Mar. 26 – “We met Sonia Grieco during a conference on Afghan civil society in 2010. As a journalist, she kept asking questions; she was curious. And that intrigued us tooSo InterSOS opened its archives for her, giving her them material needed.” Yesterday afternoon, in Rome – after more than two years from that conference – the president of the humanitarian organization “InterSOS,” Nino Sergi, presented the book “Abbiamo stretto molte mani: Venti anni nelle emergenze umanitarie,” for Carocci Editore. Starlin Arush, of the humanitarian organization and author of the book, walked on stage alongside journalist Sonia Grieco, who in the past has already dealt with foreign relations and cooperation: “The book has hundreds of characters, the InterSos aid workers that took part in 35 missions until 2012” said Grieco about her analytical reportage. The book doesn’t contain all the activities carried out by InterSOS since its foundation in 1992; rather “we decided to focus on war zones and missions that have marked significantly InterSOS.” These include the implosion of Yugoslavia, Somalia after Siad Barre, Chechnya in the new Russian Federation, the war in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the fratricidal clashes in Darfur, Chad and the Congo. “The impression I got is that rarely humanitarian actions are reported as they actually are. Sometimes, where there are no journalists, they are the only witnesses of the conflict.” The presentation of the book saw the participation of Lapo Pistelli, Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs with responsibility for international cooperation: “While traveling abroad for institutional missions, I have met several InterSOS operators. By communicating with them you can learn a lot more than from reading of a diplomatic dispatch.”
