot and abandoned while children and women were herded off in camps, regardless their age or condition.”
The reporter’s voice went on and on, listing atrocities against innocent civilians whose fate had been designed by their ethnicity.
My home door slapped behind me as I rushed out.
2nd part
Driving my way to work, I was bitterly ruminating the politically accepted term for genocide – ethnic cleansing – as if it were dirt to be removed! And we’re speaking of people. As it had happened in World War II and about which we, now, astonishingly ask “How could we, people, do this to other people? And yet history tells us the Holocaust is more than old memories: East Timor, Rwanda, Argentina, South Africa, Kosovo, Georgia… men never learn!
3rd part
Opposite my desk, in my safe nine-to-five job room, a wall chart in big attractive colours smiled at the statement “All Human Beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights(…)”.
The next 10th December the world will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of the Human Rights. Those who have already been curious enough to read its 30 articles, have realised it isn’t a mere piece of written principles, but a set of fundamental truths, a project of an ideal society. We don’t even need to read the specific rights about Health, Education or Justice to be clearly aware of how ambitious it is the task to which the United nations assigned the world in 1948. The first article will be enough.
4th part
TV news at dinner assured that the International...