NOBEL ADDRESS: MULTIETHNICITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS: A UNITED OR DIVIDED WORLD
Peace through Health
Neil Arya
for IPPNW
Distinguished guests and Nobel laureates, President Gorbachev, Mayor Vetroni, ladies and gentlemen. It is indeed an honour for me, a simple family doctor from a small town in Canada, to be in such august company. As Vice President, I am a representing International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, winner of the 1985 Nobel.
“IPPNW is a non-partisan, global federation of national medical organizations in 58 countries dedicated to research, education, and advocacy relevant to the prevention of nuclear war. To this end, IPPNW seeks to prevent all wars, to promote non-violent means of conflict resolution, and to minimize the effects of war and preparations for war on health, development, and the environment.”
I have been a member of this organization since the beginning of medical school, the same year IPPNW won the Nobel. What can IPPNW or I say about multi-ethnicity and human rights?
First I’ll tell you a bit about myself. I was born in India and came to Canada at one month of age. Both Canada and India are countries renowned for their multi-ethnicity and also for relative peace.
India, unique among former colonies, has had a flourishing democracy for 57 years after independence from Britain- India has 15 official languages, a variety of religions and many cultures. With the signing of the European constitution, a fortnight ago, I was compelled to reflect on how India was equivalent to this United States of Europe-united not by religion, ethnicity, culture, food nor language but united nonetheless. The Indian state of Kerala remains a model of religious tolerance and with educational and health standards that rival far more prosperous nations.
Of course India’s history could have led to a substantially different result. With partition, my parents, who were both born in what is now Pakistan, were forced by religious turmoil to flee from where their families had been for generations. My father’s family escaped when he was 16, thanks in part, to the intervention of a good Muslim leader in their village, who also allowed a sham engagement of my Hindu father to his daughter. Massacres occurred on the trains before and after the trains that brought my extended family to post independence India.
Yes, India has its problems. Many regions and groups continue to seek greater autonomy and rights; religious intolerance still occasionally rears its ugly head with periodic riots killing Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs; occasionally armed conflict flares up in the northeast and Kashmir; India and Pakistan continue to play the dangerous nuclear game and the costs of the arms race prevents India from meeting basic needs of many of its citizens. Yet the Indian people remain fundamentally tolerant and in charge-throwing out morally corrupt governments preying on ethnic, religious, caste or class differences. Now even the conflict between India and Pakistan is dissipating as cricket, film and business increasingly unite those who once fought each other in the mountains.
In the small Canadian town of Wiarton, where I spent most of my formative years, my family was plunged into a different culture. To find people of similar cultures we had to drive a few hours and were forced to mix with people of different religions and classes of society. A few years later, the wife of a Muslim family friend, recently arrived from Pakistan after an arranged marriage, was shocked to see her new husband fraternizing with the enemy. She had been told the Hindus were unclean, untrustworthy and dangerous. Ironically, my family in India has shared the same fears and prejudices about Muslims. Our friendship with their family has since deepened, as they have with people of various religions and ethnic groups. Our family has since grown. Today in Toronto, Canada’s largest city more than half of people have a mother tongue which is neither French nor English and 40% are ‘visible minority’. Within the next few years my current home, Kitchener-Waterloo will share that fate. Already a majority of Canadians are of cultural origins other than the dominant British and French, something inconceivable in Europe. And Canada stood atop the UNDP’s Human Development Index for much of the 1990s.
Of course Canada is not perfect- it has not always been a place of racial harmony and its treatment of its aboriginal population is one of national shame. Le Canada a deux langues officielles. Même au Québec, on continue d’avoir des referenda auxquels presque 50 pour cent des personnes veulent se séparer du pays- mais la situation ce qu’on a appellé en anglais, ‘neverendum’ ne mènerait jamais à la violence.
Why have these two countries not become as Yugoslavia post Tito or Rwanda? I am reminded of a trip to Yugoslavia where I attended volleyball matches between Canada and Yugoslavia in Belgrade and Novi Sad. Scarcely one year after we in NATO had bombed them, the crowds respectfully cheered both our team and theirs.
But to help find my answer I must first take you to another sporting event, indubitably etched in the minds of any Canadian over age 35. I think of the 1972 hockey series between Canada and Russia, - we had the best hockey players in the world and were going to whip them. In the first two minutes of the series we were already up 2-0. But the pesky Russians led by Valeri Kharlamov, Vladislav Tretiak and those with other less pronounceable (for Canadians) names had other ideas and they eventually won that first game handily and soon took a commanding lead in the series. Canada barely won with 34 seconds left in the eight game series. The hero of the series, right winger Paul Henderson, summed up the feelings of Canadians at the time. "It was obviously our way of life against their way of life," "They had no scruples whatsoever, as far as we were concerned. ... It was freedom against communism.” We knew that they were automatons devoid of feelings or independent thought. Prior to the series victory, Canadians had scuffles with Soviet policemen and we knew that even the West German referees and the goal judges were against us. In game six one of our stars, Bobby Clarke deliberately went out to break Kharlamov’s ankle. When we finally won, Henderson’s mother Evelyn explained “It was like an atomic bomb going off.” Later she added, “It’s got to be the biggest thrill of my life.”
IPPNW was founded in response to the creation of such cultural myths. Our two co-founders, cardiologists, world-renowned authorities in sudden cardiac death, Evgeni Chazov and Bernard Lown, united in friendship, were concerned about the hearts of the world. How could their two nations be planning to blow up tens of millions of their families, friends and compatriots? Why did they need to develop tens of thousands of bombs and spend trillions of dollars to develop these arms? Fortunately the change in Soviet leadership epitomized by President Gorbachev, provided us access.
President Gorbachev wrote in Perestroika "The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War has come to exercise a tremendous influence on world opinion in quite a short period of time... I had met Professor Lown before, but this time, after their Congress in Moscow, I met all the leaders of the movement. For what they say and what they do is prompted by accurate knowledge and a passionate desire to warn humanity about the danger looming over it.
In the light of their arguments and the strictly scientific data which they possess no serious politician has the right to disregard their conclusions."
Our ostensible message was that as there was no effective medical response, nuclear war was unwinnable and since there was no legitimate way in which they might be used, that abolition was the only answer. While this message remains true, our underlying and larger message was more human-no political leadership could divide us from our basic humanity and human relations. We have affiliates in all countries known to have nuclear weapons, have held Congresses in all official nuclear capitals and continue to hold meetings with nuclear decisionmakers on an annual basis.
We have reached out to Iraqi colleagues and opposed sanctions and war on Iraq-the Iraqi people’s suffering cannot be ignored by saying we are only attacking their evil leader. We know that war is neither a game nor movie and are able to use credible numbers which most recently published in the Lancet last week showed 100,000 Iraqis dead as a result of this second Gulf War.
In The last twenty years Humanitarian Ceasefires for immunization of children in war zones, initially in Central America, are credited with leading to the end a various civil wars. Ostensibly designed to manage a health issue, when the agreements held, they helped opposing sides to realize not only that the other side might be trustworthy, but also that they had common goals, the health and future of their children.
Henri Dunant founded the Red Cross not only to treat victims but simultaneously to develop rules of war between nation states. Médecins sans Frontières also treats victims, but by their very presence express solidarity with those less powerful and communicate knowledge to the outside world. The ICBL used the disproportionate effect of landmines on civilian populations even decades after battles had finished, to mobilize people around the world to ban them. All of these organizations realized that, in the oft quoted words of Rudolf Virchow: Politik ist weiter nichts als Medizin im Grossen-politics is nothing more than medicine in the big picture. And each of these organizations won the Nobel Peace Prize.
This year I co-taught the first university course of its kind in the world, examining the nature of such ventures. The concept of Peace through Health is “An emerging academic discipline to study how health interventions in actual and potential war zones may contribute to peace. ” But why are health and peace so linked?