Palestinian cities: Barcelona's new 11th district

Amman, JordanWhile Serbian troops were besieging the population of Sarajevo from the surrounding hills, its Mayor, Muhamed Kreševljaković He escaped underground. The Bosnian army had dug a tunnel under the Bosnian capital's airport to transport goods and allow the population to pass through, avoiding the Serbian soldiers' faces. It was through this tunnel that the mayor managed to escape and take off on a plane bound for Barcelona. It was July 1992.

The Catalan capital was preparing to welcome the Olympics, and the city, previously facing away from the sea, had been decorated for the occasion. Kreševljaković attended a dinner for mayors of Olympic cities held on the eve of the opening ceremony and gave a speech denouncing the devastation in Sarajevo: the city that eight years earlier had shone with the Winter Olympics was now practically in ruins.

The Bosnian mayor's cry of alarm moved Pasqual Maragall. The then mayor of Barcelona called on the public to show solidarity with Bosnia and Herzegovina and pledged to donate the remaining food and supplies from the Games to Sarajevo. This empathy crystallized into a lasting institutional collaboration that would culminate in District 11. Under this umbrella, Barcelona channeled support for the reconstruction of the city, and financed the rehabilitation of the Olympic facilities: the Zetra Olympic Pavilion in the Mojmilo Olympic neighborhood, as well as establishing the A'mbajo de la Mojilo.

Thirty years later, Jaume Collboni has announced that Barcelona will reactivate District 11 with a new focus: Palestine. In memory of what he called a "memorable precedent," this time the initiative will be named District 11 - Gaza and Palestinian Cities, and will aim to strengthen and stabilize technical cooperation with Palestinian localities, including Gaza City, Bethlehem and Ramallah, in the face of the unstoppable killing in Gaza.

"The city of Barcelona has a new district," he said. Collboni from Amman, where he visited a refugee camp of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), and stressed that the project strengthens a sustained commitment to Palestinian cities, both in the fierce context of war and in view of reconstruction "when peace comes."

Helping reconstruction

The initiative plans to assign municipal workers to coordinate cooperation projects, emulating the structure of a city district. Collboni emphasized that "a group of City Council technicians" will be in charge of cooperation projects "on a permanent basis" in the areas of urban planning, health, accessibility, and education.

The allocation for the project, which the mayor of Barcelona hopes to launch before the end of the year, will initially be one million euros. The figure includes the budget that the City Council already allocates annually to UNRWA, and which it announced on Monday would increase from 200,000 to 400,000 euros. The council will now begin the process of conceptualizing and specifying the project, which, given the complexity of the conflict—which only in the The last 24 hours have claimed the lives of 75 Palestinians.— will have to adapt to the needs and challenges of today's cities, as highlighted in a statement.