FRANCAISMédecins du Monde - Comments
5) Links to politics
-Where needs are undeniable, MDM interventions show a certain political “colour”, for instance alongside the Mujaheddin in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, where the organisation got illegally from Pakistan. At the time MDM thinks that a humanitarian prevention is more efficient in rebel-occupied areas than at “the end of the track”, in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. However, according to some analysts, the decision to act on the Mujaheddin side only also shows a refusal to negotiate with the Soviet government in Kabul. The illegal character of the operations means NGOs have to corrupt the Pakistani customs officers and the Afghan smugglers, thus supplying a mafia-like network of war scavengers. Medical convoys go with the rebels’ weapon ones. Patrice Franceshi, in charge of MDM’s Afghan programme in 1983 and 1984, makes the final move and goes and fights along with Commander Amin Wardak’s Mujaheddin. In Vies clandestines (“Secret lives”), a film directed by Christophe de Ponfilly, produced by Interscope and broadcast by France 2, Patrice Franceshi explains that he “wanted to bring what [he] knew and what [he] could do in the field of armed fighting in order to help them defend themselves better”.
-However, the political positions of MDM in armed conflicts are not linked to a strictly speaking partisan ideology. In a book edited by Marie-José Domestici-Met, three MDM executives, Bernard Granjon, Michel Brugière and Pierre Pradier, say that “the organisation chooses its side”, that “of the most deprived”. Yesterday’s oppressed are often tomorrow’s oppressors: this explains some of MDM’s about-turns, for instance along with the Shiites in Lebanon in 1975, then with the Christians during the next decade. In many cases, moreover, the personal political activities of some MDM members did not influence at all the organisation’s commitments. In Sudan and in South Africa, for instance, MDM worked with Michele D’Auria, an Italian doctor who had taken the assumed name of Antonio Canino and who was later accused by Rome of being involved in bank hold-ups in Milan in 1990 for the benefit of his brother Lucia, a member of a red-brigades-like terrorist group, Prima Linea.
