For a year now, I have been going every day to the Place des Nations, in Geneva’s shiny International Organisations district.
Twenty years ago, I was passing in front of the “broken chair” for the first time, the bus turned left and went up through some majestic gardens towards the organisation where my humanitarian journey began. Since then, before and after each mission, I have passed by that same broken chair again and greeted it, with courage when I was about to leave and with real resentment when we met again at the end of a mission in the field.
Now I visit her every day and have learned to observe and listen to her. To her and to all those who sit under her shadow. They are many, from all corners of the world and not always the most privileged. They all have one thing in common, with the exception of the tourists; they have their hopes set on the decisions of the UN assembly. In their homeland they have been victims of powers tried to silence them, imprison them, torture them, destroy them. They are the disinherited from all sorts of causes who have no other hope left other than to get attention from the international community on the Place des Nations.
May it rain, be sunny or snow, they look beyond the fence of the UN building and its official flags and wave their own, mostly non-existent in the official media. The wave flags that represent their cause, despair, pain and often torture and death.
With the arrival of the virus the square was fenced in, the assembly sessions cancelled and the demonstrators have vanished. But the causes remain the same, the latent human tragedy unaltered and the hopes and despairs intact.
My virtual chair is still active and people keep contacting me. A new battle lost in the Chinese Xiqiang, a Baluchi journalist mysteriously killed in Sweden where he was in exile, a denunciation of proxy war in Tunisia and Algeria…
The causes are as varied as there is people on the planet. To them I dedicate this window where to express what it means to have no other place other than an assembly that takes place behind an ostentatious building with an iron-pulse security council.
