” Good morning. I’m Barack Obama. Thank you for taking my call. »
“Hello Mr. President. »
We are in the middle of the war in Afghanistan, in October 2015, and the President of the United States wanted to speak “president to president” with Montrealer Joane Liu, following the bombing of a hospital in Kunduz. Coming from an American plane believing it was attacking a Taliban hideout, the bombs rained down on the building all night, killing 42 people and injuring 30.
It is the most tragic carnage in the history of Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which the pediatrician has chaired for two years, and she is preparing a press conference in Geneva that the world’s media are impatiently awaiting.
“It seemed obvious to us that the White House wanted to defuse our exit. On my guard, I was certain that, immediately after the conversation, Washington was going to issue a statement saying something like: ”The president spoke with the president of MSF, we apologized, the case is closed ”, she relates in Ebola, bombs and migrantswhich has just been published by Libre Expression.
Recurring nightmare
Once an unconditional admirer of the first black president of the United States, Joane Liu was right. The call was not over before a communiqué was issued from Washington. “I can understand his position with hindsight but he disappointed me, yes,” she said in an interview with Journal in his office at McGill University. The president thus avoided an examination of the blunder by an independent international commission of inquiry.
This is just one of the anecdotes presented in this book written in a direct and clear style. She presents the significant episodes of her mandates at the head of the humanitarian organization founded in France in 1971. In addition to the tragedy of Kunduz, she returns at length to the Ebola epidemic, which ravaged Africa in 2014 and 2015 , and on the migration crisis. Without being an autobiography, this book relates the long experience of this exceptional woman of modest origins who had solid field experience when she was appointed president of MSF in 2013.
“Of everything I have seen in my life, and I have a good collection of disasters, my discovery Tadjourah prison, in Libya in 2017, is the cruelest. The vision of tortured individuals and their voices still haunt me at night. The only crime of these poor people: having left their country in the hope of reaching Europe,” she relates.
Short 80 hour week
The book she is launching this week, written with the help of former journalist and resigned senator André Pratte, allowed her to capture reflections accumulated in the four corners of the world over nearly 30 years of career.
A little freer than in his six years of presidency – during which the magazine Time placed her among the 100 most influential people in the world – she still works 80 hours a week.
In addition to her medical practice at the Sainte-Justine Hospital Center, she sits on numerous public health committees. It does not close the door to active politics, but on condition of playing a role on the international scene.
Joanne Liu (with André Pratte), Ebola, bombs and migrantsLibre expression, 192 p. 29,95$.
Extract
“That afternoon, I found President Obama cold, distinctly lacking in empathy. At the beginning of the conversation, it was obvious that he was reading a text that had been prepared for him. No doubt he expected me to melt in front of his status and his charm. It was a very poor understanding of the person that I am and, above all, the organization that I represented. When the president saw that we stood firm in our demand for an independent international investigation, he changed his tune and acted as if we were great friends. That didn’t work either. »
P. 125-126
