IN A NUTSHELL Editor's noteA follow up reflection here by the Author on his previous article 'A New Horizon: From Broken Systems to Living Communities' PEAH published a few days ago
By Juan Garay
Co-Chair of the Sustainable Health Equity Movement (SHEM)
Professor/Researcher of Health Equity, Ethics and Metrics (Spain, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil)
Founder of Valyter Ecovillage (valyter.es)
By the same Author on PEAH: see HERE
Aylania: a New Europe Founded on Peace and Justice
Europe was a young Phoenician woman abducted by a bull. Thousands of years later, the same sea remembers: four hundred souls on the Sumud flotilla, abducted now by naval forces. Europe, born of a rape, collaborates with the kidnappers. Its courts call our rescue fleet pirates, while they remain silent as children die every day under the impunity of bombs falling in the most atrocious genocide.
That is why we carry in our memory two small bodies that the world saw and then buried. That of Mohamed al-Durra, twelve years old, pressed against the wall of an alley in Gaza as his father tried to shield him. They filmed his death live: forty-five minutes of bullets, until his white t-shirt turned red. And that of Aylan, the three-year-old Kurdish boy, drowned in the Mediterranean, his small body face down on the Turkish shore like a mirror that Europe looked at one day and then shattered so as not to see itself.
They represent thousands of girls and boys murdered by the greed of privilege, the impunity of power, and the cowardice of complicit silence.
That Europe of walls and selfishness, which signs arms deals while Gaza starves, which calls pirates those who rescue and heroes those who bomb schools, has no right to utter the word peace. That is why we dream of re-founding Aylania: not a country on the map, but an ethical territory of open arms. Aylania is where no father will ever again see his son die against a wall. Aylania is where the Mediterranean is not a children’s cemetery, but a cradle of welcome. It is the antithesis of this Europe that drowns on its coasts and murders with its bombs.
We keep sailing. The ghost of Don Quixote rides on our bow: not against windmills, but against the monstrous machinery that turns siege into policy and the death of children into a footnote statistic.
We are four hundred dreamers of justice, from every corner of the world and every condition. We know that carrying flour and medicine to Gaza makes us criminals in the eyes of the empire. So we honor ourselves in being pirates who break immoral laws. Pirates of peace, like Gandhi’s salt march: our salt is the tears of mothers under the rubble, and the tiny bodies of Mohamed and Aylan that push us never to let go.
In international waters we are attacked. Our companions are kidnapped, our boats damaged. But sumud is the art of not letting go. We stitch wounds, repair, and return. We will spread the names of European rulers who sign weapons deals while children starve. We form a human chain, a hyapry: each knot is a body preventing the next from drowning. Thus, like a chain linking the shore where Aylan appeared with the rubble where Mohamed fell, we refuse to let their deaths be in vain.
We are heading to Turkey, not to retreat but to rebuild. Because the dream is a fleet, and beneath that dream lies the oven of Gaza: a new humanity is born from its ashes. That new humanity is called Aylania. They will not kill it with bombs or decrees. We are that utopia they will not kill. We sail, we sail, we sail. Now the only pirates are those who tried to drown us — them, Aylan, Mohamed. We are the pirates of peace. And as long as there is a child under the rubble, a child in the water, a child against a wall, a child without food, we will keep being pirates. Because peace is not a palace agreement: it is a fleet of pirate dreamers full of flour and medicines, it is an open arm, it is re-founding Aylania on the ashes of this soulless Europe.