Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
by Mauro Armanino
Niamey (Agenzia Fides) - Pierluigi Maccalli, who was held hostage for more than two years by Salafist-inspired groups, has returned to Niger, the place of his kidnapping, to spend a few days (see Fides, 7/10/2024). This return coincides with the same date on which his captivity began in the savannah of Burkina Faso and then in the immense Sahara desert. A beginning and an end.
Between these symbolic moments, two years of solitude in captivity, marked by chains that accompanied him during the long starry nights of the desert. Since then, Pierluigi has been very attentive to the progress in negotiations for other hostages like him, held in the Sahel and elsewhere. His chains were of freedom, as they transformed him into a hostage of peace, of words and of unarmed hands. However, for those who have not had the same dramatic and privileged destiny as his friend and confrere mentioned, life can pass as if they were prisoners, without realizing it or without wanting it. Sometimes, they may even prefer to live as hostages to avoid risking what is most dangerous in life: freedom. Pierluigi saw, felt and suffered the chains at his feet. For about a month, he was chained day and night to a chain one meter and twenty centimeters long. Only dogs, perhaps, can understand what that means for a person accustomed to moving, traveling and deciding where to go. There are those who do not realize that they are chained, just as Pierluigi was, and are content with the food offered to them in their daily lives.
There are hostages of misery, created, reproduced and accepted as unavoidable, and sometimes maintained because that is how the world seems to have worked since the world began. Some are born to live as slaves, resigned to their destiny written in a book of sand, while others can decide the kind of future they will have for themselves and their children. There are also hostages of the humanitarian world that thrives right where the cry of those suffering from a disease that kills more than war resonates loudest: hunger. Hostages who, often, have never been told that what is written in the book of destiny is nothing more than sand scattered by the wind. A different world is possible when invisible chains are recognized.
In the Sahel, this extraordinary space of history, cultures, traditions, conflicts and adventures, there are still hostages of fear. Fear of the present, of the possible arrival of armed groups that impose the law and death. Fear of tomorrow: sowing, harvesting, granaries, the taxes to be paid per person, forced conversions and recruitment into the jihadist nebula, which trades in religion, gold, drugs, weapons and the best years of the young. Fear of denunciation that turns everyone into a suspect, even within families and villages where for decades there has been relative harmony and acceptance of differences. Then come the fostered identities that are exclusive, deadly and divisive.
Finally, there are hostages who are perhaps less recognizable and, perhaps for that reason, more harmful. They are the hostages of the lie, which prevails through rhetoric that justifies the means to an end. They associate, support, justify, defend and align themselves with the dominant thought of the moment. Politics becomes irrelevant and human rights are a commodity of ideological change, because what matters is the good of the people, as a group of "enlightened" people, often armed. Hostages who infiltrate what remains of the parties, unions, media and even the medals of merit in the field. My friend Pierluigi was right. He said that they can chain the feet but not the heart and the spirit. As a reminder of his time in captivity, he has carried with him a link of the chain. To remember that only those who have carried the chains risk their lives for the freedom of others. (Agenzia Fides, 22/10/2024)
