A day on the mountain always offers more than a story to tell.
Yesterday I went to visit the Bestoon Cave on the Bradost Mountain. The cave – that according to the legend is so long to be endless – was discovered in 1951 and it is one of the Modern Stone Age sites that are around Kurdistan. It was a nice feeling to know that I was in Neanderthal Man’s house… To keep company to the ancient stone stalagmites and stalactites there were younger ones made of ice: transience and permanence one next to the other: different in substance and yet so similar in shape…
It was very suggestive: mountains here are so old that they force you to rethink the sense of time.
After visiting the caves, we continued roaming up and down the mountains: the snow added an extra layer of tranquillity. Around lunch time, we stopped to have a bite on a quiet spot on the side of the road with a stunning view of three different chains of mountains at the far end of the valley in front of us. A few minutes after we set up our picnic, a car honks and slows down. Nothing surprising about it because people here are always very curious about foreigners. Their call, though, was not a gesture of kindness, it was rather one of warning. ”Careful, landmines!”, they tell us. Not five minutes have passed when another car does the same. We look around and we realise that we have parked the car by a landmine field – the red flags that signal it are slightly hidden by the trees. After a cold shiver, this situation becomes the main subject of several bad jokes, including the concern about where to pee after lunch considering that no one wants to be blown up… it is fascinating how dry humour becomes a powerful means to face fear. We get back in the car and continue our exploration. We listen to a pretty unusual selectionof songs, including a Hawaiian reggae tune that goes: you’ve got to live Hawaiian style… nothing could be more strident than this in relation to the environment that surrounds us. The song actually begins the very moment we drive past another landmine field – this one is very big and prepared to be cleared. Inside the fence that limits the area I see a black squirrel running around unconcerned. Just outside the fence there is a herd of wild horses. The soundtrack gives the scene a surreal twist, yet is seems to clearly reveal the sense ofdisplacement I am feeling. There are things that seem so distant and yet they have become part of my daily life.
This morning I went to look for some information to try and understand the situation a little better. All over Iraq there are still 25 million unexploded landmines. in Kurdistan, that has started since 2002 a serious and constant de-mining campaign, there are still 716 mined villages and 2241 landmine fields – these figures make my head spin. Italy, it seems, found a way to make herself useful: in the late 1980s, during the Iraq-Iran war, she was one of the main mine exporters in Iraq.