Lighting the world's way
IN THE AFTERMATH of the Cold War, there were optimists who thought history had come to a happy ending. A mere 15 years later, lucid minds cannot cling to that illusion. The news from Baghdad, Gaza, Kandahar, and Pyongyang mocks the notion that history follows an arc of progress. But the light emanating from the human rights movement is an enduring flare of hope in this dark time.
The ideal of human solidarity at the core of that movement will be celebrated at the Boston Public Library tonight, when Physicians for Human Rights holds a 20th- anniversary dinner and honors some extraordinary figures who have infused medicine with the spirit and practice of human rights.
The physician Khassan Baiev gave up an elite Moscow practice in plastic surgery after Russian troops invaded his native Chechnya in 1994. Rising above the passions of religion and ethnic identity, he returned to Chechnya and treated Russians and Chechens alike, operating on uniformed soldiers, wounded guerrilla fighters, and civilians caught in the crossfires of a savage war. Baiev, who has visited the Globe, saved videos from the war that show him performing surgery under the most trying conditions, often without electricity, without antiseptics, and without proper surgical instruments. The Russian invaders wanted to punish him for treating Chechen fighters, and there were Chechen extremists who wanted to kill him for ministering to Russian soldiers.
Julian Atim, a 26-year-old doctor in Uganda, has led groups of medical students caring for some of the 2 million people who are living in refugee camps, having been displaced by their country's long civil war. Atim, whose parents both died of AIDS, has been active in the Uganda AIDS Advocacy Network. In a country that has 1.6 million people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, she has organized a student conference to address the human rights issue linked to that plague : the need for public health programs and access to medical care.
Dr. H. Jack Geiger stood at a crossroads of medicine and human rights during the Freedom Summer of 1964, when he helped organize a team of doctors to treat civil rights activists and people of color in destitute areas of the segregated South. His experiences there led him to develop the concept of neighborhood health centers serving poor urban and rural communities. Today some 15 million patients are being cared for in a national network of more than 1,000 such health centers.
In an era of clashing fanaticisms, these practitioners of human rights are a saving remnant trying to light the way to a better time.
