Rare, Genuine Combination Of Gifts

When Princess Diana was alive, many people were cynical about her efforts to help the homeless, AIDS patients or land mine victims. Even now some ask how one woman could combine super-celebrity, jet set romance and genuine concern for the suffering.

Such cynicism infuriates Jerry White, director of the Land Mine Survivors Network, who accompanied Diana on her private trip to visit land mine victims in Bosnia three weeks ago. “This woman cared deeply. This was not put on,” White told me, his voice shaking.

“You can’t fake her comfort level with survivors. This woman could reach out and make (land mine victims) feel like royalty. She was a celebrity but she had a rare combination of gifts.”

How rare? Look at Diana’s trip to Bosnia. The fact she chose to go with the small, relatively unknown Land Mine Survivors Network already makes a statement.

Her earlier trip to Angola with the British Red Cross to look at land mine damage had frustrated her because she spent too much time with officials and not enough with land mine victims. So, backing off from established aid groups, she picked the only international group created by and for land mine survivors. And she insisted that she be taken into Bosnian homes.

She kept the visit secret until four days before she left to avoid any official opposition. “She was the princess, but she was antiestablishment,” says White. This streak of rebellion against the milieu that produced her caused terrible personal turmoil but was one of Diana’s great strengths.

So Diana ignored official warnings the security risk of going to Bosnia was too high. Once there, she spoke with Croat and Muslim groups that treated the disabled, groups which had never gotten together before her visit. She also visited victims and their families in their homes.

“She never talked down to anyone,” says White. “She would sit on the ground, wearing jeans, never fussing with her hair. She had the gift of listening, and she listened for hours.”

And, despite her rarefied background, Diana clearly had the ability to feel at ease with people. In one Sarajevo home, while visiting a 15-year-old girl who had stepped on a land mine, she picked up the girl’s younger sister - who suffered from cerebral palsy - and caressed her withered legs.

Was Diana a celebrity poseur? Not to those who witnessed such visits, many of them made in private.

Diana’s genuine compassion has been cited over and over by ordinary people who are mourning her in England. A volunteer at a homeless shelter recalls when Diana slipped in unannounced to talk to shelter residents, taking her two sons with her. Many others recall the moment when she shook an AIDS patient’s hand in front of TV cameras, instantly and publicly challenging the widespread stigma against such contact.

What her critics misunderstood was the particular value of her combination of glamour, vulnerability and compassion. Her galactic starpower focused the spotlight on her causes. But what gave her real power - and the potential to become a great humanitarian - was that ordinary people found her believable. All the more so because she had made mistakes in her own life.

Diana certainly was no Mother Teresa. But she was never trying to be a saint.

Nor, contrary to some snide critics, was she a clone of Eva Peron. The wife of dictator Juan Peron was adored for her charity to the poor. But Evita was a consummate politician, using good works to bolster her husband.

“That” clearly wasn’t Diana’s aim. Nor did she have other political motives. Those Tory members of Parliament who sneered at her as a loose political cannon missed the mark.

Princess Diana’s good works were really aimed at helping the sick and wounded. Even her work on land mines aimed more at aiding those injured by mines than at pushing a treaty banning such weapons. She thought in terms of people more than in terms of parliaments.

Last week Diana wrote to Jerry White that landmine victims she had met in Bosnia “have stiffened my resolve to ensure that their needs … are not overlooked” in the search for an international ban. White was going to London later this week to help her draft a message to be delivered at a conference in Oslo on land mines.

Instead, Jerry White will be going to Princess Diana’s funeral. So will representatives of other groups she helped, including some of the maimed and homeless.

We will never know whether Diana would have grown into a humanitarian leader or quit public life. But no one can deny that her efforts were special - and real.

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