Friday, 27 August 2004 10:20:36
MILAN - Just a few years ago Italian journalist and Red Cross volunteer Enzo Baldoni was at that frontier of the world called East Timor. A witness of the world.

In East Timor Enzo met Xanana Gusmao, the East Timorian resistance leader who was in love with two colours - black and blue. And Ronaldo. An incredible story of history and football, one which Enzo told the world about.

Massimo Moratti sent an Inter shirt and wrote a letter. Through Enzo.

Enzo was (and it is terrible to use the past instead of the present tense) a careful and irreplaceable witness of what happens at the world's unknown and faraway frontiers. Of those which took his life on an August night in Iraq after days of silence and before a cruel and cold announcement, the final hour of a loyal and courageous man who reported what others couldn't see.

In memory of Enzo, a witness of history and seeker of the truth, standard bearer for a day of football, which is sometimes too insignificant with respect to what happens in life, we dedicate these words. Perhaps too few.

Let us hope his strength, the strength of an isolated witness whose death has become fundamental for our history, will become a light which can pierce the darkness of the dramatic solitude his family and everyone who knew him are forced to live with in this tragic moment.