When war unexpectedly broke out on the streets of KhartoumHiba Omer, a tenured surgeon, could have fled like so many others. Instead, he stayed on to keep a hospital open.. His city was in the moment of its greatest need. If she left, who would do the C-sections and treat all those gunshot wounds? Even after a Sudanese military officer accused her on social media of siding with the enemy, the Rapid Support Forces, unleashing a barrage of death threats against her, refused to flee.
“I will never leave Khartoum,” he told me. “I will stay here, until death. I have a responsibility and I will stay until we do our job. It is a professional commitment”.
Whenever a place becomes unbearable due to natural disaster or war, our hearts go out to the refugees making the desperate journey out. But it is the people left behind who will decide the fate of the Country. It is they who will determine if the refugees will have a home to return to.
Consider what Ukraine would look like today if President Volodymyr Zelensky had accepted the US offer to take it to safety at the start of the Russian invasion. His famous response — “I need ammunition, not a ticket” — shamed the West into providing more aid, boosted morale and inspired a nation.
How must Afghans have felt when they learned that their President, Ashraf Ghani, who had vowed to “never abandon” his people, had rushed off in a helicopter as the Taliban approached? No one can reproach the self-preservation instinct. But saving your own skin—and letting those you are responsible for suffer—is an abdication of leadership.
Captains with honor go down with the ship. They don’t sneak around in a lifeboat while no one is looking. Ghani’s flight was in stark contrast to the bravery shown by former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who posted a video online announcing that he and his three young daughters would remain in Kabul, at the very moment other internationally renowned Afghans were hastily doing their suitcases and left for luxurious properties they own abroad.
Karzai’s voice in that video, nearly drowned out by the sound of helicopters evacuating people, must have brought some comfort to the poor who couldn’t flee.
That brings me to the issue of Americans threatening to move to Canada every time an election doesn’t go their way. More than 5,000 people renounced their US citizenship in 2016 and more than 6,000 did so in 2020, according to an analysis by The American Expat Financial News Journal. It is estimated that more than 3 million US voters live abroad, some of whom say they left the US because of political conflict.
I get it, up to a point. It is often easier to leave a place than to fight to change it, especially for wealthy and well-educated Americans. For those with the means, decisions about where to live are increasingly made not based on tribal lands or national loyalties, but on lifestyle preferences and favorable tax treatment. The kings and queens of the Middle Ages clung to their castles, their fates tied to those of their serfs. But today’s elites don’t have ties like that. Think of Peter Thiel, the Trump-loving California-based tech investor who poured untold amounts of money into the US election, only to plot his exit to New Zealand or possibly Malta.
In today’s post-industrial world, citizenship is just another commodity that can be bought for a price. When the water level rises too high or the weather gets too strange or a garrulous narcissist threatens democracy, those with the resources can book a ticket out. I cannot recriminate those acts of self-preservation. But I can call them what they are: an abdication of the leadership role that wealth and education once dominated. The broken link between the globalized elite and the common people they leave behind is one reason for the rise of populism around the world.
Sudanese doctors should inspire us all to think differently and fulfill our responsibility to help people where we are from. In 2019, Sudanese doctors helped turn a protest over rising bread prices into an organized uprising for democracy and civilian rule. When the military dictatorship tried to silence them by arresting, imprisoning, and torturing them, they organized a general strike.
Omer was detained for 58 days. Now those military have hijacked the pro-democracy movement and turned their weapons on each other, dragging their country of 46 million over the brink.
Since fighting broke out last month between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces, Omer and other volunteers from the Sudanese Doctors Union, which she heads, have worked with civil resistance committees to keep a hospital running. They slept in their rooms and shared the meager medical supplies. They have taken a neutral stance in the war, she told me, tending to wounded combatants on both sides along with civilians.
However, she and her friends have received a barrage of threatening messages. In a video she sent me, a military official said that she is now “considered a traitor” and that she “will come her day.”
Even before those threats, the war was already deadly for doctors. At least 10 medical professionals have been killed in the chaos and crossfire, including Bushra Ibnauf Sulieman, a US citizen who was stabbed to death outside his home while accompanying his father to a dialysis appointment, and Farida Abdel Moneim from Hospital Maternal Omdurman, who was killed in a shooting on his way home from work.
Fortunately, Omer is still alive and caring for patients in Khartoum. The Sudanese army and the RSF – which have just reached an agreement to withdraw their forces from hospitals and allow aid to reach civilians – must ensure that it stays that way.
The world has never figured out how to make armed men share power with civilians who have earned the trust of the people. But it has never been clearer that Sudan’s life-saving doctors would make better leaders than the fighters who take lives.
By: intelligence/FARAH STOCKMAn
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6720791, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-05-19 13:00:08
#conflict #true #heroes #left