The writer Carati: “Mladic sentence is fine, but interethnic coexistence remains unpunished”

The confirmation of the life imprisonment of former Serbosnian general Ratko Mladic, accused of the Srebrenica massacre, is ” the ascertainment of a legal truth of what happened ” and ” the fact that the word ‘genocide’ was used it’s a big step forward. ” But there is ” another crime that no court will ever judge and for which we will never have a sentence ” and it is that of ” having destroyed an inter-ethnic fabric ” and ” the possibility of cohabitating and creating a daily life with of rites between people who belong to different religions and ethnic groups ”. Because ” where people lived in peace in diversity, they were allowed to begin to hate each other ”. Thus destroying ” a wealth of humanity, not of Bosnia alone, destroying what could have become Europe. This was a historic crime. ” The writer Alessandra Carati, the new winner of the Opera prima prize at Viareggio-Rèpaci this year with her debut novel ‘And then we’ll be saved’, published by Mondadori, is convinced of this. A novel in which he tells of a family fleeing from Bosnia to Italy during the war in the former Yugoslavia because ” this conflict talks a lot about us ”, about what it means to live as an exile, about the attempt to put back roots in another Country. What thousands and millions of people around the world are trying to do today, especially in Europe ”. Because what happened in the former Yugoslavia started a process of ” sanctification of borders ” which, according to Carati, led to the ” dismemberment of Europe in the east and west. Brexit on the one hand and Turkey on the other. ” The writer who lives in Milan then quotes Alexander Langer, who in one of his latest speeches had said ” Europe dies or is reborn in Sarajevo ”. ” If the goal was to dilute the boundaries of language, religion and belonging to the nation state, which then was the goal we set ourselves at the beginning when we imagined a Europe and we should have become European citizens, there was a crazy reversal ”, says the writer. After the sentencing of Mladic, ” what I hope, and that it is very difficult, is that even a partial reconstruction of a way of life that these people had within their own territory, of ties, can return. At the outbreak of the war, Sarajevo had more than 40 per cent of mixed families ” and ” the war has dismembered them. ” Globally, there is ” a trend towards emphasizing borders instead of making that people who live together can do it easily. ” Carati says that “by writing this book I hoped that we could reach a level of understanding of what the experience of a refugee is”, hoping “recognition of citizenship for people who have lived here for years”. And ” this would be a huge step forward ”, because ” as Langer said, we need to work to create a network because many small communities recognize the need to change course ”. Doing so would be ” a huge step forward ”.