ABSTRACT: A list of the artists and intellectuals, and especially the writers, who signed the petition for the establishment of the ad hoc tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

(1994 - IL QUOTIDIANO RADICALE, 3 November 1993)

Never before has the European intelligentsia seemed so much at a loss as in front of the tragedy in the former Yugoslavia. Few appeals, equally few commitments: the sense of impotence in the face of the genocide - which no one thought could ever occur again - has almost always remained within, without taking the shape of a film, a book or a picture. Sarajevo, in other words, has not yet produced a Guernica. And yet, called upon to endorse a petition for the immediate establishment of the international tribunal on the crimes in ex-Yugoslavia, artists and intellectuals have given a massive support. The writers were especially concerned. For instance, Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish Nobel Prize in 1980 for Literature, signed the appeal. Milosz himself two months ago launched a severe warning against Europe in the form of a poem: "Let them shake and realize, at the last moment: the word Sarajevo will mean the destruction of their children, the foulness of their daughters/ This is what they are preparing, and they rea

ssure themselves - We, at least, are safe - whereas they nurture the thing that will destroy them". Along with Milosz are other prestigious personalities: the Russian Josip Bridsky, the Egyptian Nagib Mahfuz, the Albanian Ismail Kadarè, the Peruvian Mario Vargas Losa, the Spaniards Manual Vasquez Montalban and Fernando Savater, the Croatian Predrag Matvejevic, the Americans Allen Ginsberg and Gore Vidal, the Cuban Carlos Franqui, the Hungarian Peter Nadas. Also, eminent playwrights, directors and actors, such as Eugène Ionesco, Giorgio Strehler, Carmelo Bene, Maurizio Scaparro.