When war broke out unexpectedly in the streets of Khartoum,
Sudan, Dr Hiba Omer, a senior surgeon, could have fled like so many others.
Instead, she stayed behind to keep a hospital open.
اضافة اعلان
Her city was in its hour of greatest need. If she left, who
would perform the C-sections and treat all those bullet wounds? Even after a
Sudanese military official accused her on social media of siding with its
enemy, the RSF militia, sparking a barrage of death threats against her, she refused
to flee.
“I will never leave Khartoum,” she told me. “I will stay
here, until death. I have a responsibility, and I will be staying until we do
our job. It is a professional commitment.”
The people who stay behindWhenever a place becomes unbearable because of a natural
disaster or a war, our hearts go out to the refugees who make the desperate
trek out. But it’s the people who stay behind who will decide the country’s
fate.
They are the ones who will determine whether refugees will
have a home to return to.
Consider what Ukraine would be like today if President
Volodymyr Zelenskyy had taken the American offer to spirit him to safety at the
beginning of the Russian invasion.
His famous reply — “I need ammunition, not a ride” — 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 that he “would never abandon” his
people, had hastily departed in a helicopter as the Taliban approached?
No one can begrudge him the instinct of self-preservation. But
saving your own skin — and leaving those for whom you are responsible to suffer
— is an abdication of leadership.
Honorable captains go down with the ship.
They do not slink off in a lifeboat while no one is looking.
Ghani’s flight stood in stark contrast to the bravery shown by Afghanistan’s
ex-president Hamid Karzai, who posted a video online announcing that he and his
three young daughters would be staying in Kabul, at the very moment when other
internationally known Afghans were frantically packing their bags and departing
for luxurious estates they own abroad.
But saving your own skin — and leaving those for whom you are responsible to suffer — is an abdication of leadership.
Karzai’s voice in that video, nearly drowned out by the
sound of helicopters evacuating people, must have given some comfort to the
poor who could not flee.
It made me wonder if Karzai would be Afghanistan’s leader
today? Had the Americans not micromanaged his every move.
Which brings me to the subject of Americans who threaten to
move to Canada every time an election doesn’t go their way.
More than 5,000 people renounced their American citizenship
in 2016, and more than 6,000 renounced in 2020, according to an analysis by The
American Expat Financial News Journal. (It is not clear how many did so because
of politics.) More than 3 million American voters are estimated to be living
abroad, some of whom say they left the US because of political strife.
Citizenship, for a priceIn today’s postindustrial world, citizenship is just another
commodity that can be purchased for a price. When the water rises too high or
the weather gets too weird or a bloviating narcissist threatens democracy,
those with the resources can book a ticket out.
I can’t begrudge those acts of self-preservation. But I can
call it what it is: an abdication of the leadership role that wealth and
education once commanded. The broken bond between the globalized elite and the
ordinary people they leave behind is one reason for the rise of populism across
the globe.
The doctors of Sudan should inspire all of us to think
differently and live up to our responsibility to help the people in the places
we are from. In 2019, Sudanese doctors helped turn a protest over the rising
price of bread into an organized uprising for democracy and civilian rule.
When the military dictatorship tried to silence them by
arresting them, imprisoning them and torturing them, they organized a general
strike.
Omer was detained for 58 days.
Now those military men have hijacked the pro-democracy
movement and turned their guns on one another, dragging their country of 46
million people over a cliff.
Since fighting erupted last month between the Sudanese army
and the RSF paramilitary group, Omer and other volunteers with the Sudan
Doctors’ Trade Union, which she leads, have worked with civilian resistance
committees to keep a hospital functioning. They slept in its wards and shared
scarce medical supplies. They have taken a neutral stance in the war, she told
me, treating wounded fighters from both sides alongside civilians.
Nevertheless, she and her friends have received a barrage of
threatening messages accusing doctors of refusing to treat some Sudanese
soldiers while treating others. In one video that Omer forwarded to me, a
military official said she is now “considered a traitor” and that her “day will
come”.
The world has never quite figured out how to make the men
with the guns share power with civilians who have earned the people’s trust.
But it has never been clearer that the doctors of Sudan, who save lives, would
be better leaders than fighters who take lives.
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