Rifugiati, lottatori di speranza, seminatori di pace

World Refugee Day 2024

An enormous number of issues are shaking the whole world. The fronts of tension and reasons for confrontation are manifold. Thirty-five years ago the world and Europe were pervaded by the confidence and euphoria of a renewed era of peace and balance after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today we are helplessly witnessing a gradual metamorphosis; today it is fear, anxiety, and resentment that prevail.

Increasingly addicted and continually exposed “from a distance” to scenes of war, destruction, suffering, the risk we are all running is the loss of empathy, of that human “feeling” that prompts a response in the face of the need of the other, which as Zygmunt Bauman has taught us, regenerates the social bond.

In this complexity in which we are immersed, there is a risk that, in order to unravel the skein, the more archaic and simple war logic of “friend-enemy” prevails. This is what has been happening for years with regard to migrants. Mercified, blamed, excluded, stigmatized they have been raised to the “imaginary enemy” of society, personifications of social conflict, fear and collective insecurity.

World Refugee Day 2024 is meant to be an opportunity to reflect on the protection of human rights for all and the ways forward together to build a society that is truly free and open to differences, capable of recognizing and respecting diversity.