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“Violence is like a drug, the more you use it, the more you become dependent on it." Witnessess of the tragedies of XX century speak against the death penalty.

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"What would the world be without forgiveness? We would all be addicted on violence". Some witnesses of the great tragedies of history during the XX century ask this question in Barcelona, at Sant'Egidio meeting. Witnesses of Holocaust, apartheid, death penalty, Rwandan genocide.

In South Africa could have been found a "hard punishment for those responsible of racial segregation", said the South African Deputy Minister Andries Carl Nel.

At Auscwitz, Liliana Segre, then little more than a child, could have taken revenge on her persecutor, but "it was then - she said - that I realized that I was better than him."

Tamara Chikunova, protagonist of the fight against death penalty in Central Asia, could have closed herself in her grief after the death of his son, but "this - she said - is the time to fight for the soul of people, otherwise the emptiness of ideas will be filled with violence."

It was then the turn of a young Rwandan that explaind the value of the abolition of death penalty in a country crushed by a terrible war: "it is expected that to stop the violence we should use an equal and opposite violence - said Celestin Twizere, from the Community of Sant 'Egidio in Rwanda - but violence is like a drug: the more you use it, the more you become dependent on it."