Vatican newspaper deplores death of refugee on Poland-Belarus border (L'Osservatore Romano (Italian))

On November 17, L’Osservatore Romano devoted its most prominent front-page coverage to the funeral of Ahmad al-Hasan, a 19-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned in the Bug River, on the border of Poland and Belarus.

“The hopes of Ahmad have remained forever entangled in one of the too many fences —unfortunately not only metaphorical —that have been unrolled all over the world to keep out those who ask for help,” wrote Giuseppe Fiorentino, the paper’s vice-director.

“And so, more or less in the same hours in which the ‘menace’ of the refugees pressing on the Polish border was thwarted with the jets of fire hydrants and the stinging fumes of tear gas, Ahmad’s body was buried, after a short funeral rite, by the tiny Muslim community of Bohoniki,” he added. “A gesture of pity, a little light in the pitch dark of indifference.”