Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Fides Agency) - The five doctors belonging to Médecins Sans Frontières were killed in an ambush in north-western Afghanistan. Their mission was to bring medical relief to people in danger, to the sick, the children, the weak, but the task they had set for themselves was also to witness the violations of human rights and human dignity they saw on a daily basis.
They were the victims of a fanaticism and obscurantism which in Afghanistan and other parts of the world prevents a male doctor from visiting a woman (because of a restrictive reading of Islamic religious prescriptions) and which is seriously hostile to the presence of humanitarian operators. They become troublesome witnesses of shameful and violent actions performed in the name of an ideology, of religion or simply for an obsession for power and the desire to dominate.
The five brave doctors, who paid for their commitment in Afghanistan with their lives, knew the risks they were running, but their awareness was not a hindrance to their mission. A month ago, three UN observers had been killed in the northeastern part of the Country.
In the name of the principles of justice and solidarity, they had made their competences and professionalism, together with their very lives, available to people who still suffer from the effects of a religious fanaticism that is hard to eradicate. The Taliban have been removed from power, but many social practises of today’s Afghanistan are still connected to their idea of a society where Islamic law is interpreted with in fundamentalist key and made a civil law, heavily discriminating the freedom and rights of women. This very fundamentalist root erases the value of human life and bursts into the kind of terrorism spreading over our planet today.
The Médecins Sans Frontières volunteers, killed for their courage in witnessing the values they believed in, are an example of consistency and dedication for us all today. Their witness urges us even more powerfully not to sell off or betray the ideals of democracy, solidarity, peace, justice, human development that they have given their lives for. (Fides Agency 3/6/2004 lines 21 words 245)
