The Weekly Lift - April 18, 2024

This week's selection of headlines and articles*:

International Relations: Ireland Says It’s Moving Closer To Recognising A Palestinian State

The Globe and Mail (Canada) reports,"Ireland is close to formally recognizing a Palestinian state and would like to do so in concert with Spain and other like-minded countries, new Prime Minister Simon Harris said on Friday after meeting his Spanish counterpart.

Spain and Ireland, long champions of Palestinian rights, last month announced alongside Malta and Slovenia that they would jointly work toward the recognition of a Palestinian state. The efforts come as a mounting death toll in Gaza from Israel’s offensive to rout out Hamas prompts calls globally for a ceasefire and lasting solution for peace in the region.

“Let me this evening say our assessment is that that point is coming much closer and we would like to move together in doing so,” Mr. Harris said after meeting Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, the first premier to visit Dublin since Mr. Harris became Prime Minister this week.

“When we move forward, we would like to do so with as many others as possible to lend weight to the decision and to send the strongest message. The people of Israel deserve a secure and peaceful future, so do the people of Palestine. Equal sovereignty, equal respect.”

Israel told the four European Union countries that committed to moving toward Palestinian recognition that their initiative would amount to a “prize for terrorism” that would reduce the chances of a negotiated resolution to the generations-old conflict.

The meeting with Mr. Harris was part of a number Mr. Sanchez planned this week with EU counterparts to try to garner support for the recognition of a Palestinian state. Mr. Sanchez said following a meeting in Oslo with his Norwegian counterpart, Jonas Gahr St?re, earlier on Friday that there were “clear signs” in Europe that countries in the region were prepared to recognize a Palestinian state.

Mr. Sanchez has previously said he expects Madrid to extend recognition to Palestinians by July. Mr. Harris said Dublin would continue discussions with other like-minded countries in Europe and beyond, including at next week’s meeting of EU leaders.

Irish Foreign Minister Micheál Martin said earlier this week he was preparing to bring a formal proposal to government on the recognition of a Palestinian state.

Since 1988, 139 out of 193 United Nations member states have recognized Palestinian statehood."

Humanitarian Assistance: World Donors Pledge More Than $2 Billion In Aid For War-Stricken Sudan

The Los Angeles Times (US) reports,"French President Emmanuel Macron announced Monday that world donors are pledging more than $2 billion in aid for Sudan, a year into a war that has pushed its population to the brink of famine.

Macron spoke at the end of an international conference in Paris aimed at drumming up support for Sudan’s people. He did not give a detailed timeline or breakdown of the funding.

In a final statement, top diplomatic envoys, U.N. officials and aid agencies gathered at the conference also urged Sudan’s warring parties to stop rights violations and allow access for humanitarian aid. Members of Sudan’s civil society took part in the Paris meeting, but neither the Sudanese army nor its rival paramilitary were represented.

Sudan descended into conflict in April last year when simmering tensions between the military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces exploded into open fighting in the capital, Khartoum, and elsewhere across the country. Macron called it “one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world,’’ that has created a ‘’real risk of famine.’’

The United Nations’ humanitarian campaign needs some $2.7 billion this year to get food, healthcare and other supplies to 24 million people in Sudan — nearly half its population of 51 million. So far, funders have given only $145 million, about 5%, according to the U.N’s humanitarian office, known as OCHA.

After Monday’s conference, Macron said, ‘’We are today at 2 billion euros for Sudan.’’ United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres urged the international community to donate generously and support the U.N. life-saving efforts to help Sudanese people, trapped in the “nightmare of bloodshed.”

More than 14,000 people have been killed and at least 33,000 have been wounded in a yearlong war. Nearly 9 million people have been forced to flee their homes either to safer areas inside Sudan or to neighboring countries, according to the U.N. Hunger, sexual violence against women and girls and continued displacement are rampant and much of the country’s infrastructure — homes, hospitals and schools — has been reduced to rubble.

“We cannot let this nightmare slide from view,” Guterres said in a video message to the Paris conference. “It’s time to support the Sudanese people. It’s time to silence the guns,” he added. French Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne said the aim of the conference was to mobilize humanitarian funding to help Sudanese people, who have been victims of both a “terrible war” and “international indifference.”

“It’s a colossal task,” Sejourne said. “It’s a war the Sudanese people did not want, a war that only produces chaos and suffering.” The European Union’s crisis management commissioner, Janez Lenarcic, said the 27-member bloc wants to ensure that Sudan is not forgotten as wars in Gaza and Ukraine dominate the international news.

“People of Sudan, caught up in this emergency, are almost completely invisible,” Lenarcic said. Sudan has turned into one of the worst humanitarian disasters ever on the African continent, he said, and added: “It is our duty not to look away.”

President of the International Committee of the Red Cross Mirjana Spoljaric warned that humanitarian action is increasingly politicized in Sudan and humanitarian workers are risking their lives to get vital aid to people. She urged all sides in the war to facilitate a “safe, rapid, and unimpeded passage of humanitarian personnel and goods, into and within Sudan, through all available routes.”

“Securing a military advantage cannot be pursued regardless of the human cost,” Spoljaric said. The United States and Saudi Arabia initially led efforts to find a negotiated way out of the conflict. But the efforts did not succeed, and since October the fighting has been overshadowed by the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, which is threatening to expand into a broader regional conflict.

Relief workers, meanwhile, warn that Sudan is hurtling toward an even larger-scale calamity of starvation, with potential mass death in the coming months. Food production and distribution networks have broken down, and aid agencies are unable to reach the worst-afflicted regions.

The conflict has also been marked by widespread reports of atrocities including killings, displacement and rape, particularly in the area of the capital and the western region of Darfur.

Save the Children warned that about 230,000 children, pregnant women and newborn mothers could die of malnutrition in the coming months. “Famine is a reality in Sudan,” said Abdallah al-Dardari, a regional director of the U.N. Development Program. He appealed to diplomats gathered in Paris to help facilitate access for humanitarian aid workers and funding for vital aid for millions of people trapped in a conflict that is “rapidly deteriorating due to no respect for human rights and international law.”

The military, headed by Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, and the RSF, commanded by Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, have carved up Khartoum and trade indiscriminate fire. In 2021, Burhan and Dagalo were uneasy allies who led a military coup. They toppled an internationally recognized civilian government that was supposed to steer Sudan’s democratic transition."

Justice: Slavery Tribunal? Africa And Caribbean Unite On Reparations

The Japan Times (Japan) reports, "Support is building among Africa and Caribbean nations for the creation of an international tribunal on atrocities dating to the transatlantic trade of enslaved people, with the United States backing a U.N. panel at the heart of the effort.

A tribunal, modeled on other ad-hoc courts such as the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals after World War II, was proposed last year. It has now gained traction within a broader slavery reparations movement, Reuters reporting based on interviews with a dozen people reveals.

Formally recommended in June by the U.N. Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, the idea of a special tribunal has been explored further at African and Caribbean regional bodies, said Eric Phillips, a vice-chair of the slavery reparations commission for the Caribbean Community, CARICOM, which groups 15 member states.

The scope of any tribunal has not been determined but the U.N. Forum recommended in a preliminary report that it should address reparations for enslavement, apartheid, genocide, and colonialism.

Advocates, including within CARICOM and the African Union (AU), which groups 55 nations across the continent, are working to build wider backing for the idea among U.N. members, Phillips said.

A special U.N. tribunal would help establish legal norms for complex international and historical reparations claims, its supporters say. Opponents of reparations argue, among other things, that contemporary states and institutions should not be held responsible for historical slavery.

Even its supporters recognize that establishing an international tribunal for slavery will not be easy. There are "huge obstacles," said Martin Okumu-Masiga, Secretary-General of the Africa Judges and Jurists Forum (AJJF), which is providing reparations-related advice to the AU.

Hurdles include obtaining the cooperation of nations that were involved in the trade of enslaved people and the legal complexities of finding responsible parties and determining remedies. "These things happened many years ago and historical records and evidence can be challenging to access and even verify," Okumo-Masiga said.

Unlike the Nuremberg trials, nobody directly involved in transatlantic slavery is alive. Asked about the idea of a tribunal, a spokesperson for the British Foreign Office acknowledged the country's role in transatlantic slavery, but said it had no plan to pay reparations. Instead, past wrongs should be tackled by learning lessons from history and tackling "today's challenges," the spokesperson said.

However, advocates for reparations say Western countries and institutions that continue to benefit from the wealth slavery generated should be held accountable, particularly given ongoing legacies of racial discrimination.

A tribunal would help establish an "official record of history," said Brian Kagoro, a Zimbabwean lawyer who has been advocating for reparations for over two decades. Racism, impoverishment and economic underdevelopment are linked to the longstanding consequences of transatlantic slavery from the United States to Europe and the African continent, according to U.N. studies.

"These legacies are alive and well," said Clive Lewis, a British Labour MP and a descendant of people enslaved in the Caribbean nation of Grenada. Black people "live in poorer and more polluted areas, they have worse diets, they have worse educational outcomes ... because structural racism is embedded deep."

The proposal for a tribunal was discussed in November at a reparations summit in Ghana attended by African and Caribbean leaders. The Ghana summit ended with a commitment to explore judicial routes, including "litigation options."

Africa's most populous nation, Nigeria, is in favor of the push for a tribunal, Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar said in February, saying the country would support the idea "until it becomes a reality."

In Grenada, where hundreds of thousands were enslaved, Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell is "in full support," a spokesperson said, describing the tribunal as a CARICOM-led initiative.

Phillips said the work to establish a tribunal would have to take place through the United Nations system and include conversations with countries, including Portugal, Britain, France, Spain, Netherlands and Denmark, that were involved in trading enslaved people to the Caribbean and other regions.

Reuters could not establish how many countries in Africa and the Caribbean were likely to support the idea. Among the tribunal's most vocal advocates is Justin Hansford, a Howard University law professor backed by the U.S. State Department to serve at the U.N. forum. He said the idea will be discussed at the forum's third session, starting April 16, due to be attended by 50 or more nations.

Hansford then plans to travel to Africa to lobby for further support, with the goal of raising the proposal with stronger backing during the U.N. General Assembly in September, he said. "A lot of my work now is to try to help make it a reality," he said of the tribunal, saying it could take three to five years to get it off the ground. Phillips said the goal was to garner enough support by 2025.

The United States, which has financed the U.N forum, "will make a decision on the tribunal when it has been developed and established," a U.S. State Department spokesperson said. "However, the United States strongly supports" the forum's work, the spokesperson added.

Regarding reparations, "the complexity of the issue, legal challenges, and differing perspectives among Caribbean nations present significant challenges," the spokesperson said.

The U.N. leadership has now come out in support for reparations, which have been used in other circumstances to offset large moral and economic debts, such as to Japanese Americans interned by the United States during WWII and to families of Holocaust survivors.

"We call for reparatory justice frameworks, to help overcome generations of exclusion and discrimination," U.N. General Secretary Antonio Guterres said on March 25, in his most direct public comments yet on the issue. Guterres' office did not respond to a request for comment about a possible tribunal.

"No country with a legacy of enslavement, the trade in enslaved Africans, or colonialism has fully reckoned with the past, or comprehensively accounted for the impacts on the lives of people of African descent today," said Liz Throssell, spokesperson for the U.N. Human Rights office, in response to a question about the tribunal.

The Netherlands apologized for its role in transatlantic slavery last year and announced a roughly $200 million fund to address that past. A spokesperson for the foreign ministry said it was not aware of the discussions around a tribunal and could not respond to questions.

The French government declined to comment. The governments of Portugal, Spain and Denmark did not respond to requests for comment. The push for a tribunal stems in part from a belief that claims need to be enshrined in a legal framework, said Okumu-Masiga, of the Africa Judges and Jurists Forum.

Several institutions, including the European Union, have concluded that transatlantic slavery was a crime against humanity. After the 1940s Nuremberg trials, the U.N. formalized the structure of special tribunals — criminal courts set up on an ad-hoc basis to investigate serious international crimes, such as crimes against humanity.

The U.N. has since established two: one to prosecute those responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide and another to prosecute war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The Rwanda and Yugoslavia tribunals were established by the U.N. Security Council, however the International Criminal Court, another international U.N. tribunal, was founded through a General Assembly resolution, a possible route for a slavery reparations tribunal, Hansford said.

Okumu-Masiga said affected countries, descendants of enslaved people and indigenous groups could be potential claimants, while defendants could include nations and institutions with historic links to slavery or even descendants of enslavers.

An international tribunal is not the only judicial path available. At a summit of Caribbean countries in February this year, the gathered prime ministers and presidents proposed working with the AU to request an ICJ advisory legal opinion on reparations through the U.N. General Assembly, a source familiar with the matter at CARICOM said.

Makmid Kamara, founder of the Accra-based civil society group Reforms Initiatives that works with the AU on reparatory justice, said decisions on which route to take would be made based on that advisory by the ICJ.

From the 15th to the late 19th century, at least 12.5 million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported by mainly European but also U.S. and Brazilian-flagged ships and sold into slavery. Before pushing for the abolition of slavery, Britain transported an estimated 3.2 million people, the most active European country after Portugal, which enslaved nearly 6 million.

Those who survived the brutal voyage ended up toiling on plantations under inhumane conditions in the Americas, mostly in Brazil, the Caribbean and the United States, while others profited from their labor.

Calls for reparations started with enslaved people themselves. "They ran away, they raised their voices in songs of protests, they fought wars of resistance," said Verene A. Sheperd, director of the center for reparation research at the University of West Indies.

The movement later garnered support from quarters as varied as U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and the Caribbean's Rastafarians. In the past year, some of the world's largest institutions have added their voices.

Ghana led efforts to get African support for formally pursuing reparations, with Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa also taking up the cause, said Kamara. Most discussion has focused on transatlantic trafficking, Hansford and Phillips said, rather than the older trans-Saharan trade to the Islamic world, estimated to have transported several million enslaved Africans.

What reparations would consist of in practice is debated. Some, including in the United States, have pushed for individual payments to descendants of enslaved people. CARICOM, in a 2014 plan, called for debt cancellation and support from European nations to tackle public health and economic crises.

The AU decision to join CARICOM has given new heft to the campaign, said Jasmine Mickens, a U.S.— based strategist for social movements who specializes in reparations.

The AU is now developing Africa's own white paper on what reparations might look like, said Okumu-Masiga. "We have a global community behind this message," said Mickens, who attended the Ghana event. "That's something this movement has never seen before."

Global Health: Long-Acting Drugs May Revolutionize H.I.V. Prevention And Treatment

The New York Times (US) reports, "A pill taken once a week. A shot administered at home once a month. Even a jab given at a clinic every six months.

In the next five to 10 years, these options may be available to prevent or treat H.I.V. Instead of drugs that must be taken daily, scientists are closing in on longer-acting alternatives — perhaps even a future in which H.I.V. may require attention just twice a year, inconceivable in the darkest decades of the epidemic.

“This period is the next wave of innovation, newer products meeting the needs of people, particularly in prevention, in ways that we didn’t ever have before,” said Mitchell Warren, executive director of the H.I.V. prevention organization AVAC.

Long-acting therapies may obviate the need to remember to take a daily pill to prevent or treat H.I.V. And for some patients, the new drugs may ease the stigma of the disease, itself an obstacle to treatment.

“To not have to remember that every morning is earth-changing for them,” said Dr. Rachel Bender Ignacio, director of University of Washington’s UW Positive, a clinical research site focusing on H.I.V. “That stigma, that internalized stigma of taking that pill every morning, is what prevents them from taking it.”

Long-acting drugs are likely to be an even greater boon in populations that have long been hard to reach: patients who have spotty access to health services, or who have trouble taking daily pills because they have unstable housing or transportation, are struggling with substance use, are mentally ill or face discrimination and stigma.

In 2022, nearly 30 years after the advent of combination antiretroviral therapy, more than nine million of the 39 million people living with H.I.V. worldwide were not receiving treatment. About 630,000 died from AIDS-related illnesses that year.

Even in the United States, about one-third of those diagnosed with H.I.V. are not keeping the virus in check. “We still haven’t addressed these sort of underlying issues around access,” said Gregg Gonsalves, a longtime H.I.V. activist and an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health. “We can be elated about the science and the clinical implications” of long-lasting drugs, he added. “But for many people, it’s going to be a distant dream.”

One barometer of the excitement about long-acting regimens was their prominence at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Denver in March. The annual meeting has served as the backdrop to many H.I.V. milestones, including the electric moment in 1996 when researchers showed that a combination of drugs could suppress the virus.

Dozens of studies of long-acting regimens were presented at the conference this year. (While most such drugs are tantalizingly close for H.I.V. prevention and treatment, similar options for tuberculosis, hepatitis B and hepatitis C are not far behind.)

One long-acting treatment — Cabenuva, two shots given every other month — has been available for nearly three years. It costs more than $39,000 annually in the United States, although few patients pay that price. Even with a steep discount, however, the treatment is out of reach for many patients in low-income countries.

Still, many researchers at the conference were excited about the results from one study showing that Cabenuva was more effective than daily pills at controlling H.I.V. even in groups that typically have trouble adhering to treatment.

“When you think about how hard it is for some folks, giving them new tools that might be able to get them to be suppressed is a big deal,” said Dr. Kimberly Smith, who leads research and development at ViiV Healthcare, which makes one of the component drugs in Cabenuva.

Long-acting drugs might be useful even for children living with H.I.V. Worldwide, only about half of children diagnosed with H.I.V. are receiving treatment. That’s in part because of the lack of drug versions made for children, Dr. Charles Flexner, an H.I.V. expert at Johns Hopkins University, said in a presentation at the Denver conference.

“With long-acting formulations, that will no longer be the case,” Dr. Flexner said. “Children will be able to use the same formulation as adults, just at a different dose.”

Most long-acting shots contain nanocrystals of drug suspended in liquid. While oral pills must pass through the stomach and the intestinal tract before they enter the circulation, so-called depot shots deliver the drugs directly into the bloodstream. But they are released extremely slowly, over the course of weeks or months.

Some depot antipsychotics are given every two to eight weeks, and the contraceptive Depo-Provera is administered once every three months. Cabenuva — a combination of cabotegravir, made by ViiV Healthcare (majority owned by GSK), and Janssen’s rilpivirine — is injected into gluteal muscles every two months to treat H.I.V.

Cabotegravir given under the skin of the stomach produced more bruising and rashes than in the buttocks, and some people developed nodules that lingered for weeks or even months. But with gluteal injections, “there’s nothing that you see,” Dr. Smith said. “You feel pain for a couple of days and then you go on with your life.”

ViiV is trying to develop a version of cabotegravir to be given every four months and, ultimately, one every six months. The company aims to bring the four-month version to market for preventing H.I.V. in 2026, and for treatment in 2027.

But injecting drugs into muscle is challenging for people who have significant body fat or who have silicone implants in the buttocks, as some trans women do. Some newer shots under development are administered under the skin, circumventing the problem.

Gilead’s lenacapavir can be given as a subcutaneous injection in the stomach once every six months, but it is so far approved only for people with H.I.V. who are resistant to other drugs. The drug is in multiple late-stage trials as a long-acting H.I.V. preventative in various groups, including cisgender women.

Lenacapavir is also being tested as a treatment in the form of a once-weekly pill in combination with another drug, islatravir, made by Merck. Having multiple long-acting treatments is ideal, “so people can really make the choice among the options that are going to work best for them,” said Dr. Jared Baeten, a vice president at Gilead.

Santos Rodriguez, 28, was diagnosed with H.I.V. in 2016 and has taken a daily pill ever since to suppress the virus. Mr. Rodriguez, who works on artificial intelligence at Mayo Clinic in Florida, said having to take only one pill a week would be “definitely groundbreaking for me and my adherence.”

He said he was put off by the clinic visits every two months required for Cabenuva shots, and by reports that injections in the buttocks are painful. A shot every four months or every six months would be much more attractive, he added.

To make it truly accessible for everyone, including those who may live far from a health care center, researchers must also come up with a long-acting injection that can be self-administered, some experts noted.

One team is developing exactly that and, with backing from the global health initiative Unitaid, planning to make it available in low- and middle-income nations.

“The really exciting thing about this is that the way that it’s being developed, it ideally will bypass the trickle-down effect to get into the people who need it most,” said Dr. Bender Ignacio, referring to the tendency of rich countries to gain access to new therapies first. She is leading the study.

The product uses a lipid base to suspend three H.I.V. drugs, two water-soluble and one fat-soluble. Unlike depot shots, which release drugs slowly, this so-called nanolozenge is taken up by the immune cells and lymph nodes immediately after it is delivered under the skin of the stomach.

The shots can carry smaller doses of drugs because of this efficiency, and they can also easily be adapted for children and adolescents, Dr. Bender Ignacio said. A single injection maintains levels of the three drugs in the body for more than a month, replacing 150 pills.

So far, the self-administered long-acting shot has been tested in just 11 people, including Kenneth Davis, 58, a resident of Auburn, Wash. Mr. Davis, who lost two family members to AIDS, likened the jab to a bee sting — fleeting and less painful than the Covid vaccines.

Because the component drugs have each been independently approved, Dr. Bender Ignacio estimated the shots could be available to treat H.I.V. in less than five years.

Many of the products, including those in Dr. Bender Ignacio’s study, can be adjusted to prevent H.I.V. There are currently only three options for that: two types of daily pills, and ViiV’s cabotegravir, which is injected into the buttocks once every two months. “It’s been prevention where we have been lagging the greatest in the AIDS response over the last decade,” Mr. Warren, of AVAC, said.

One study presented at the Denver conference showed that when people were offered a choice of prevention methods, more of them chose long-acting cabotegravir. But the percentage opting for daily pills also rose.

“The fact that we saw protection go up with a range of methods — that to me is the most important thing,” Mr. Warren said. The study, he added, “really shows that there is now evidence behind choice, not just advocacy.”

International Relations: Paris 2024: in Olympia, The Flame Ceremony Turns Into A Platform For Peace

Le Monde (France) reports, "Nestled in the heart of the green region of Elide, in the Peloponnese, the stadium of the 2,600-year-old sanctuary of Olympia was transformed, on Tuesday, April 16, into a platform for peace. In overcast weather and stunning heat, the ignition of the flame thanks to the rays of the sun, as the ancient tradition dictates, could not be achieved. Fortunately, as a precaution, the Olympic Committee always organizes a dress rehearsal the old one to keep the flame lit.

101 days before the opening ceremony in Paris, it was thus able to be distributed by the "high priestess" to the first relay of the flame, the Greek Stefanos Ntouskos, Olympic rowing champion in Tokyo in 2021. Before giving the sacred fire to the athlete, she invoked the god of the Sun and Light, Apollo: "Offer peace to all peoples and laurel wreaths to the winners of the Games", then released a dove.

Faced with an audience of a few thousand spectators and guests, including the President of the Greek Republic, Katerina Sakellaropoulou and the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, the President of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, recalled the message of hope conveyed by the Olympic flame, despite a global environment marked in particular by the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war. Believing that "the world is tired of conflicts", Mr. Bach added that "we all aspire to something that brings us together again, to something that unites us, to something that gives us hope".

Aristidis Panagiotopoulos, mayor of the former Olympia, a village of some 700 inhabitants that welcomes up to 10,000 visitors per day at the peak of the season, said that "the spirit of Olympism was very much alive". "With this flame will travel the universal message of peace and fraternity between peoples. We have a debt to the world, we are, here in Olympia, the guardians of the values of Olympism, "he added.

Questioned by Le Monde, the Greek Minister of Sports, Ioannis Vroutsis, insisted on "the pride of the Greeks that the Olympic flame was born here in Olympia 2,800 years ago". "The Olympic Games are the largest social event in the world. Every four years, Olympism conveys values of peace, fraternity, solidarity and it all started here, "he also stressed.

Stefanos Ntouskos, the first relay of the Olympic flame, who passed it on to Laure Manaudou, who had won her first Olympic title, in a 400 m freestyle, at the Athens Olympic Games in 2004, said he was "very proud and honored" to have been chosen for this role. "It is very symbolic for me to be the first to carry this message of peace and fraternity," he said.

After two editions of the Games (summer in 2021 and winter in 2022) spoiled by the restrictions related to the Covid-19 pandemic, Panos Kourouklis, a pensioner living in a neighboring village, was able to come back to see the ceremony: "I am a regular.

For us, the Greeks, this ceremony is special and in this place, more than elsewhere, we feel connected to our history, a philosophy, values". His dream is to see the Olympic Games organized permanently here in Greece, even if he regrets the "gabegie" related to the organization of the Athens Olympics in 2004.

Vassilis Tiligadas, owner of the Neda Hotel and representative of the Union of Hoteliers of ancient Olympia, remembers"having taken his first steps in the ancient ruins and playing with his friends on this site". "It always moves me to see that the flame is lit in this small village in the depths of Greece and that it then crosses the whole world," he notes.

He still has a regret: in "the village of Olympism, there is no stadium worthy of the name for children to do athletics". In the community of municipalities of Olympia, of the 15,000 inhabitants, only 2,000 people live from tourism, and the others from agriculture. "When we talk about building a stadium or a gymnasium, the town hall tells us that some villages even lack water and that this is not the priority," admits Vassilis Tiligadas.

Antonis Natsios, a physical education teacher, also thinks that the country has a little forgotten its heritage. A fervent admirer of the Olympic Games, he has written several books in Greek, French and English to "inform young people about the values of Olympism, that is, the union of peoples across borders, equality between men". On Monday, on BFM-TV, the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron himself wanted to "do everything to have an Olympic truce".

This idea of a truce during the Games is generally magnified or even fantasized by many Greeks. Erofili Kollia, Director of Archaeological Services in the Elide Region, explains that the Olympic truce or "Ekecheiria" established in the 9thcentury BC. J-C, meant above all "that all citizens, athletes, families could go safely to attend or participate in the Games", without necessarily meaning the total cessation of the fights.

The idea that sport can serve the cause of international peace was born in the circles of liberal pacifism at the turn of the 1880s and was defended by Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of modern games.

Having made the trip from Kalavrita, a martyred village in the Peloponnese during the Second World War, Nikos Papadatos said he was "very moved by the situation in Gaza and Ukraine". "I would like this message of peace to be heard by the leaders of this world. I may be naive, but this flame, this light, is a sign of hope and for us Greeks in particular, "said the fifty-year-old professor.

Sacred fire is also associated in Greece with the Orthodox feast of Easter. On Easter Saturday (May 4), the faithful go to the churches, bring candles to light them with the "light" of hope and renewal transported from Jerusalem.

Paradoxically, the Olympic flame relay was introduced at the Berlin Games in 1936, under Hitler, but "it relies on elements dating from antiquity," says Erofili Kollia. At the beginning of the Ancient Games, messengers traveled Greece to announce the beginning of the competition.

Over the next eleven days, six hundred relayers will pass the flame and travel 5,000 km through Greece before embarking, on April 27, on a three-mast, the Belem. Direction: France."

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