FRANCAISComité inter-mouvements auprès des évacués - Comments
5) The links with politics
-In the 1970s and 1980s, the CIMADE often worked in partnership with the CCFD. It experienced quite a similar ideological drift when it defended human rights in pro-American countries only, from Latin America to Turkey, and not in allegedly progressive countries of the Eastern block, as though they had nothing to be blamed for. In its own way, the CIMADE has, from the beginning, boasted a certain form of political commitment. The Pomeyrol theses, notably, have sometimes been compared to the Kairos Document drawn up by Protestant groups in South Africa in 1985, who proclaimed the “hour of truth” and denounced the apartheid racial segregation system. The career of Madeleine Barot, general secretary (between 1940 and 1952) and vice president (from 1980) of the CIMADE, is significant. Member of the YMCA board of directors between 1945 and 1950, she took part in the creation and was vice president of INODEP (Ecumenical Institute for Peoples’ Development), a controversial organism which, founded in 1970 by Paulo Freire, advocated the “conscienticisation” of the masses, the liberation theology and the struggle against forces of oppression. In 1980, Madeleine Barot was then nominated to the vice presidency of ACAT (Christian Action for the Abolition of Torture) which for a long time focused on South American dictatorships rather than Eastern European “people’s republics”.
-However, the CIMADE cannot be accused of the same bias as the CCFD which privileged “left-wing” victims over “right-wing” ones. First, the CIMADE clearly distanced itself from movements that supported the use of revolutionary violence. Besides, the CIMADE, in its long history, led actions that counterbalanced its third-world and progressive orientations in the 1960s. Unlike the Secours populaire français at the end of World War II, the CIMADE, which had helped Jews to escape the Nazis, provided relief to “collaborateurs” and German prisoners, for instance. In the 1950s, it also took care of refugees from the communist countries. Since the Berlin Wall fell, the East-West divide tends to vanish anyway, and today, the presence of the CIMADE in one country or another is mainly linked to the historical geographic distribution of its programmes.
