Disbelief set in even before sadness. Deep sadness, in fact, to accept the sudden death of a man used to overcome the most impossible of challenges. In this annus horribilis, at the very moment when darkness is falling again on Afghanistan, a place he always kept close to his heart and where three of his hospitals operate, war surgeon Gino Strada has left us. He was the founder of Emergency, the NGO that, for the past 30 years, has brought free medical care and structures to the most dangerous and hopeless war zones on Earth.
“Ignoring a person’s pain is always a cowardly act of violence.” Gino Strada wasn’t a type for compromises. His words always had the edge and wisdom of someone who had seen and lived horror and death. But his coherence always made the difference. For years, I have taken part to awareness-rising activities in one of the more than 175 Emergency local groups working across the country, embracing the association’s solidarity ideals in full.
It’s the late morning of Friday, the 13th of August. The news spread online. Common people, friends, supporters take to the web to honor a man who, with his matter-of-fact, direct way of doing things, contributed immensely and crucially to human rights, and saved 11 million lives, “one every minute,” as we can read on the website listing all his ambitious projects, and telling the world about his dream to build peace, starting from taking care of people.
“It’s a sad day. One of the few – and honest – free minds of our country has left us. Along with a small part of my past,” Andrea writes on his social media profile. Emanuela has similar thoughts : “You were a master in coherence, honesty and concreteness, you taught me the importance of doing, and doing well, for the wellbeing of all. A little something – our little something, as Teresa used to say (Sarti, Strada’s wife), to make the world a better place. Thank you, and safe travel, wherever you may be now. You are and always will be in my heart, that of a simple volunteer.”
Messages of mourning come also from the highest representatives of the State. “Gino Strada – President Sergio Mattarella writes – brought the ideals of life where war wanted to impose violence and death. He invoked the ideals of Humanity where confrontation and battle wanted to obliterate respect for the individual. His testimony, which he gave until the very end of his life, contributed to enrich our common heritage of values like solidarity and altruism, expressed, sometimes roughly but always with generosity, by working to protect the most unfortunate, the people most exposed to the consequences of all the conflicts shedding blood on this planet. Coherent with our Constitution, which repudiates war, Gino Strada made of this idea the inspiration of humanitarian actions developed both in Italy and abroad and, bravely, he offered an alternative to conflict between and among people.” In his own message, Prime Minister Mario Draghi points out that: “Strada spent his entire life by those who suffer the most, working with professionalism, courage and humanity in the most difficult areas in the world. Emergency, which he had founded with his wife Teresa, represents his moral and professional legacy.”
Born on the 21st of April 1948 in Sesto San Giovanni, Milan, Gino Strada graduated in medicine at the Università Statale di Milano, specialized in trauma surgery and completed his training in the US, working on heart and heart-lung transplant at Stanford and Pittsburgh universities. He furthered his education in England and South Africa. Between the 1980s and the early 1990s, the time of the USSR collapse and the wars in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, he worked for Geneva’s International Red Cross in Pakistan, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Peru, Djibouti, Somalia and Bosnia. After that, he was ready to go at it alone. With his wife, Teresa Sarti (1946-2009), he founded Emergency, a neutral, independent association to bring free high-quality, medical and trauma care to the victims of war, landmines and poverty.
He started from the genocide in Rwanda, then it was Cambodia and, later, Afghanistan, where he opened a surgical center in Anabah, in the Panshir Valley. There, in the same country that, today, has violently returned in the spotlight, Emergency has, in spite of countless challenges, three hospitals, a maternity center and a network of 44 trauma and emergency hubs.
On the day he, unexpectedly, died in Normandy, Turin daily La Stampa published his last article, Così ho visto morire Kabul (“This is how I saw Kabul die”), a manifesto and moral analysis, of which we’d like to share a short, but intense citation: “I lived in Afghanistan seven years in total. I’ve seen violence and the number of people getting hurt escalating, while the country was progressively devoured by insecurity and corruption. Twenty years ago, we already said this war was to be a disaster for everyone. Today, the results of it are for everyone to see: a failure, under every point of view. Beside the 241,000 casualties and the 5 million displaced, both internal to the country and refugees, Afghanistan, today, is about to fall once more into civil war. More than anything, it’s a country on its knees, where those who can do try to escape, even if they know they’ll have to go through hell to reach Europe…”.
Emergency’s humanitarian journey goes on. Uganda, Iraq, Eritrea, Sierra Leone – hit by an Ebola epidemic – Yemen. And then, Algeria, Angola, Palestine, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka and Sudan, where it creates the first, entirely free medical center in Africa. The NGO — which is today a UN partner — doesn’t limit its activities at building hospitals or bringing high quality medical specializations in 19 countries, it has also taken the field to battle against Covid-19 at the height of the emergency, even in Italy, where it offered mobile medical centers and assistance from Brescia to Naples, from Marghera to Castel Volturno, from Sassari to Palermo.
Emergency’s most recent international project is in Uganda, where under-5 child mortality is ten times higher than in Italy (49 deaths every 1,000 births) and where it has just opened a surgical center set to become a reference for the entire continent. Renzo Piano is also involved: “I like to think about Africa like a laboratory for the future, not only as a backdrop for pain and forgotten wars. Gino Strada – the famous starchitect said this past April – always asked me to design a ‘scandalously beautiful’ hospital. He mentioned the idea of ‘scandal’ because, for some people, offering beauty and excellence to everyone, especially to the unfortunate and the marginalized, is, indeed, scandalous,.”
A charismatic and coherent leader. A man moved by authentic humanitarian commitment. Thanks to his modus operandi and his character, he brought Emergency to many a tortured realities and created, along with a number of African countries, the Manifesto for a Human Rights-Based Medicine, to reclaim a equity, quality and social responsibility based healthcare. But he would also ask Italians to concretely commit to make landmines illegal and to support all anti-war campaigns.
Green Parrots: A War Surgeon’s Diary (1999) and Buskashì: Viaggio dentro la Guerra (a journey inside war)(2002) are among the most intense books I have ever read. Strada, a surgeon who operated on thousands of people wounded by bullets and shrapnel, writes with courage, tells about war and about the horror of landmines masked as toys, so that children would pick them up, only to be maimed by them forever. “(These are) weapons not designed to kill, but rather to inflict unspeakable sufferance to innocent children, placing their families and society under a terrible burden. Still today, those children are to me – he said in 2015, upon receiving the Right Livelihood Awards, an ‘alternative Nobel prize’ that, since 1980, has been honoring and supporting who ‘offers practical and exemplary answers to today’s most urgent challenges’—the very symbol of contemporary wars, a constant form of terrorism towards civilians.”
My story with Emergency began by chance, but soon became a well pondered choice. I met Gino Strada for the first time in Orvieto, when Emergency’s national convention was presented. When I approached him and his wife to ask a couple of questions, I was welcomed immediately by two people who didn’t want any distance to exist between me and them. This was Gino Strada. A doctor at the very front of the frontline, a critical conscience who remained in the spotlight to bring attention to the most wounded, but was, at the same time, a “next door” man.
From mere volunteering, becoming part of Emergency turned into a necessity, a constant commitment that never tired me, nourished by the desire to work for change, and by the certainty to be part of a group of women and men who, every Wednesday night, would meet to build a better future. After a handful of months, I found myself speaking about the tragedy of war in schools, telling how I didn’t manage to stop tears from pouring , the time I heard a child victim of a landmine cry for the first time.
My duty was to inform, to tell the story, but Emergency and Gino Strada were there with those children to help them. And his doctors still are, to build a new future. To give people the hope that Humanity isn’t only a death machine, busy dropping bombs from the skies, but also a pair of gentle eyes able to bring them out of darkness.
In only a few months, the Venetian group of which I was part, led by his historical founder, Carlo, became quite large, with volunteers of all ages. The activities we carried out for Emergency weren’t simple stands to collect funds: we spoke to people about our projects, we brought our stories to them. We shared our principles and values. We continued for years, achieving important goals also with Gino Strada who, in the meanwhile, had moved to Venice with his wife.
On the Lagoon, two years ago, in occasion of the 76th Festival del Cinema, the documentary Beyond the Beach, the Hell and the Hope was presented. A work entirely focused on the work of Emergency and the brutality of war. Back then, director Graeme Scott: “We’ve directly witnessed pain and suffering in tragic circumstances, but also the humbleness and kindness of the people working with Emergency, who devote themselves entirely to those in need.”
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