Following, we present the interview of Pierluigi Ontanetti and Giuseppe Ciotola, who have served during the war in Bosnia.

Pierluigi Ontanetti, 53 years old from Florence, went to Sarajevo as a volunteer for the “March of the 500″ on December 10th, 1992.

He decided to stay there until August 1994 for a project of non-violent popular interposition. His task was to ride his car between Split and Sarajevo delivering mail in and out of the siege. After the war he went back to Sarajevo several times and in 2003 he was diagnosed with a non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He is now unemployed because of his health conditions and is undergoing a maintenance therapy.

Giuseppe Ciotola was born in Naples in 1976 and in 1994 started working in the Italian Army as a mechanic.

Between 1995 and 2000 he was deployed twice in Bosnia, once in Kosovo and once in Albania. In Bosnia he was stationed in the military base of Tito Barack as army vehicle electrician, servicing cars and trucks used in the field without any protection. In 2000, upon his return from the last mission, he was diagnosed with a thrombocythemia, a form of leukemia, and several kinds of heavy metal particles were detected in his body. Thirteen Italian troopers who have been deployed in the Tito Raback Base died of cancers deriving from the exposure to depleted uranium. Today Giuseppe lives in Treviso with his wife and their two children and works as a part-time mechanic. Michele and Rocco left for Bosnia at the beginning of February to trace the steps of Pieluigi and Giuseppe, looking for the places that they had seen several years earlier.

Simone/TerraProject