FRANCAISMédecins Sans Frontières - Comments
6) Links to politics
-MSF’s positions in armed conflicts are not linked to a partisan ideology as such. In her book, Michèle Manceaux, who worked for MDM, wondered why in 1985 MSF informed against the Marxist junta’s atrocities in Ethiopia and not the bombings of civilians by the military pro-American dictatorship in Salvador. But the wrongs were neither of the same importance nor of the same nature. In Ethiopia it was the humanitarian logistic which was directly diverted towards military aims in order to empty the north of the country and to deprive the guerrillas from the peasants’ support. The issue was to know if aid was still providing more advantages than drawbacks to the starving villagers. It was not to follow the Western governments which, according to Peter Gill, never gave to Addis-Ababa the benefit of the doubt and condemned straight away the resettlement of population to the south while in Sudan in 1984, they supported Operation Moses, to transfer Ethiopian Jews to Israel, and did not denounce the corruption of the pro-American regime in Khartoum at that time.
-The diversity of personal opinions and the political activities of some members of the movement are not sufficient to state that MSF is a “right-wing” organisation, or MDM a “left-wing” one. The fact that the movement got wider and more international probably neutralised the possible ideological drift that had threatened MSF at the time of the Libertés sans frontières Foundation. In fact, some early MSF-France interventions may have been politically tinted, often anti-communist-wise, in particular in Marxist regimes like Cambodia, Ethiopia, Russia, China and Afghanistan. In the USSR between 1988 and 1989 the organisation sent four secret missions to collect testimonies from citizens interned by force in mental asylums, to denounce the abuses of the local medicine and to oppose the reintegration of the soviet section of the World Association of Psychiatry, banned from its ranks in 1983. In China in 1989, MSF also tried to help the Tien-an-men demonstrators in Beijing, a city that already had many doctors. In Afghanistan after 1980, the organisation even braved the communist authorities arguing that from a humanitarian prevention perspective, it was more sensible to act in the areas held by the Mujaheddin than “at the end of the trip”, in the refugee camps in Pakistan. But according to analysts such as Helga Baitenmann, however, deciding to intervene only on the “freedom fighters” side was in truth the sign of a refusal to negotiate with the government installed by the Soviets in Kabul. The underground character of the operations compelled to bribe Pakistani customs officers and Afghan smugglers, supplying a whole mafia network of war profiteers. And the caravans of medicine got linked to the rebellion’s weapons convoys.
