Help in desperation

On the day of his death last week, Italy’s La Stampa published an article by Italian surgeon Gino Strada who argued that the Taliban take-over of Afghanistan “shouldn’t surprise anyone who has a discrete knowledge of Afghanistan or at least a good memory.” A man of peace who detested war, Strada called the Afghan war a “war of aggression, launched after the September 11th attack, by the United States, to which all Western countries tagged along.”

During 25 years working in war zones in his health care non-profit organisation, dubbed “Emergency,” Strada said, “I saw the number of wounded and violence increase, when the country became progressively devoured by insecurity and corruption.”

Born in Milan in 1948, Strada took his initial medical and surgical degrees in the city’s State University before specialising in heart-lung surgery in the US and South Africa. Once qualified, he joined the International Red Cross where he worked in Pakistan, Ethiopia, Thailand, Afghanistan, Peru, Djibouti, Somalia and Bosnia. In 1994, he and wife Theresa Sarti, several friends and colleagues founded Emergency. Its president until her death in 2008, Sarti was a self-declared warrior for life and against war. Quoted in an article appearing in “Focus on Africa,” she took the view that “war is scandalous and therefore intolerable. And every victim concerns us, every one, always.”

She was succeeded as Emergency’s president by the couple’s daughter Cecilia Strada, who also volunteers with rescue vessels sailing the Mediterranean saving the lives of migrants seeking to reach Europe. She was on a voyage when her father died suddenly and unexpectedly.

Emergency launched its first project in 1996 in Rwanda, during the genocide. Since then it has expanded into Eritrea, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Yemen, and Sudan as well as Afghanistan and has founded projects in Italy.

Having served with the Red Cross in Afghanistan, Strada returned to that country in 1999. Emergency opened two surgical hospitals, a maternity centre, 44 first aid posts and other health projects. Over the years seven million people have been treated by Emergency. Strada personally carried out 30,000 surgeries in war zones.

 On Aug. 8, its first aid post in Maidan Shahr was hit by shrapnel and bullets and two staff members were injured, forcing the post to close. On the 9th, a rocket exploded in the compound of Emergency’s Lashkar-Gar surgical centre for war victims; there were no wounded.  Ahead of these incidents, Emergency had distributed a leaflet in Dari, Pashto, and English showing the hospital’s location, providing GPS coordinates and warning that the clinic is receiving war wounded.

One of Strada’s last actions was to praise the courage of Emergency staff working in Afghanistan and of the Afghan people, calling them “true ‘war heroes.’”

In 2007 Strada inaugurated a project close to his heart: the first regional centre for cardiac surgery on the outskirts of the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, in an area where many young people suffer from the after-effects of rheumatic fever.  A second state-of-the art hospital is a paediatric facility in Uganda. His aims were to provide urgent care in war zones and accord in poor countries the level of high-quality heath care enjoyed by citizens in the developed Western world.

The Sudanese and Ugandan hospitals reflected Strada’s medical philosophy. In a 2013 interview with the Observer he said Emergency’s hospitals must be “equal to — if not better than — those in the west.”  Emergency provides free, first class medical care for war victims, 90 per cent being civilians, as well as poor people who cannot afford treatment for chronic ailments.

“If you think of medicine as a human right, then you cannot have some hospitals that offer sophisticated, very effective, hi-tech medicine, and  then go to Africa and think, ‘Ok, here’s a couple of vaccinations and as few shots.” He asked, “Do we think that we human beings ...are all equal in rights and dignity or not? We say, ‘Yes we are.”” His objective was to establish “facilities that you would be happy to have one of your family members treated in.”

Calling himself a “surgical animal” who was happiest in the operating theatre, Strada sacrificed a great deal to perform live-saving and life-giving surgeries. He was separated from his wife, who remained at home raising funds and recruiting staff, while he spent years travelling from country to country and one Emergency facility to another, performing operations in hospitals and checking out injuries and sickness other centres.

He courted danger while travelling to Kabul in Afghanistan in 2001 shortly before the US began bombing the Taliban and during a visit with daughter Cecelia to Falluja in Iraq in 2003 when the city was under US siege.

During an interview a year before her death with Tiziana Cauli of Devex, the international development community’s web platform, Sarti spoke of Emergency as a “hand-made” organisation launched in her home by seven people. Although its reach has grown rapidly due to expanding and urgent need, Emergency does not appeal for government funding but relies on private donations. It also remains a largely Italian organisation, recruiting most of its medical volunteers on short-term basis from Italian hospitals which impose limitations on leave. Administrators and engineers also serve for short periods, making turn-over high and Emergency’s job all the more challenging.

Despite danger and difficulties, Gino Strada was determined to carry on with a mission he believed is important and necessary although he suffered from heart disease. He summed up, “What we do, we and others, what we can do with our own strength is perhaps less than a drop in the ocean. But I remain of the opinion that it is better that it is there, that drop, because if it were not there it would be worse for everyone. That is all. It’s a tiring job, that of the war surgeon. But it is also, for me, a great honour.”

In 2015, he was given the Right Livelihood Award, deemed the alternative Nobel Peace Prize.