-
I cannot forget them.
-
Their names were Aslan, Alik, Andrei,
-
Fernanda, Fred, Galina, Gunnhild,
-
Hans, Ingeborg, Matti, Natalya,
-
Nancy, Sheryl, Usman, Zarema,
-
and the list is longer.
-
For many, their existence,
their humanity,
-
has been reduced to statistics,
-
coldly recorded as "security incidents."
-
For me, they were colleagues
-
belonging to that community
of humanitarian aid workers
-
that tried to bring a bit of comfort
-
to the victims of the wars
in Chechnya in the '90s.
-
They were nurses, logisticians,
shelter experts,
-
paralegals, interpreters.
-
And for this service, they were murdered,
-
their families torn apart,
-
and their story largely forgotten.
-
No one was ever sentenced
for these crimes.
-
I cannot forget them.
-
They live in me somehow,
-
their memories giving me
meaning every day.
-
But they are also haunting
the dark street of my mind.
-
As humanitarian aid workers,
-
they made the choice
to be at the side of the victim,
-
to provide some assistance,
some comfort, some protection,
-
but when they needed
protection themselves,
-
it wasn't there.
-
When you see the headlines
of your newspaper these days
-
with the war in Iraq or in Syria --
-
aid worker abducted, hostage executed --
-
but who were they?
-
Why were they there?
-
What motivated them?
-
How did we become
so indifferent to these crimes?
-
This is why I am here today with you.
-
We need to find better ways
to remember them.
-
We also need to explain the key values
to which they dedicated their lives.
-
We also need to demand justice.
-
When in '96 I was sent
-
by the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees to the North Caucasus,
-
I knew some of the risks.
-
Five colleagues had been killed,
-
three had been seriously injured,
-
seven had already been taken hostage.
-
So we were careful.
-
We were using armored
vehicles, decoy cars,
-
changing patterns of travel,
changing homes,
-
all sorts of security measures.
-
Yet on a cold winter night
of January '98, it was my turn.
-
When I entered my flat
in Vladikavkaz with a guard,
-
we were surrounded by armed men.
-
They took the guard,
they put him on the floor,
-
they beat him up in front of me,
-
tied him, dragged him away.
-
I was handcuffed, blindfolded,
and forced to kneel,
-
as the silencer of a gun
pressed against my neck.
-
When it happens to you,
-
there is no time for thinking,
no time for praying.
-
My brain went on automatic,
-
rewinding quickly
the life I'd just left behind.
-
It took me long minutes to figure out
-
that those masked men there
were not there to kill me,
-
but that someone, somewhere,
had ordered my kidnapping.
-
Then a process of dehumanization
started that day.
-
I was no more than just a commodity.
-
I normally don't talk about this,
-
but I'd like to share a bit with you
some of those 317 days of captivity.
-
I was kept in an underground cellar,
-
total darkness,
-
for 23 hours and 45 minutes every day,
-
and then the guards
would come, normally two.
-
They would bring a big piece of bread,
-
a bowl of soup, and a candle.
-
That candle would burn for 15 minutes,
-
15 minutes of precious light,
-
and then they would take it away,
and I returned to darkness.
-
I was chained by a metal cable to my bed.
-
I could do only four small steps.
-
I always dreamt of the fifth one.
-
And no TV, no radio,
no newspaper, no one to talk to.
-
I had no towel, no soap, no toilet paper,
-
just two metal buckets open,
one for water, for one waste.
-
Can you imagine that mock execution
can be a pastime for guards
-
when they are sadistic
or when they are just bored or drunk?
-
We are breaking my nails very slowly.
-
Isolation and darkness
are particularly difficult to describe.
-
How do you describe nothing?
-
There are no words for the depths
of loneliness I reached
-
in that very thin border
between sanity and madness.
-
In the darkness, sometimes
I played imaginary games of checkers.
-
I would start with the black,
-
play with the white,
-
back to the black
trying to trick the other side.
-
I don't play checkers anymore.
-
I was tormented by the thoughts of my
family and my colleague, the guard, Edik.
-
I didn't know what had happened to him.
-
While trying not to think,
-
I tried to fill up my time
-
by doing all sorts of physical
exercise on the spot.
-
I tried to pray, I tried all sorts
of memorization games.
-
But darkness also creates images
and thoughts that are not normal.
-
One part of your brain wants you
to resist, to shout, to cry,
-
and the other part of the brain
orders you to shut up
-
and just go through it.
-
It's a constant internal debate;
there is no one to arbitrate.
-
Once a guard came to me,
very aggressively, and he told me,
-
"Today you're going to kneel
and beg for your food."
-
I wasn't in a good mood,
so I insulted him.
-
I insulted his mother,
I insulted his ancestors.
-
The consequence was moderate:
he threw the food into my waste.
-
The day after he came back
with the same demand.
-
He got the same answer,
-
which had the same consequence.
-
Four days later,
the body was full of pain.
-
I didn't know hunger hurt so much
when you have so little.
-
So when the guards came down,
-
I knelt.
-
I begged for my food.
-
Submission was the only way for me
to make it to another candle.
-
After my kidnapping,
-
I was transferred
from North Ossetia to Chechnya,
-
three days of slow travel
in the trunks of different cars,
-
and upon arrival, I was interrogated
-
for 11 days by a guy called Ruslan.
-
The routine was always the same:
-
a bit more light, 45 minutes.
-
He would come down to the cellar,
-
he would ask the guards
to tie me on the chair,
-
and he would turn on the music loud.
-
And then he would yell questions.
-
He would scream. He would beat me.
-
I'll spare you the details.
-
There are many questions
I could not understand,
-
and there are some questions
I did not want to understand.
-
The length of the interrogation
was the duration of the tape:
-
15 songs, 45 minutes.
-
I would always long for the last song.
-
On one day, one night in that cellar,
I don't know what it was,
-
I heard a child crying above my head,
-
a boy, maybe two or three years old.
-
Footsteps, confusion, people running.
-
So when Ruslan came the day after,
-
before he put the first question to me,
-
I asked him, "How is your son today?
Is he feeling better?"
-
Ruslan was taken by surprise.
-
He was furious that the guards
may have leaked some details
-
about his private life.
-
I kept talking about NGOs
supplying medicines to local clinics
-
that may help his son to get better.
-
And we talked about education,
we talked about families.
-
He talked to me about his children.
-
I talked to him about my daughters.
-
And then he'd talk about guns,
about cars, about women,
-
and I had to talk about guns,
about cars, about women.
-
And we talked until
the last song on the tape.
-
Ruslan was the most brutal man I ever met.
-
He did not touch me anymore.
-
He did not ask any other questions.
-
I was no longer just a commodity.
-
Two days after, I was transferred
to another place.
-
There, a guard came to me,
very close -- it was quite unusual --
-
and he said with
a very soft voice, he said,
-
"I'd like to thank you
-
for the assistance your organization
provided my family
-
when we were displaced
in nearby Dagestan."
-
What could I possibly reply?
-
It was so painful.
It was like a blade in the belly.
-
It took me weeks of internal thinking
to try to reconcile
-
the good reasons we had
to assist that family
-
and the soldier of fortune he became.
-
He was young, he was shy.
-
I never saw his face.
-
He probably meant well.
-
But in those 15 seconds,
-
he made me question everything we did,
-
all the sacrifices.
-
He made me think also how they see us.
-
Until then, I had assumed
that they know why we are there
-
and what we are doing.
-
One cannot assume this.
-
Well, explaining why we do this
is not that easy,
-
even to our closest relatives.
-
We are not perfect, we are not superior,
-
we are not the world's fire brigade,
-
we are not superheroes,
-
we don't stop wars,
-
we know that humanitarian response
are not substitute for political solution.
-
Yet we do this because one life matters.
-
Sometimes that's the only
difference you make,
-
one individual, one family,
a small group of individuals,
-
and it matters.
-
When you have a tsunami, an earthquake,
or a typhoon, you see teams of rescuers
-
coming from all over the world,
-
searching for survivors for weeks.
-
Why? Nobody questions this.
-
Every life matters,
-
or every life should matter.
-
This is the same for us
when we help refugees,
-
people displaced within their country
by conflict, or stateless persons,
-
I know many people,
when they are confronted
-
to overwhelming suffering,
they feel powerless,
-
and they stop there.
-
It's a pity, because there are
so many ways people can help.
-
We don't stop with that feeling.
-
We try to do whatever we can
to provide some assistance,
-
some protection, some comfort.
-
We have to.
-
We can't do otherwise.
-
It makes us feel, I don't know,
simply human.
-
That's a picture of me
the day of my release.
-
Months after my release,
I met the then-French Prime Minister.
-
The second thing he told me, he said,
"You were totally irresponsible
-
to go to the North Caucasus.
-
You don't know how many
problems you've created for us."
-
It was a short meeting.
-
(Laughter)
-
I think helping people
in danger is responsible.
-
In that war, that nobody
seriously wanted to stop,
-
and we have many of these today,
-
bringing some assistance to people in need
and a bit of protection
-
was not just an act of humanity,
-
it was making a real difference
for the people.
-
Why he could not understand this?
-
We have a responsibility to try.
-
You've heard about that concept:
Responsibility to Protect.
-
Outcomes may depend
on various parameters.
-
We may even fail,
but there is worse than failing,
-
it's not even trying when we can.
-
Well, if you are met this way,
if you sign up for this sort of job,
-
your life is going to be full
of joy and sadness,
-
because there are a lot of people
we cannot help,
-
a lot of people we cannot protect,
a lot of people we did not save.
-
I call them my ghost,
-
and by having witnessed
their suffering from close,
-
you take a bit
of that suffering on yourself.
-
Many young humanitarian workers
-
go through their first experience
with a lot of bitterness.
-
They are thrown into situations
where they are witness,
-
but they are powerless
to bring any change.
-
They have to learn to accept it
-
and gradually turn this
into positive energy.
-
It's difficult.
-
Many don't succeed,
-
but for those who do,
there is no other job like this.
-
You can see the difference
you make every day.
-
Humanitarian aid workers
know the risk they are taking
-
in conflict areas or
in post-conflict environments,
-
yet our life, our job, is becoming
increasingly life-threatening,
-
and the sanctity of our life is fading.
-
Do you know that since the millennium,
-
the number of attacks on humanitarian
aid workers has tripled?
-
2013 broke new records:
-
155 colleagues killed,
-
171 seriously wounded,
-
134 abducted.
-
So many broken lives.
-
Until the beginning of the civil war
in Somalia in the late '80s,
-
humanitarian aid workers
were sometimes victims
-
of what we call collateral damages,
-
but by and large we were not
the target of these attacks.
-
This has changed.
-
Look at these pictures.
-
Baghdad, August 2003:
-
24 colleagues were killed.
-
Gone are the days
when U.N. blue flag or Red Cross
-
would automatically protect us.
-
Criminal groups and some political groups
-
have cross-fertilized
over the last 20 years,
-
and they've created this sort of hybrids
-
with whom we have no way of communicating.
-
Humanitarian principles are tested,
questioned, and often ignored,
-
but perhaps more importantly,
we have abandoned the search for justice.
-
There seems to be
no consequence whatsoever
-
for attacks against
humanitarian aid workers.
-
After my release, I was told
not to seek any form of justice.
-
"It won't do any good to you."
That's what I was told.
-
"Plus, you're going to put in danger
the life of other colleagues."
-
It took me years to see the sentencing
-
of three people associated
to my kidnapping,
-
but this was the exception.
-
There was no justice
-
for any of the humanitarian
aid workers killed or abducted
-
in Chechnya between '95 and '99,
-
and it's the same all over the world.
-
This is unacceptable.
-
This is inexcusable.
-
Attacks of humanitarian aid workers
are war crimes in international law.
-
Those crimes should not go unpunished.
-
We must end this cycle of impunity.
-
We must consider that those attacks
against humanitarian aid workers
-
are attacks against humanity itself.
-
That makes me furious.
-
I know I'm very lucky
-
compared to the refugees I work for.
-
I don't know what it is to have seen
my whole town destroyed.
-
I don't know what it is to have seen
my relatives shot in front of me.
-
I don't know what it is to lose
the protection of my country.
-
I also know that I'm very lucky
compared to other hostages.
-
Four days before my eventful release,
four hostages were beheaded
-
a few miles away from where
I was kept in captivity.
-
Why them?
-
Why am I here today?
-
No easy answer.
-
I was received with a lot of support
-
that I got from my relatives,
-
from colleagues, from friends,
from people I didn't know.
-
They have helped me over years
to come out of the darkness.
-
Not everyone was treated
with the same attention.
-
How many of my colleagues,
after a traumatic incident,
-
took their own life?
-
I can count nine that I knew personally.
-
How many of my colleagues
went through a difficult divorce
-
after a traumatic experience
-
because they could not explain
anything anymore to their spouse?
-
I've lost that count.
-
There is a price for this type of life.
-
In Russia, all war monuments have
this beautiful inscription at the top.
-
It says, [In Russian].
-
No-one is forgotten,
nothing is forgotten.
-
I do not forget my lost colleagues.
-
I cannot forget anything.
-
I call on you to remember their dedication
-
and demand that humanitarian
aid workers around the world
-
be better protected.
-
We should not let that light of hope
they have brought to be switched off.
-
After my ordeal, a lot of colleagues
asked me, "But why do you continue?
-
Why do you do this sort of job?
-
Why do you have to go back to it?"
-
My answer was very simple:
-
if I had quit,
-
that would have meant
my kidnapper had won.
-
They would have taken my soul
-
and my humanity.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)
Krystian Aparta
At 05:10, "We are breaking my nails very slowly" was changed to "We are breaking my nerves very slowly."