By Rick Gladstonemarch
They are four relatively obscure humanitarians: an
orphanage founder in Burundi who challenged a bloodthirsty mob and other
dangers; the only doctor for half a million people in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains; a
Pakistani advocate for indentured laborers who helps extricate them from debt;
and a Roman Catholic priest in the Central African Republic who saved more than
1,000 Muslims, mostly women and children, from fatal persecution.
An international committee deliberating on who would
receive a new humanitarian award, created in memory of the Armenian genocide,
has selected these four as finalists for the annual prize, meant to honor those
whose exceptional work to preserve human life in disasters created by humans —
like war and ethnic strife — puts them in great peril. The finalists, whose
selection will be announced Tuesday, will attend a ceremony in Yerevan,
Armenia, on April 24, where the winner will be announced.
“They’re not celebrities — they’re surprised that some
people in the outside world even noticed them,” said Vartan Gregorian, the
president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a philanthropic foundation.
Mr. Gregorian, an American scholar of Armenian descent, leads the selection
committee for the award, known as the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity.
“They’re not in the self-aggrandizing business,” Mr.
Gregorian said in an interview alongside two other committee members, Gareth
Evans, a former foreign minister of Australia, and Leymah Gbowee, a Liberian
peace activist and Nobel laureate.
The prize, created by Mr. Gregorian and two other
prominent philanthropists of Armenian descent, Noubar Afeyan and Ruben
Vardanyan, has a twist that distinguishes it from other prizes: The winner
receives $100,000 and designates an organization that inspired his or her work
to be the beneficiary of $1 million.
The finalists are Marguerite Barankitse, founder of
Maison Shalom, which began as a center for orphans during ethnic upheavals that
convulsed Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1990s;
Dr. Tom Catena, a physician from Amsterdam, N.Y., who founded the Mother of
Mercy Hospital in Sudan’s war-ravaged Nuba Mountains eight years ago; Syeda
Ghulam Fatima, who runs the Bonded Labour Liberation Front, an organization in
Lahore, Pakistan, that aids destitute workers and who was once shot because of
her work; and the Rev. Bernard Kinvi, a priest from Togo who runs a Catholic
mission in the Central African Republic that has saved many civilians from
reprisals in that country’s chronic civil conflict, regardless of their
backgrounds.
The finalists were chosen from 200 submitted after the
award was announced last April during events for the centennial of the Armenian
genocide, widely considered the first genocide of the 20th century. As many as
1.5 million Armenians were killed as the Ottoman Empire collapsed.
The award founders named it the Aurora Prize after a
genocide survivor, Aurora Mardiganian, who witnessed the massacre of relatives
and told her story in a book and film.
Ms. Gbowee said she hoped the prize would inspire a
generation of young people, many of whom she feared had become hardened or
intimidated by humanitarian crises around the world.
“How do we awaken humanity in them? Should we start now?”
she said. “My answer is yes. And the whole idea of this prize is the perfect
opportunity to begin that conversation.”
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