The Lions Club of San Marino meets Tony Capuozzo
The San Marino Undistricted Lions Club participated, together with the Bologna Irnerio Lions Club, in an Intermeeting organized by the Ariminus Montefeltro Lions Club which saw Tony Capuozzo, reporter and journalist of undisputed fame and experience, as speaker.
Tony Capuozzowitness to numerous conflicts experienced firsthand as a journalist sent to war zones, he encountered the topic of conflicts, past and present, which afflict different areas of the globe, with particular reference to the ongoing one between Russia and Ukraine.
A native of Palmanova in Friuli, Capuozzo already as a child saw with his own eyes the ethnic and political tensions of post-war Trieste, the nodal point of the ideological confrontation between the West and the Iron Curtain.
But precisely when the latter fell in 1990, when it was thought that the climate of the Cold War had passed, a long and bloody civil conflict was unleashed within the former Yugoslavia.
With a view to interpreting the conflict in Ukraine, and above all predicting its developments, Capuozzo referred to his experiences gained in the conflicts in Somalia, the Middle East, Afghanistan and Chechnya.
Precisely on the basis of decades of knowledge acquired directly on the battlefield, Capuozzo himself proved perplexed in seeing a rapid outcome of the conflict in Ukraine, as the media are often undermined by false information, propaganda and easy illusions.
Behind the conflict there are also old ethnic, classist and political issues such as the Holodomor, the Ukrainian genocide perpetrated by Stalin in the early 1930s of the last century.
Capuozzo was very cautious towards the too simplistic “removal” of Putin to resolve the conflict. In fact, looking at the recent past, the physical elimination by the West of undisputed dictators such as the Iraqi Saddam Hussein and the Libyan Muammar Gaddafi has caused greater evils than those removed.
But just returning to the period of the Cold War, in which for years a terrible conflict between East and West seemed imminent every day, the simple dialectical confrontation that materialized in the Helsinki Conference of 1975 led to the Final Declaration signed by thirty-five states, including the USA, the USSR, Canada and all the European states and constitute an attempt, proved valid over time, to improve relations between the communist bloc and the West.
The Helsinki agreements formed the basis for the subsequent creation of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) of which San Marino is a participating State.
While aware that the future is unpredictable, the dialogue between the parties, however long and exhausting it may be, leaves room for less dramatic scenarios.
The president of the Ariminus Montefeltro Lions Club, Gianluca Zucchi, thanked the speaker and asked for a greeting from the presidents of the Clubs who took part in the Intermeeting.
To represent the San Marino Lions Club Without Districtthe president Silvano Di Mario, unable to participate, delegated the vice president Pietro Falcioni who brought the greetings of San Marino applauding the initiatives of collaboration and cultural exchanges between the neighboring clubs.