A knight's crusade to help Afghans

A knight's crusade to help Afghans: Retired army physician Sir Edward Artis refuses to let anything stop him from delivering aid
The Ottawa Citizen
Saturday, November 3, 2001
Page: A4
Section: News
Byline: Levon Sevunts
Dateline: IN KHWAJA BAHUDDIN
Source: Citizen Special

IN KHWAJA BAHUDDIN - Friends say about Sir Edward Artis that he is the scariest nice guy you'll ever meet. The highly decorated Vietnam veteran certainly deserves this reputation.

A retired army physician and a Knight of Malta, Sir Edward is on a lifetime crusade to help people in the most desperate situations. For Sir Edward, when it comes to helping people almost anything goes.

He has smuggled tonnes of medications to Cambodian refugee camps, he managed to persuade the Albanian Mafia to guard medical supplies for Kosovo refugees through his connections with the New York underworld, and he defied Taliban fighter jets to fly medical help to the Hazara people in the interior of Afghanistan where no humanitarian organization could go.

Afghanistan's refugees and the sick are his next mission and Sir Edward is ready to do whatever it takes to get it accomplished.

"Right now I would kill for tents," Sir Edward said. "We could use 1,000 tents easily. You couldn't throw a stone without hitting somebody who needs shelter in this country."

Looking out at the soggy afternoon that flooded the streets of Khwaja Bahuddin with lake-size puddles and turned the perpetual Afghani dust into a sea of mud yesterday, Sir Edward knows that his mission is a race against time. "We are going to see thousands and thousands of very short graves with green flags if nothing is done within the next two or three weeks," he said. "People are going to start dying."

Right now he has only 40 tents donated by the Iranian government that he had to re-buy on the black market.

Sir Edward, who has been distributing humanitarian help donated by California-based Knightsbridge International, Afghanistan Relief and Taiwan-based Tzu Chi Foundation has few kind words for the way the U.S. has been dropping food rations from the air.

"Afghans lived in war for 22 years and throughout those years they tried to maintain some modicum of dignity, but they've already been stripped of part of their dignity," Sir Edward said. "Now comes Uncle Sam who throws food at them.

"It's the most demeaning and insensitive way to make people trust you."

In addition, no humanitarian drops have been made in Mazar-e-Sharif and Bamiyan regions, which have been cut off by a Taliban blockade, he said.

In 1998, Sir Edward flew two planeloads of humanitarian help to Bamiyan, in central Afghanistan, besieged by Taliban forces. When the Taliban finally captured the region, they slaughtered 6,000 people, including a family that befriended him, Sir Edward said, showing pictures of the family and their little girl. "They were killed because they were Hazaras and because the Taliban found my business card," he said.