Dr Denis Mukwege
President Obama says he will donate the $ 1.4 million that comes with the Nobel Peace Prize to charity. As usual he’s being vague about the details, so I have a suggestion for him. How about the Shuhada Organization which was founded by Dr Sima Samar, MD, one of the also-rans for this year’s prize.
奥巴马总统说他会将诺贝尔140万美元的奖金捐给慈善机构。与往常一样，对于细节信息，他依然含糊其辞，因此我来给他提个建议吧。不如捐给西玛 萨马尔医学博士的Shuhada组织，她本人也是这次和平奖的竞争者。
The Shuhada organization runs hospitals, schools and health clinics for girls and women all over Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Dr Samar literally risked her life many times to get this thing, now in it’s 20th year, off the ground. Dr. Samar has a hell of a resume. If I’d been reviewing it as a member of the selection committee it would have knocked my socks off. Then again, I’m not a dweeby Scandinavian former Socialist party intellectual who doesn’t get out much and thus thinks it’s a miracle sent by God if a black man talks in complete paragraphs and graduates from Harvard Law School.
Shuhada组织为阿富汗和巴基斯坦全国的女童和妇女提供 包括医疗和教育在内的服务。为了真正落实这些服务，在组织成立的20年里，萨马尔博士多次面临生命的威胁，她的简历可以说是地狱式的恐怖。如果我像评选委 员会成员那样去回顾萨马尔博士的这份简历的话，一定会震惊得要死。我不是那种斯堪的纳维亚前社会党知识分子，他们不去做调查，因此想当然地认为如果一个黑 人能从哈佛大学法律学院毕业，并还口若悬河的话，那一定是上帝创造的奇迹。
But let’s meet some of the nominees who were blown off the map by President Obama’s miraculous presidency. There is the aforementioned Dr Samar. Now 50 years old, she graduated from a Kabul medical school in the middle of the Soviet invasion. She was forced to flee Kabul for a more central part of Afghanistan, where, though barely into her training she began attempting to treat patients against a background of extreme poverty, war, and harassment by the Taliban, who have virtually criminalised the delivery of reproductive health services to women and girls. In an article for the New England Journal of Medicine she describes having “to walk or travel on horseback or by donkey for three or four hours in each direction” to get to a patient, often finding that she had died before she got there. In her long, but ultimately triumphant career, she has been forced to smuggle birth control supplies under her clothing; she has endured death threats and been jailed; her hospitals have been bombed and looted by Taliban, and her medical director jailed for a year without charges; she was appointed to the Karzai government’s legislature then forced to resign when she was made comments that were critical of sharia law in an interview with foreign
让我们来了解一下那些被奥巴马总统击败的提名者吧。有前面提到的萨马尔博士，她现年50岁，在前苏联侵略阿富汗期间从喀布尔医 学院毕业。之后被迫逃往阿富汗中部，在那儿这位新手就开始尝试为那些受困于贫穷，战争以及塔利班骚扰的病人治病。要知道塔利班是会将那些为女性提供生殖医 疗的人定罪的。萨马尔在一篇新英格兰医学期刊上描述到，“ 徒步或骑马，骑驴单边花3至4个小时后”，我们见到了病人，但发现她在我们到达前就死了。在萨马尔漫长但相当成功的职业生涯中，她有过被迫走私节育物资； 遭受死亡威胁；坐牢；医院被炸；以及被塔利班洗劫一空的经历，她的一名医疗主任在没有受到任何指控的情况下却在监狱里呆了一年；她被任命到政府立法会工 作，却又因为在一次接受外国记者采访时，作出批评伊斯兰教法的言论而被迫辞职。
This is what a hero looks like.
这就是一位英雄的本色。
Another quiet hero is Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynaecologist who, according to his Wikipedia entry, works in the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, where he specializes in the treatment of women who have been gang-raped by Congolese militia:
另外一位了不起的英雄是Denis Mukwege, 根据维基百科的资料，这位刚果的妇产科医生在布卡武的Panzi医院工作。他主要为那些被刚果民兵轮奸的妇女治疗：
Mukwege has probably become the world’s leading expert on how to repair the internal physical damage caused by gang rape. He has treated 21,000 women during the Congo’s 12-year war, some of them more than once, performing up to 10 surgeries a day during his 18-hour working days.
现在他很可能是世界上就如何修复轮奸后所造成的内脏损伤方面最权威的专家。在刚果的12年战争期间，Mukweg医生治疗了2万一千名妇女，其中有些还不止一次。他一天工作18个小时，每天要做多达10台手术。
True, the Nobel Prize was originally created to honour the person or organisation who has “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” But in recent years it has often honored people like Mother Teresa or organisations like Medecins Sans Frontieres for human rights work. (And where was Al Gore supposed to fit in?)
的确，诺贝尔和平奖最初的宗旨是奖励那些为了增进国家间的互助友爱，消除或减少军事武装，以及推进和平进程而贡献了自己最大努力的个人和组织。但是近年来，该奖却经常被授予给特丽莎修女，和为争取的无国界医生这样的个人和组织。（不知道阿尔戈尔应该归为哪个类别？）
Still, in a way, by ignoring these heroes, the committee may have been on to something. The sad fact is that crusading for womens’ rights in places like Pakistan and the Congo does not bring peace. If you subscribe to the theory that much of the roiling of the Islamic world, the launching of suicide bombers etc. is a reaction by panicked male supremacists to the creeping modernization of women, then “empowering women” with birth control and the like actually, in the short term, encourages war.
在某种程度上，评选委员会似乎意识到了些什么，从而忽略了这些英雄们。但悲哀的一面是在巴基斯坦和刚果推行的 女权运动并没有带来和平。如果你同意大多数伊斯兰世界的动荡和自杀性炸弹袭击，都是因为男权至上主义者对不断发展的妇女现代化运动作出的激烈反击的话。那 么通过诸如节育这样的方式来赋予女性更大的力量只会在短期内触发战争。
So I’m trying very hard to credit the committee with thinking this nuanced. But I keep going back to the thought that patronising attitudes towards the first black president had a lot more to do with it.
所以考虑到这些细小但微妙的因素，我很难信服评选委员会的决定。但话说回来，也许以这种方式给与美国历史上第一位黑人总统一些支持，其中的含义更深远吧。