The volume in which the correspondent of the “Corriere” traces recent events through the war point of view: women, men and rubble seen with his own eyes. And always exercising the method of doubt, from Gaza to Kiev
“If there is a God, yesterday he was not in Jerusalem.” Thus began, on January 16, 1988, in the Corriere, the Time.news by Lorenzo Cremonesi on the beating of the Islamic faithful who crowded the al-Aqsa mosque. He was perched “on the rounded roofs of the Arab houses overlooking the esplanade,” he saw and wrote. Hundreds of soldiers in riot gear, a few furious slogans shouted by a group of young Arabs and “a rain of canisters flood the air with unbreathable white smoke. The screams of the women join the noise of hundreds of people fleeing and the croaking of two-way radios of the army. The muezzin invites to calm ». He is struck by the detail of an old man who «could not find his shoes. He stayed a little longer looking for them. Then two soldiers lifted him up by the collar, beating him with fists … ».
Open up heaven! On the same day, she will tell, “many friends and acquaintances turned their backs on me, even my grandmother Esther phoned angrily from Milan”. As she dared she, the boy who came from Italy to deepen his studies on Israel and the Jewish world, to write things so different from the standard versions? “But I saw those episodes live. To those who criticized me I repeated: “Come here, and then you will tell me what you would tell me” ». To put it with the historian Michele Sarfatti: “He is made like this: he is someone who is open to discussing the most divisive issues, but if he sees something with his eyes he writes it”.
It wasn’t the first time he was being challenged, it wouldn’t be
was the last. Indeed, as he accumulated experiences of war passing from Gaza to Afghanistan, from Beirut to Iraq, from Syria to Ukraine, he became more and more convinced that from the stormy high school years in Milan, years so full of imagination and illusions, hopes and disappointments, mistakes and defeats, something good has really come. The teaching to be wary of the widespread “truth”: «Doubt, always doubt, never believe the official versions, especially in times of war or crisis. Since then, my first instinct, when I read a press release or receive a government bulletin, is to verify, demand confirmation, ask me the reasons for its diffusion. Because in times of conflict everyone lies: persecutors and victims, winners and losers. War is the realm of disinformation, propaganda, and therefore blessed be the journalist who questions everything…».
He writes it in the book Endless war. Forty years of strife removed from the Middle East to Ukraineto be released on May 12 for Solferino, where retraces his story as a reporter intertwining it with several parallel lives. From that of the cyclist who challenges the fiery desert to arrive by bike from Jerusalem to the Gulf of Aqaba (“At the checkpoints the military offered me ice to break in the bottles, after an hour it would have been possible to make tea”) to that of mountaineer who in 2004 drags Lino Lacedelli back in his eighties (on his legs!) to review the K2 base camp conquered half a century earlier to call Walter Bonatti from up there with the satellite and attempt (“too late …”) a pacification .
Starting point of memories: the vision in a moment of absolute terror in Eriha, while she waited for Bashar Assad’s soldiers to break into the closet where a heroic Syrian ophthalmologist had given him refuge, risking the extermination of his family, of “a long-haired white pony without a saddle”. The one to which the Alpine Ugo Balzari, a friend of the family, had clung to in the storm of the retreat from Russia: «The ghosts of that past instilled hope: if he had saved himself (…) perhaps I too could have managed it. .. “.
And he really got away with it. As it would have happened, on different fronts, many other times. Including the one in which he was kidnapped by a Palestinian armed group in the Gaza Strip in 2005. He had been coming up and down with Iraq for three years and about twenty between Israel and Palestinian areas. If he got along with tongues, she knew the places, she didn’t panic. All the more so when she noticed that they were peeking at a porn movie on TV: “They are clearly not upright jihadists,” she thought. He offered them to share a bottle of water, turned off a cell phone before they found it and gave him the news of the kidnapping to the “Corriere” so that CNN and Al-Jazeera would also talk about it, calming the nervous kidnappers … After a while they told already Lorenzo had their troubles, drinking water, medicines, unemployment … It turned out that they did not even ask for a ransom: they wanted to be hired as policemen by Abu Mazen. Be satisfied. And he ended up in farce along the border net when, by dint of passing Kalashnikovs over each other, Lorenzo found all three machine guns in his hand, with the unarmed guerrillas across the border. This then!
The heart of the book, however, are the swollen memories of horrors, deaths, grief, blood, tears, refugees, rubble.. Too many rubble. Including those of Milan still visible here and there when he was a child: “He was disturbed to see in the gutted blocks of flats the tiles of the open-air bathrooms, the broken pipes, the stumps of carbonized beams, half-torn shutters yet still stubbornly attached to the last centimeters of crumbling wall before the void, shreds of clothes entangled in the sleepers … ». And here resurfaces a ski trip on the snow that covered Monte Stella at San Siro where dad, mute about the suicide of his father Cesare ruined by the bombings, said to Lorenzo: “Below are the rubble of our houses.”
Here are again the stories of grandmother Esther about the Holocaust she had survived, the pride in the birth of Israel, the puffs for that grandson “with the black and white keffiyeh around his neck”, Lorenzo’s curiosity towards that culture up to the choice , while considering himself “non-Jewish”, di to volunteer at Snir kibbutz in the Golan, near the sources of the Jordan. A choice, for what the schemes of the time were valid, “left”, but exchanged by various enemies of Israel and the USA, especially in the early days of the collaboration with the “Corriere” directed by Piero Ostellino and the subsequent hiring, for a right-handed Zionist option. Mixed judgments. Gradually updated …
«I enter Ukraine surprised not to be surprised. Or rather, I am struck by the speed of events, by the brutality with which Vladimir Putin has implemented his project to recreate the Russian power lost with the end of the Cold War “, he wrote on February 24,” but the war does not surprise me in Europe, the fact that the dynamics of the military confrontation are once again imposing themselves on our lives as Europeans deluded that perpetual peace was an established fact ». After all, he underlines, he has been writing about war for forty years, “while in Europe this period was celebrated as one of the most peaceful in history”.
Forty years of “having to understand” what was going on. To tell in 1982 the abysmal distances between the luxurious hotel in Beirut where the maître excused himself amidst elite wines and models shocked for having served a dessert that was “too liquid” (“power surges, ah, sir
the war… ») and the nearby refugee camp of Sabra and Chatila destroyed a month later by the Christian Maronite militias. To denounce in the Taliban Kabul of 2000 the suffocating grayness broken only by the strip of red and yellow beads on the ankle of a bundled gray woman. To narrate the death of Maria Grazia Cutuli who the month before had been confirmed as sent to the area between Pakistan and Afghanistan: “It is the best birthday present of my life!”. And the rites of the Dead in our cemeteries in comparison with the Muslim cemeteries of the Middle East and Asia, “where the graves blend with the houses, as in Kabul, Kandahar or Peshawar: neighborhoods of the dead intertwined with those of the living” and “the children playing among the tombstones ».
Not to mention the “dark fascination of war”. Celebrated for example by Chris Hedges of the New York Times: «War retains its attraction because, despite destruction and massacres, it can give us what we really want. It can give us a purpose, a reason to live. Only in the midst of a conflict do the pettiness and the insulting of so much of our life appear evident to us … War becomes an intoxicating elixir. It makes us purposefuloffers us a cause “.
But it is so? Lorenzo Cremonesi and Paolo Dall’Oglio, the Jesuit who had dedicated his life to studying Islam and theorized dialogue and said mass in Arabic, thus also calling the Christian God Allah, they spent two days and one night talking about it, in the small and poor monastery raised in Mar Musa, north of Damascusin 2012. Father Paolo gave him his latest book entitled In love with Islam, believer in Jesus (Jaca Book) and told him that he already foreshadowed his own death: «He hinted at how important it was in his eyes to be willing to die for a cause that is considered just. He posed it as a question not only of courage, but also of intelligence and the ability to offer one’s life at the right time, if useful for achieving the set goal. According to him, the fear of dying could not prevent one from living one’s convictions to the extreme ». In short, living could not be an end in itself: “For me, unconsciously, the concern of not failing death remained very much alive and intervenes in my choices …”. Since then, we don’t know anything about him.
The dates of presentation of the book
Lorenzo Cremonesi presents
infinity war
at the Turin Motor Show, with Barbara Stefanelli and Gian Antonio Stella on May 19 (2.45 pm, Sala Azzurra); in Milan in Sala Buzzati, in collaboration with the Corriere Foundation, on 25 May at 6 pm; at Passaggi Festival in Fano on 21 June, with the delivery of the Andrea Barbato prize (at 10pm, Piazza XX Settembre).
May 11, 2022 (change May 11, 2022 | 20:49)
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