"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work : there is now no smooth road towards the future, but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

From the very beginning of Peace Lines, our first Campaign for Peace, the Mostar, Zenica, Kiseljak Call for the Sake of Peace in ex-Yugoslavia, published in the French daily Le Monde, on May 20, 1995, our pledge was for books across the front-lines.

"In twenty months, we have transported some thirty people as witnesses and voluntary copilots, with some fourteen tons of relief and translated texts (Descartes, La Boétie, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Giono, Saint-Exupéry, Plato, Plutarch, Ibn Arabi, Saadia Gaon, Nhat Hanh...).

Why books ? 'We are fed up being considered as digestive tubes' (Mr Kreseljakovic, mayor of Sarajevo until 1994).
We believe in schools and radios, independent media, more than in bags of rice."

This article was updated by the end of April 2023.

To all our friends, passengers, visitors :

2020 was the year nobody expected.

It uprooted all our plans, habits, projects.

The author of these lines caught the coronavirus, first in London in March 2020, then in Belfast, in December 2022.

Worse, his mother died from it, in October 2022 (but things are more complex than that, you don't die from one single cause).

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I was obliged to get vaccinated, to be able to go to Brighton, in January 2022. My mother had been vaccinated too.

Sadly, we realized that the vaccine (which is not one, strictly, medically speaking) was in no way preventive.

Contrarily to all the other true vaccines.

Following these three years of confusion, unprecedented chaos, our priorities shifted, on every level.

Thus, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which we have been so deeply involved since October 2000, became something of a side-show.

We all discovered other emergencies, much closer to home.

The duty of solidarity still remains primordial, on all levels of human experience.

The author of these lines has participated, as a volunteer, in a Social Grocery, related to the Food Bank in his region.

In this grocery you see people queuing for low-cost products, who had no need of that before.

Among them, a mother and her daughter, who owned a café, gone bankrupt after many others, due to the pandemics.

How can we begin to evaluate the extent of all the social, human damage done ?

More than ever, we need to rehumanize ourselves, smile through masks, and beyond masks, listen to each other, encourage each other, support each other.

It's a long way to free ourselves from this long, vicious nightmare of the years 2020-2022.

The peace we have been seeking since our birth as a humanitarian organization, will be found, built, and kept, in ourselves.

("Be the Change you Wish to See in the World")

At that cost we shall survive, stronger, more resolute.

"What does not kill me makes me stronger".