FRANCAISMédecins Sans Frontières - History
1971-1979
-1971-1975, France: MSF is born out of Bernard Kouchner’s GIMCU (Groupe d’intervention médico-chirurgical d’urgence, i.e. Group of Medical and Surgical Emergency Intervention), created in 1970 after the Biafra war, and the SMF (Secours médical français, i.e. French Medical Relief), also created in 1970, by Philippe Bernier and Raymond Borel, two journalists from Tonus, a Journal of the pharmaceutical group Winthrop. In 1968, Bernard Kouchner had gone on behalf of the ICRC to Biafra and informed against the blockade of the Nigerian governmental troops. At the beginning, MSF has a small operational capacity and doubts as whether best to focus its action on development or emergency programmes. At first its network provides doctors to Medicus Mundi, the ICRC or Terre des Hommes, for whom MSF starts to administer a medico-surgical centre and a blood bank in Bangladesh in January 1972. The first president of the association, Marcel Delcourt, quits in August 1973 to become an advisor to the minister of Foreign Affairs, Michel Jobert. He is first replaced by Max Récamier, then in 1975 by Jacques Bérès, a member of the “Biafrans” (as opposed to the “Tonus clan”) who want to encourage the publicising of MSF’s actions with Bernard Kouchner.
-1972-1978, Nicaragua: in December 1972, MSF-France is authorised to use a Transall by the minister of Defence, Michel Debré, in order to rescue the victims of an earthquake, in collaboration with the military doctors of EMIR (Element médical d’intervention rapide, i.e. Quick Medical Response Unit). The volunteers get there too late, four days after the earthquake, and observe that the President Anastasio Somoza’s wife is reselling the medicine on the black market. During the last hours of the dictatorship, in 1978, MSF-France is present again, along with the FSLN (Sandinista Front of National Liberation).
-From 1974, Iraq: in September 1974, Bernard Kouchner sets up a relief programme financed and transported by General Mustapha Barzani’s Kurdish resistance; Philippe Bernier refuses to cash in the checks of this armed movement. As the organisation is eager to preserve its financial independence from the belligerents, it eventually works in the region on its own funds. During the first Gulf crisis, MSF-France decides, unlike the Belgian and Dutch sections, not to open an office in Kuwait, a country already assisted by the Americans after the Iraqi occupation troops left in January 1991. However within Operation Provide Comfort, MSF-France works in close co-operation with the French and American soldiers of Operation Libage which, from the 6th of April to the 28th of July, provides assistance in the Iraqi Kurdistan from Turkey, in particular in Cukurça. In April 2003, MSF-France medical teams are in Baghdad while the American troops are launching an attack on Saddam Hussein’s regime: two employees are detained briefly by the dictator’s security forces. Unlike Oxfam, the French Red Cross, ACF, MDM, HI, PU, Solidarités and EMDH, the organisation doesn’t protest against the US military intervention. It considers that its purpose is not to condemn a war but only to alleviate sufferings. Moreover, according to Rony Brauman and Pierre Salignon, nothing proves that Washington bombings are more devastating than Saddam Hussein’s from a humanitarian point of view. After the American victory, the organisation reduces its programmes and denounces obstructions from the occupation authorities. Unlike SCF or Christian Aid, MSF-UK refuses for instance to be funded by belligerent states, especially the British government.
-April-May 1975, Vietnam: while the American troops are leaving the country, MSF-France briefly works in the Anh Loï camp in Saigon and runs a medical programme financed by the French Foreign Affairs ministry and the Vietnamese diaspora in Paris on the request of an NGO close to Hanoi’s regime, Aide à l’enfance vietnamienne (Aid to Vietnamese Children). Under the Communist pressure, the association soon has to leave the country.
-1975-1979, Lebanon: MSF-France intervenes on the request of the Palestinian Red Crescent and the Imam Moussa Sadr, religious leader of the Shiite community who, in a letter dated November 3rd 1975, offers to pay the airplane tickets and to finance the medical equipment for the operation. The association is then working in Beirut, in the very centre of the besieged district of Nabaa-Borj Hammond, a Shiite enclave that the medical teams must leave when the hospital is shut down, at the peak of the fighting in July 1976. MSF then deploys its teams in the Christian zone but ends up withdrawing when the security of the volunteers is no longer ensured.
-May 1976, Algeria: after having signed an agreement with the ministry for health of the Sahrawi Democratic Arab Republic, not recognised by Morocco, MSF-France has to stop working in the refugee camps in Tindouf which are under the strict control of the Front Polisario guerrillas.
-From December 1976, Thailand: MSF-France starts by working for the International Rescue Committee and World Vision in the Khmer and Laotian refugee camps of Aranyaprathet and Ban-Vinaï, then for Terre des Hommes in those of Nam Yao and Chieng-Kong. The association also takes part in a programme which aims to transplant to French Guyana 500 Hmong from Laos, chosen on medical aptitude criteria. Its aid work soon takes on a political dimension since MSF denounces the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge, and continues to supply aid to the Cambodian refugee camps that serve as supply bases for Lon Nol’s pro American partisans. On February 2nd 1980, on the Poï-Pet border bridge which spans the river Klong Luek, the organisation marches with the media against the recent occupation of Cambodia by the Vietnamese troops. In Cambodia, Hanoi wants indeed to supervise the distribution of food, take the supplies for its soldiers, and prevent the aid from reaching the refugee camps held by the Khmer Rouge unless the new government in Phnom Penh is first recognized by the international community. MSF’s campaign becomes ideological as it associates well-known anti communist Americans such as the president of the International Rescue Committee, Leo Cherne. At the time, some MSF-France volunteers in the Kao I Dang camp do not hide their political opinions either, as Patrice Franceschi, who will fight along with the Mujaheddin against the Soviets in Afghanistan, or Philippe de Dieuleveult, who will disappear in the Zaire River rapids. Nevertheless, MSF-France tries not to encourage the armed struggle against the Vietnamese occupation, and withdraws quite quickly from refugee camps held by the Khmer Rouge, guilty of genocide, thus limiting its action to other sites.
-1977, France: MSF signs a convention with HSF (Hôpital sans frontières, Hospitals without borders), an organisation which provides mobile medical units often transported by the Transaals of the French Air Force. Founded in 1976 by Tony de Graaff and Guy Barthélemy with the support of the International Rotary, this association first knows but failures in Lebanon, where it cannot set up a hospital with the necessary authorisations from all the concerned parties. In his book, Guy Barthélemy, friend of Doctor Albert Schweitzer in the 1950s, explains that HSF sends medical teams in 1979 in the Angolan refugee camps in Sandoa in Southen Zaire and in the Red Khmer refugee camps in Sakeo in Western Thailand. The association then differs from MSF and shuts down due to bankruptcy in 2002.
-May-November 1978, Eritrea: on the request of the Eritrean Relief Association and with the logistical support of the Christians from the Eritrean Red Cross on the EPLF (Eritrean People’s Liberation Front) side, and the Muslims from the Eritrean Red Crescent on the ELF (Eritrean Liberation Front) side, MSF tries to open a surgical mission amongst the secessionist rebels who oppose Ethiopian rule. But its teams don’t have access to civilians and can only help fighters, those of the EPLF to the detriment of those of the ELF. MSF-France decides to quit, leaving the material to the medical team of the EPLF.
-1978-1982, France: MSF is presided until 1980 by Claude Malhuret, a former member of the Unified Socialist Party (Michel Rocard’s PSU), then until 1982 by Xavier Emmanuelli who had been expelled from the Communist Party for having supported the Algerian independence fighters of the FLN (National Liberation Front). In the meantime, MSF starts developing fundraising in order to ensure its financial independence. After having benefited from a free advertising campaign offered by the agency Ecom International in 1977, the association from 1984 onwards uses marketing techniques to encourage the generosity of the French public. According to Myriam Donsimoni, the MSF’s resources are multiplied by 36 between 1978 and 1980. Yet MSF refuses to support advertising campaigns with a miserable tone, and carefully controls its communication policy, which at first had been delegated to professional agencies and photographers, as in the book published by Claude Malhuret and Xavier Emmanuelli in 1982. According to Joelle Tanguy, Executive Director of MSF-USA since 1994, the formidable growth of the movement can also be explained by the multiplication of refugee camps, its main fields of intervention. The global refugee population doubles between 1976 and 1979, and, once again, between 1979 and 1982.
-1979, France: Bernard Kouchner, who was for a while the editor of L’Événement (a weekly news magazine created in 1966 by Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie), wants to promote humanitarian causes through the media; he leaves MSF, which refuses to charter a cargo, l’Île de Lumière, to rescue Vietnamese boat people in the China Sea. After Malaysia decides on the 15th November of 1978 to close its Hai Kong coast to a drifting coaster carrying 2,564 Vietnamese refugees, Bernard Kouchner creates the committee Un bateau pour le Vietnam (“a boat for Vietnam”) in October 1979 and manages to rally to the project the most well known Parisian intellectuals of the time, including archrivals Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron. But in an article entitled Un bateau pour Saint Germain des Prés (“a boat for Saint Germain des Prés”) and published in the Quotidien du Médecin (“Doctor’s Daily”) on 4th December of 1979, Xavier Emmanuelli accuses Bernard Kouchner of making an exhibition of himself and of politicising the debate with a French intelligentsia which had for too long refused to see the dramatic exodus of refugees since the Communists came to power in Vietnam in 1975. The operation above all risks prompting other boat people to take the sea, at the risk of dying in a shipwreck, a pirate attack, or from lack of food. Moreover, the refugee camps are already overcrowded, notably that of Songkhla in Southern Thailand. Finally, a boat has little chance in seeking out the fragile little crafts used by the Vietnamese in the middle of the ocean. In fact the Île de Lumière soon forgets its initial mission and reconverts itself into a hospital-ship, following the example set by its German equivalent, the Port de Lumière, whose on-board consultations necessitate difficult to-and-fros from the mainland because the boat is to big to moor off the Anambas archipelago.
