Editorial of january 2000

"Blessed are the gentle: for they shall inherited the earth" - Matthieu, 5, 4.

Our Millenium - the Millenium we impose to the world - ends gradually today, according to the different time zones. There are else eras, else calendar, but today who take care of them ? This starting year prevails over all this night. With laser and fireworks, champagne and spectacles, satellites and Internet, we are seing since the morning all the dawn's 2000 in the planet. Of course, half of humans don't know what's happened now, because half of humans has been excluded from the mankind's unity. But for this night and this day, we are even many millards to share the same obscure fears, the same unreasoned emotion front of a threshold that seems important to everybody : this emphazised passage of time, our unknowned destinies, the pathos of civilisations that are falling, of the worlds that born, that we see every day without notice it.

Since it is the time of balance sheet, we remind that this century wanted to instaure above all permanent borders, states with lasting, eternal geographies. It wanted to be the century of nations, of independentist awakenings, of the fallen empires. And paradoxically or consequently, it was too the century of migrations, forced exodus, it had seen the borth of a new nation, may be the most numerous of our modern world, the nation of people without land, the nation of refugees : a human group with no voice, no rights, no identity, not linked each others except by this particularity to be unwelcomed on earth. At the XXth century we have created the nation of people who has no right to exist. We remind that our era, which we celebrate with such noise the Third Millenium, started with the birth of a poor child, in a wandering family. We remind too these words, in the 13^th article, paragraphe 2 of the Human's Right Declaration, wich since 1946, all of us can refered : "Everybody has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country".

To return to his country : it will be the dangerous and hard task of the refugees during the Third Milenium, whether they are Kurds, Palestinians, Tutsi, Bosniacs.... Because to born in a country, to have his own land, an identity, are historical steps that Humans should taken for leaving them. So, even if national states are bloody and dangerous inventions, even if the borders have been set up for beeing violated, first let us to be ourselves, let us to learn again and reconstruct an identity reduced to ashes, and restore a country reduced to ashes. Then after, only after, we renounced it perhaps, because we could not reach the universality of the world without the consciousness of our singularity.

Sandrine Alexie