The little lady from Bangladesh waits patiently. Monowara Sarker will be on stage in a few minutes. The scarf she is wearing for the ceremony depicts (albeit in a discreet allusion) the Battle of Solferino!
This year, four people will receive the Henry Dunant Medal, the highest distinction of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.
The four (*) have lived extraordinary lives, dedicating themselves to helping and improving the lives of others. They seem a bit lost in this huge, austere room of the Geneva Conference Centre, home last December to the 32nd Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent.
Lost and intimidated, perhaps, in front of the Movement's leaders, who congratulate them warmly, as well they should.
A reward for a humanitarian life
For Monowara Sarker, the Henry Dunant Medal rewards the busy bee's 44 years of reconnecting families and, more generally, her painstaking, meticulous work searching for missing people.
Looking for the missing
The Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971 forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes. 17-year-old Monowara Sarker, who dreamt of becoming a teacher, saw her life take a dramatic turn. She was forced to leave her village and escape to Dacca, far away from her family. The ICRC offered her a job as a tracing officer (for missing people), work she could relate to as she was unable to contact her own family.
Obstinate, she soon came to personify families' "right to know" - the right to know what happened to family members: Is he/she dead? Injured? A refugee? Displaced? Detained?
"From 1971 to 1975, around 120,000 Bangladeshis were repatriated to Bangladesh, and more than 198,000 were transferred to Pakistan," recalls Monowara Sarker. “180,000 tracing requests were solved by the ICRC and 2.8 million Red Cross messages were exchanged”. Another result of this meticulous work was the reunification of hundreds of families after months, sometimes even years, of separation.
After this mission, the ICRC reduced its operational teams in Bangladesh, but Monowara Sarker continued on her "right to know" mission. She built from scratch the Tracing Service of the new Bangladesh Red Crescent Society, where she devoted 40 years of her life. In 2004, she also started a programme to assist detained migrants, a first in Red Cross and Red Crescent history. Today this service works for the victims of armed conflicts as well as those of natural disasters, all the while assisting migrants and detainees to communicate with their families.
Reunion, 44 years later
The story of Monowara Sarker's Henry Dunant Medal could stop here… but no! Luck would have it that after this interview, the little lady comes face-to-face with an ICRC delegate who, 44 years ago, was in the team of expatriates immersed in the Bangladeshis’ struggle for independence – François Bugnion (now an honorary member of the IRCR Assembly)! (**)
It is an emotional moment as old memories come rushing back… "At that time, we didn't have computers. Everything was done by hand. We rented trucks to transport the reams of Red Cross messages to their recipients".
The little lady smiles, remembers the meticulous work, holds back a tear, then without thinking turns forward her Henry Dunant Medal, which keeps spinning around.
Credits
- Visit the blog of the ICRC delegation in France, L'humanitaire dans tous ses états
- Visit the FamilyLinks website, dedicated to Restoring the Family Links
- Visit the website of the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society
Production and direction : Multimedia Communication Center of the ICRC delegation in France
Additional photography : ICRC delegation in Bangladesh and ICRC archives (Geneva)
(*) The laureats of the 2015 Henry Dunant Medal :
- Dr. Ahmed Mohamed Hassan, Somalia ;
- Professor Mamdouh Kamal Gabr, Egypt ;
- Monowara Sarkar, Bangladesh ;
- Stephen Davey, United Kingdom
(**) If you follow "L'humanitaire dans tous ses états", you certainly remember François Bugnion in the video series "A story of Humanity", about the history of humanitarian action and International Humanitarian Law.
