FRANCAISMédecins du Monde - History
1990-1999
-January 1990, Romania: MDM decides not to start an emergency programme after learning that the information about the Timisoara massacres and mass graves were not true. The organisation though will run long term programmes in Romania to help orphans suffering from aids, and neglected by the local health authorities.
-March 31 1990, Poland: at a meeting of doctors in Cracowa, MDM helps forward the adoption of a European charter of humanitarian action according to which “the principle of non-interference stops when begins the risk of failing to assist a person in danger”.
-From 1991, Iraq: taking advantage of Operation Provide Comfort and of the US military intervention, MDM, who had been illegally acting in Kurdistan since 1984, is finally allowed by Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship to administer the hospitals of Ranya and Azadi from Jordan, along with the Iran Kurdish Democratic Party. Until then the organisation had very bad relations with the regime and three of its employees were held hostage by the authorities in Baghdad for two months after the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. Yet in 2003, MDM condemns the military intervention of the Coalition forces and criticises the decision of the United States Army to supervise humanitarian aid during its war against Saddam Hussein. In a joint release with HI, PU, ACF, EMDH and Solidarités on 3rd of March 2003, MDM claims its “refusal to subordinate its action in the field to a military authority that takes part in the fight”. The organisation does not want to relay the Coalition forces in the medical field and limits its operations. In July 2003, for instance, it says nothing about its future programmes so that they are not integrated by the United States into the Iraqi national budget for 2004. But because security does not improve after the US troops landed in Baghdad and captured Saddam Hussein, a director of MDM requires a better protection by the Allies. In an interview published in Libération on the 9th of September 2004, this position is criticised by the president of MSF, Jean-Hervé Bradol, because a military supervision by the Coalition does not prevent attacks against civil personnel and compromise the neutrality of humanitarian organisations. MDM, whose office in Bassora is looted and whose expatriates are threatened, eventually leaves the country in March 2004.
-From 1992, ex-Yugoslavia: six months after president Bernard Kouchner and François Mitterrand’s short visit in Sarajevo on 28th June 1992, a MDM convoy tries to enter into the besieged capital but stays blocked twenty miles or so away from the city, in the small village of Visoko, where, for want of anything better, the medical supplies are handed out there and then. Coming up to Christmas, MDM launches a very controversial advertising campaign which compares the Serbs Nationalists to Nazis in order to expose their ethnic cleansing on the Bosnian Muslims. Such a strong line earns MDM-France to be banned from Serbia and to have to send Polish doctors to Belgrade and American ones to Kosovo. In 1993, MDM-France backed with its own funds opens a mission in Sarajevo despite the disapproval of both the United Nations and the European Union, which have been told not to intervene. The doctors are escorted by the United Nations troops because of insecurity. Fight, car robberies and numerous thefts compel MDM to leave Zenica for a while and to withdraw to Split in August 1993. That same year, the association collects testimonies from war victims in Croatia and in Bosnia. Published in a book, L’Enfer yougoslave (“Hell in Yugoslavia”), some of these testimonies are transmitted to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia that the United Nations has just created. From 1993 to 1996 Yugoslavia, along with the African Region of the Great Lakes, will represent a third of MDM’s total budget for missions abroad. In Kosovo, MDM-France then gets involved along with the Albanians. As for MDM-Greece, it doesn’t hide its sympathy with the Serbs and goes for it alone. In 1999, it denounces NATO’s bombings (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) and works in territories controlled by Beograd. Unlike MSF, which severed relations with its Greek section for these reasons, MDM-Greece remains part of the International Committee of MDM.
-May-October 1993, Somalia: during the United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM), MDM collaborates with the French army and runs two health centres in Wajid and Bardera.
-From November 1994, Congo-Kinshasa: after signing jointly with MSF, Care, Oxfam, PSF and IRC a petition against insecurity, physical threats and the uneasy access to Rwandese refugees in the Goma Region, MDM decides to continue its programmes in the camps infiltrated with “genociders” preparing to reconquer their country. To prevent militiamen from hijacking the aid, MDM refocuses its programmes on women, an African Rights report showing that they have also largely participated in the genocide. In many humanitarian organisations, women and children are perceived as innocent victims. According to Father François Lefort, who worked for MDM in Goma in July 1994 then in Rwandese refugees camps in Amisi and Tingui-Tingui in December 1996, “ no genocide should ever justify the killing of women and children who bear no responsibility in passed crimes ”.
-Since 1995, Russia, Chechnya: in 1998 MDM expatriate volunteers are called back home as they might be abducted or bombed. However, the organisation carries on its activities with local doctors supplied from Ingushya and Daghistan. In 1999 MDM says it is the only western NGO still working in Chechnya.
-January 1996, Rwanda: three workers of MDM-Spain, Manuel Madrazo Osuna, Maria Flores Sirena and Luis Maria Voltuena, are killed.
-Since 1996, Mali: in the North of the country MDM helps with rehabilitating and pacifying the Gundam district, where Tuaregs had been fighting against the army.
-1997, Sudan, North Korea: MDM withdraws for lack of free access to those in need.
-1998, Burundi : MDM does not want to be part of the forced displacement of peasants and refuses to build medical infrastructures in the camps where the Tutsi-led army started to confine the Hutu after February 1996. The organisation leaves the country in 1998.
