Gino Strada is dead

The founder of Emergency has died Gino Strada. This was learned from sources close to the family. Strada was 73 years old. He had suffered from heart problems for some time.

Just today in the newspaper The print an article by him had come out about the advance of the Taliban in Afghanistan.“With the passing of Gino Strada, a great man is gone, what he leaves behind is extraordinary. A thought to his entire family and to the Emergency staff”. He writes it on Twitter Save the children. At the time of death he was in Normandia.

Born in Sesto San Giovanni, a common worker in the Milanese belt, grows up in a Catholic environment sensitive to social reality that is inspired by the ideas of the Vatican Council II and then joined the university communist movement.

After completing his high school studies at the Carducci Classical High School, Strada obtained the Degree in Medicine and Surgery from the State University of Milan in 1978, at the age of thirty, and then specialized in Emergency Surgery. During the years of protest he was one of the activists of the Student Movement.

[the_ad_group id = ”289023 ″]

[the_ad_group id = ”289025 ″]

In 2013 he declared that he had not voted in elections for about thirty years, to express his disapproval of Italian politics, but in 2014 he declared that he supported the Italian left-wing coalition. The Other Europe with Tsipras.

He was hired by the Rho hospital and then trained in the field of heart transplants until 1988, when he turned to trauma surgery and the care of war victims. In the 80s he specialized in cardiopulmonary surgery, working in the United States, at the universities of Stanford and Pittsburgh, at Harefield Hospital (UK) and at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town (South Africa), the hospital of the first heart transplant in Christian Barnard.

In the period 1989-1994 he worked with the International Committee of the Red Cross in various conflict zones: Pakistan, Ethiopia, Peru, Afghanistan, Somalia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Emergency and other activities by Gino Strada

Gino Strada at the Perugia-Assisi peace march, in 2002
This field experience motivated Strada and a group of colleagues to found Emergency, an international humanitarian association for the rehabilitation of victims of war and landmines which, from its foundation in 1994 to the end of 2013, has provided free assistance to over 6 million patients in 16 countries around the world.

He has published two books that have achieved a certain success with the public and critics: Green Parrots: Chronicles of a War Surgeon and Buskashì. Journey into War.

In 2001 he won the Golden Doves for Peace Award, awarded annually by the Disarmament Archive to a personality who has distinguished himself on the international stage.

Since 2002 he has been an honorary citizen of the city of Empoli (Tuscany), and since 2003 also of the city of Montebelluna (Veneto). He received some votes in the secret ballot for the Election of the President of the Italian Republic in 2006.

In March 2007, during the kidnapping in Afghanistan of the journalist from La Repubblica Daniele Mastrogiacomo took a prominent position in the negotiations for his release.

His wife died in 2009 Teresa Sarti; the role of President of Emergency is then assumed by his daughter Cecilia.

In Italy, Gino Strada has over the years taken critical positions towards the governments led by Massimo D'Alema, Romano Prodi, Silvio Berlusconi, Mario Monti, Enrico Letta, Matteo Renzi, Paolo Gentiloni and Giuseppe Conte for their choices in support of the war, for Italy's participation in several recent conflicts, for the continuous increase in military spending supported by them, for their policies on immigration and rejections.

Most of the criticisms are related to Italy's participation in the NATO intervention in Afghanistan – also known as Operation ISAF – assessed by Gino Strada and his organization, which operates there, as a barbarity committed against the Afghan population in open violation of Article 11 of the Italian Constitution.

He made these statements because he believed that NATO's intervention, and consequently Italy's, was driven by economic interests. Although many consider Gino Strada's position as an example of radical, moralistic and utopian pacifism. In this regard, Strada himself declared:

"I am not a pacifist. I am against war."

On April 13, 2013, he was elected among the ten possible candidates for the Presidency of the Republic at the so-called "Quirinarie" of the 5 Star Movement. Having come in second behind Milena Gabanelli, following her withdrawal, he became a possible candidate. Shortly after, however, he decided to withdraw, in favor of the third possible candidate, Stefano Rodotà. He later became a harsh critic of the Movement.

In 2015 he received the Right Livelihood Award, first Italian ever if we do not consider the 2008 award to Monika Hauser, who has Italian citizenship but was born and raised in Switzerland. In the same year he was nominated by the 5 Star Movement to succeed him at the Quirinale.

The asteroid 248908 Ginostrada was named in his honor.

On February 3, 2017 in Seoul (South Korea) he received the SunHak Peace Prize, a peace prize established in 2015 by Mrs. Hak Ja Han Moon, wife of the late Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Movement. Gino Strada was the winner together with Mrs. Sakena YacoobiThe two were chosen from 227 candidates from over 76 nations.

He also frequented Catholic volunteer groups where in 1971 he met Teresa Sarti, who became his wife in the same year (Teresa Sarti will be co-founder and President of Emergency). The two had a daughter in 1979: Cecilia.