FRANCAISEnfants Réfugiés du Monde - History
1990-1999
-March 1996, ex-Yugoslavia: in Tuzla, Bosnia, ERM helps the displaced children from Srebrenica. In September 1999, the organisation hands its activities over to a local partner created for this purpose, Deciji Svijet (“The World of Children”).
-April 1996, Lebanon: along with two local NGOs, Najdeh and the General Union of Palestinian Women, ERM starts to support the schooling system in the Palestinian refugee camps.
-July 1996, Rwanda: ERM has to stop its activities for five months before being able to sort out its administrative situation and to start again its programmes in January 1997.
-From 1999, Algeria: ERM opens an office in Alger in order to strengthen its activities in the Western Saharawi refugee camps of Tindouf where the organisation has been active since July 1986. Before, other humanitarian agencies, such as the ICRC and MSF, had, without success, tried to intervene in the refugee camps held by the Front Polisario guerrillas who fought against the Moroccan occupation army. Faced with the impossibility of free access to the populations controlled by the government in exile of the RASD (Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic), they had to give up. Despite its support for the RASD, even Danielle Mitterrand’s France Liberties Fund eventually denounced, in a report published in September 2003, the way the Front Polisario forced Moroccan prisoners of war in Rabouni to work unpaid on humanitarian projects, thus pocketing the salaries paid by the international organisations normally intended for the Sahrawi refugees. Funders also worried about the way food aid was diverted and sold on markets in Mauritania, Southern Algeria and Northern Mali.
