A Gluttonous War

- By Erri De Luca

Aleppo, Syria from the WSJ (May 4, 2016).
Photo: Karam Al-Masri/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Some twenty years ago, during the war in Bosnia, I walked into cities made somber by hunger. We unloaded packages for families found on the trip before: we distributed them directly, without intermediaries, storage sites, or stockpiles. I saw hunger in the shame of the elderly: every mouthful they swallowed was one less for a grandchild, a woman, someone sick. Today I experience the hunger of Aleppo from a distance and I ask myself why I’m not there, along with the Bosnians from twenty years ago. I give myself plenty of excuses.

Syria is Asia—you can’t get there with vans going around the edge of the Adriatic.

No organization working for peace can operate in a place where a children’s hospital is taken as a military target and intentionally bombed.

We can’t throw out lifelines during a tenuous truce, like back then: there are no truces. We can’t give our aid directly to the besieged, as we did in East Mostar, in Sarajevo, and their sister cities. It would be taken by some militia or other and used as merchandise on the black market.
 
Such excuses appease neither the hunger of Aleppo nor my own helplessness. I once knew a world where, with the help of others, it was possible to intervene, a world where hands reached out, grasped each other. That world is gone. I support the call of two journalists for sending money to a Franciscan center operating in Aleppo for some years now. I don’t know what good this long-distance subsidy can do, but I do thank anyone who tries suggesting some sort of move. The world has new limits. There are places where your old bag of bones, carrying an aid package, can’t go in person. Today I give to a few dollars the power of travel, of presence, of one body beside another, between gluttonous war and peace starving.

Erri De Luca is one of Italy's best-known novelists, poets, essayists, and translators. An excerpt from his The Day Before Happiness was published in the MR Casualty issue and his poem "Being Medit" was included in the MR Mediterraneans issue.