Preface of "The escape of Lieutenant Messaoud Alili"
The volume number 5 Anacrèptica collection of narrative that presents with Edicions aïllades new for Book Day 2015 It is written by MANUEL VEGA ALOCÉN and prefaced by María Luisa Cava de Llano:
When my friend Manuel Vega asked me to write a few lines as a prologue to his book "The Flight Lieutenant Messaoud Alili", I did not hesitate to accept and this for several reasons:
1O. I've always been sensitive to the injustices, the suffering and human rights violations.
2O. I lived perplexed and dumbfounded, as everyone in Ibiza, Alili arrival to the island.
3O. Because I felt flattered that I requested it.
I read flip book in one afternoon and I found it entertaining, interesting, easy to read and absolutely real and that we get a story prove entertaining, without departing one iota of truth, It often becomes a difficult task.
I thought useful to know in person Lieutenant Messaoud and I did, I had a relaxed chat with him and I found an intelligent person, sincere, worker, brave and extremely grateful, with the Ibizan town that welcomed him. He talked about his country, their customs, its people and its reasons and I saw in his eyes a deep sadness, because Algeria continues to carry in your heart and because not a day goes, without thinking about it.
Wealthy family, I had it all: youth (29 years) and future, he was a lieutenant in the Algerian army and was to be promoted to captain his helicopter unit within a month, but he decided to leave it all, take a leap into the void and flee Algeria with military transport helicopter, because he could not bear, as he himself says, the human rights violations, and crimes against humanity in his country watching, Y así, after a suicide ground and flight, miraculously he landed at the airport of Ibiza with a scale of orientation in Formentera, after circumvent controls and radar.
The reader may wonder, to what extent human rights violations referred to, You can lead a man to leave everything and to flee into the unknown, but it is easy to understand his state of mind if one of the phrases of the interview that was conducted by a known means of communication is read, Arriving at Ibiza: "I care if I get shot now. A man who has a dead heart, they can not kill with bullets ".
In Argelia, the victory of the Islamic Salvation Front in parliamentary elections 1990, the military coup to prevent their entry into government and strong subsequent repression, They provoked a confrontation without truce between the government and Islamist radicals.
The lieutenant, He lived part of the bloody Algerian civil war that began in 1992 and he ended with the victory of the government and defeat in 2002, Salvation Islamic Group. More of 150.000 people were killed, and even today, the country is traumatized by the horrors of so-called "black decade", without having overcome the terrible scars of fratricide.
The worst massacres were in 1997 y 1998, just at the time that Lieutenant Messaoud decided to leave his country. Gunmen with rifles, grenades and machetes entered the villages down doors, murdered men, women and children with signs of great cruelty. Wars always behave tragedies, victims, massacres, expulsions, displacement, hungry, diseases, solitudes, distresses, pain for the friend or family member missing or dead, the abandoned country or the country that you think you should leave, and there comes a time when you have to be questioned as sociologists and historians may explain the fact that the wars of the early twentieth century, will cause only a small number of civilian casualties, while wars of the century and present such as Yugoslavia, great lakes, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Algeria, etc.. They seem to save the lives of the fighters to hit specially the civilian populations killed and subjected to all sorts of indignities.
I guess many readers, assail them doubt whether the protagonist of this story, it was entitled or not to leave their country, but the truth is that everyone should find answers to their own actions and it is difficult to put on the skin of others. Alili wanted to denounce his conduct to the international community, atrocities and human rights violations, show their outrage and explain their own truth.
George Hebert Mead said that human rights will never run greater danger than when your only guarantee are political institutions and those holding positions in these institutions. Only when human rights are enrolled in the civic conscience of men and peoples acquire virtuality and that, Oddly enough it is difficult, why should arrive at a true culture of human rights taking into account that the same, are not only a beautiful texts, but a true school of life and that we should commit all.
Lieutenant Messaoud wish to forget one day the horrors experienced and have someone pick up that message the speaker in the book and jumped into the sea in a bottle, with the hope that Algeria will become a free and democratic. That is also my desire along with that peace is achieved, that peace which according to John Paul II requires four essential conditions: true, Justice, love and freedom.
María Luisa Cava de Llano
