1.000.000 “Shameful Milestone”

“When the music is over, turn out the lights” canta Jim Morrison, e poi, più avanti nel brano, “Before I sink into the big sleep I want to hear, I want to hear the scream of the butterfly“, e, da sempre, questa strofa mi angoscia, pensando all’urlo delle farfalle.

Stamani l’urlo è arrivato attraverso un pezzo della Reuters (leggi questo link): il numero di bambini costretti, a causa della guerra civile in Syria, a lasciare le loro case per rifugiarsi nei campi profughi dei paesi confinanti, ha raggiunto il milione di unità. Shameful Milestone. Si stima che altri due milioni siano dispersi all’interno del paese, spesso oggetto di violenza o reclutati come soldati, privandoli del diritto a un’infanzia e a una educazione.

L’articolo stima che ci si trovi ormai dinnanzi a una “generazione perduta” in termini sia di morti, ma soprattutto per lo shock da violenza che sarà per sempre presente nei loro occhi.

Antonio Guterres, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, told a joint news conference. Guterres said he had met Syrian children in refugee camps suffering from loss of speech, disturbed sleep, and “very strange” forms of behaviour after violence they had seen or endured.

Referring to a Syrian girl in Zaatari camp in Jordan which holds 120,000 refugees, he said: “I remember one child of four years old with a family in a tent in Zaatari. During the 15-20 minutes that I was with them, she was compulsively shooting with a toy gun and it was impossible to make the child stop.”

Nearly two million Syrians have fled to Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and North Africa, the UNHCR says. They include about 42,000 Syrian Kurds who have flooded into Iraqi Kurdistan in the past week to escape fighting and sectarian violence in the north of Syria. “This is becoming a structural problem for the economies and societies of the neighbouring countries,” Guterres said.

L’urlo della farfalla.

Inutile trovare un’immagine adatta: mentre stavo leggendo l’articolo, dal Ponte delle Chiatte, ho scattato questa foto ….