FRANCAISAction Contre la Faim - History
1980-1989
-From January 1985, Sudan: ACF starts to work in Southern areas held by the guerrillas of the SPLA (Sudan People’s Liberation Army). Supported by institutional backers, the programmes enable the organisation to get subsidies in spite of the rebels’ looting. Quoted by a journalist, David Rieff, who found some volunteers to be idle in the South of Sudan, a person in charge in ACF admits bluntly: “The guerrillas want us to keep a presence in the area, and for our own reasons we need to do so […] My job is to assure ACF’s survival. If we are out of Sudan and MSF is here, or the Anglo-Saxons are there, then the hard truth is, we are less likely to get funding from ECHO […]. An NGO simply must be in certain areas that the donors are paying attention to”. But in 1997, the SPLA expels ACF, which wanted to conduct a nutritional survey likely to reveal the extent of the misappropriation of food aid by and for the fighters around a displaced people’s camp in Labone. ACF-France then runs new programmes in Wau and Juba’s governmental strongholds, as well as in Bentiu. As to ACF-USA, it returns in September 2000 to the Bahr el Ghazal’s region controlled by the rebels.
-From 1986, Ethiopia: contrary to MSF, which is expelled from the country in December 1985, ACF does not inform against the military abuses and the forced transfers of populations towards the South. In not participating in the protests against Colonel Mengistu Hailé Mariam’s junta, the organisation is able to stay in the North of the country but its silence legitimates the authorities and undermines the credibility of the accounts made by MSF on the deportations. In Rama camp near the Eritrean capital Asmara, it is true that ACF volunteers do not directly witness any massacre and think that their presence can prevent army raids. In his autobiographical novel, Jean-Christophe Rufin, who was at the time in charge of the mission in Rama, implies that the police blackmail, while the girlfriends of the humanitarian workers were kept in jail, might have influenced ACF’s decision to keep silent. Yet Jean-Christophe Rufin is very much aware of the politico-military take-over of the aid, and not only by the government. The “aid poured into this zone, he writes, is as much to the advantage of the rebels as to the government. More often than not, it is impossible to distinguish the two. It is war that we are feeding”. Later on, one of the ACF’s nurses is kidnapped in the Tigray in 1987. After the collapse of the Mengistu Hailé Mariam dictatorship in 1991, the working conditions remain difficult and, in 1999, a volunteer, Eric Courly, is abducted for five weeks in the South of Ethiopia. In 2000, the organisation reveals the manipulations of the new regime in power in Addis-Ababa, which inflates the figures of a famine in the Ogaden region in order to obtain humanitarian aid to finance its war effort against Eritrea.
