DO YOU KNOW WHO IQBAL WAS ?

Tuesday, April 21, 2015 COLUMN Do you know who Iqbal was? By: Elio Velan Posted: 21.04.2015 | 14:57 Last change: 04/21/2015 | 14:57 0 comments Rozzol-Melara is a suburb of Trieste, somewhere halfway between the coast and the Karst, from a social or class point of view it is a typical working-class neighborhood, ethnically it is one of the many parts of the city where Italian and Slovenian ethnicities touch in terms of living together for centuries. next to another. Melara is a place where architects from the second half of the twentieth century erected a horrible concrete structure in which they installed workers' apartments, the concrete giant is visible from afar and is one of the emblematic examples of shame of the profession, architecture in the service of capital. The residential settlement of Melara resembles the workers' settlements of Naples, Milan and Rome. It is almost identical to that labyrinth of cement, misery and mafia vices that was very well presented by Italian director Matteo Garrone in the film Gomorra, one of the better Italian films of the last two decades. Returning to certain notions that were popular in the last century we could easily assert that the settlement of Melara is an example of human alienation, a place where man is lost, where the shaping of space serves to consciously destroy the dignity of the individual. Today the working class is gone, If it really disappeared, the space in which it once lived and in which it was restored remained, the building was turned into a kind of object of social-class archeology of the third millennium. One day I talked to the principal of the primary and secondary school and the district, Andre Avon, because it is the only school in Trieste that in 2009 introduced optional learning of the Slovenian language, which is offered in addition to English, German and French. After the introduction of a system of compulsory learning of two foreign languages ​​in Italy, this school accepted the challenge and included the Slovenian language in the program. Avon tells me that this was the only valid way to spread the culture of bilingual communication. His school operates in a former working-class neighborhood and in an area where Slovenes and Italians meet. I mean, where culture touches work, interesting experiences of social and ethnic integration are emerging there. I have been in Trieste for many years, so I can easily say that the hotbed of nationalism is in well-to-do neighborhoods in the very center of the city and in the streets of the old town where the new Trieste lumper proletariat has settled. The institute that manages the primary and secondary school in the suburb of Rozzol Melara is called “Istituto comprensivo Iqbal Masih”. During the conversation, Professor Avon uttered that name several times, looked at me and realized that I was not able to reasonably connect the exotic name of the institute with the karst - workers' reality of the Trieste suburbs. "Do you know who Iqbal was?" he asked me suddenly and I honestly replied that I didn’t know. An explanation followed: Iqbal Masih was a Pakistani boy who was assassinated at the age of thirteen because he had become a symbol of the union struggle in Pakistan against the exploitation of underage labor. Iqbal was born in 1983 in Muridke, the exact date of his birth is unknown because he was born into a large poor family and entered the world of work at the age of four. His first job was in a brick factory. The family borrowed to settle a $ 12 debt and ceded Iqbala to the owner of a wallpaper factory, so the boy began Calvary: he worked ten to twelve hours a day, physically chained to the machine next to which he ate and slept. One day he managed to escape and joined a union protest. The factory owner returned it for the machine but Iqbal refused to work; they beat him, left him without food but the little one withstood the pressure and was finally fired. From 1993 until the day of the murder that took place on April 16, 1995, Iqbal Masih traveled almost all over the world, becoming a planetary symbol of the union’s fight against the exploitation of minors. As a ten-year-old, he gave a series of speeches and lectures in the United States and Europe, The established symbolic connection between Pakistan and Trieste, through the character of a young trade unionist, belongs to the leftist worldview. Not everyone has to recognize themselves in that character and in that relationship. The world is complicated. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the communist regimes, an entire culture that had taken shape through two hundred years of trade union struggle was erased. I once read articles by the Istrian Giuseppina Martinuzzi, who wrote in the early twentieth century about the problem of exploiting underage labor in European factories. Articles could comfortably still serve as school material today because children need to know what world they live in. The Trieste school chose its name precisely for these reasons, despite the liberal uranium