FRANCAISComité inter-mouvements auprès des évacués - History
2000-2009
-2000, France: for lack of funds the CIMADE stops all its programmes in Latin America, a continent which, along with the Caribbean, had absorbed up to 62% of all financial transfers to local partners in 1996. From then on, the organisation focuses on Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
-2001, Israel/Palestine: in territories where it has been working from time to time since the Six Days war in 1967, the CIMADE stops backing the UPMRC (Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees), which has enough funds, and which focuses on the West Bank to the detriment of the Gaza Strip. The UPMRC is Mustapha Barghouti’s NGO, the leader of the ex-Palestinian communist party, a member of the FPLP (People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine), and a relative of Marwan Barghouti’s, himself the leader of the Tanzim, the armed branch of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. (Imprisoned for four years by the Israeli in 1978, elected MP at the Palestinian Legislative Council in 1996, Marwan Barghouti was the kingpin of both Intifadas in 1987 and 2001, before he was abducted by Tsahal in Ramallah in April 2002 in order to be tried for his alleged participation to terrorist attacks of the martyr brigades of Al-Aqsa). Nevertheless the CIMADE keeps supporting the PARC (Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee), the Badil Resource Center for Refugee Rights and the CFTA (Culture and Free Thinking Association).
-2002, France: president of the French Protestant Federation between 1987 and 1997, a member of the Committee sent by the Prime Minister in New Caledonia in 1988 to restore dialogue after fighting erupted in Ouvéa, Jacques Stewart, a clergyman, succeeds Bernard Picinbobo to chair the CIMADE.
-15th February 2003, France, Paris: the CIMADE takes part in a demonstration against American war on Iraq.
-22-26 March 2004, France: in Paris, the CIMADE backs the NGO Survie and his president, François-Xavier Verschave, who set up a civic commission to investigate on the role of France during the genocide of 1994. Launched in 1984 and led until 1995 by Jean Carbonare, who was a consultant to the Rwandese President Pasteur Bizimungu, the French section of Survie denounces the 1998 parliamentary inquiry of Paul Quilès, which dismissed the charge of complicity against the conservative government of Edouard Balladur, the Prime Minister in 1994. Upset by the “bias” and the “controversial argument” of the organisation, Paul Quilès, a socialist MP, refuses to testify in front the civic “tribunal”, which commemorates the 10th anniversary of the genocide.
