Baku, Azerbaijan, July 2010

Water or oil? You need to put a finger in it to know what it is. The darkness of the night among the sparkling lights of the new Baku doesn’t let you distinguish reality from the image that we carry with us of the lake which is called sea and has more oil rigs than all the Greek islands: the Caspian Sea.

While we are walking along the shiny seaside promenade we comment on our first day full of events here in the capital of Azerbaijan, a city with more than two million inhabitants, an important industrial district.

The trip to the South Caucasus got serious from the start: the Azeri Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Araz Azimov, received Rondine’s delegation and, without beating about the bush, faced the crucial issue of Nagorno-Karabakh. It was incredible to listen to the story of a conflict that has lasted for years, causing increasing pain and leaving wounds of every kind. Wounds must not be left open: they get infected and the worst can happen. Memory gets stronger and poison is no more filtered: new generations that grow up in this kind of conflicts are intoxicated, poisoned to the point of experiencing a chronic but unconscious depression. But aggressiveness is always hiding behind depression.

A frank man, Vice Minister Azimov, that let the human dimension arise after starting in a completely political manner. Usual dynamics for Rondine, when the young students of the International Hall of Residence talk. Hence Guy, Israeli, and Ruba, Lebanese, proposed a real question time to the Vice Minister, without hypocrisy, explaining the deep meaning of why two Middle-Easterns, with their own problems, have ended up in the Caucasus. They obtain esteem and respect. A consummate politician could have reacted with irony, deriding the dreams of peace of a small group of young people who put together great part of the world’s conflicts. But it wasn’t the case. He listened carefully permitting the expression of the moral strength of somebody who doesn’t travel around the world repeating the word “peace”, but takes action for his personal change without waiting for the rest to move.

Rondine’s students don’t shout and don’t denounce, they testify. The materialization of “cursed couples” that have become friends disarms the interlocutor: a Chechen and a Russian, an Israeli and a Palestinian, a Georgian and a Russian, a Serbian and a Bosnian. And Mr. Azimov, receiving us at the Ministry offices in Baku, catches it straight away. “You are an extended family - he said warmly - and when a family gets bigger, it’s inevitable for differences to grow, but it’s also true that its strength grows. I wish you to grow more and spread hope”.

We say goodbye in front of the mosque where we entered together, taking our shoes off. I remember that “dialogue is not possible if we don’t undress a little…”, this is how the Bishop of Assisi had started his reflection on Rondine’s event “Le Piazze di Maggio” in the room where Saint Francis took his clothes off in front of his father and the city. On the way out an old man kindly offers a long shoe fitter that avoids bending down to put shoes on: pleasant for the muscles that are starting to get a bit stiff.

Andrea Messeri, delegate of the provost of the university of Siena, turning up in front of the great university of Baku (the fifth of the former soviet empire) answers with concealed irony: “I come from a small university which flourished in 1200, 800 years ago”. An Azeri colleague smiles and lifts his eyebrows. For a moment we realize fortune of the Italians. At the center supporting and coordinating the efforts for evacuees from Nagorno-Karabakh the story is passionate and agonizing. Immersed in the wounds of mourning and violence of any kind. As in any war. It’s hot, in spite of the air conditioning. Neither water nor oil: reality here is not liquid, it’s solid, very hard. And for today it’s only told. Tomorrow we will touch it.