FRANCAISMédecins Sans Frontières - History
1990-1999
-Since 1990, Liberia: while the country sinks ever deeper into war and Samuel Doe’s dictatorship in Monrovia is falling, MSF starts operating from the Ivory Coast border using relief sent by military planes and the Emergency Cell of the ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris. In the areas controlled by Charles Taylor’s combatants, at the beginning of 1993, MSF vehicles are bombed by Nigerian planes from the peacekeeping forces of the Ecomog (Ecomomic Community of West African States’ Monitoring Group), who have imposed a blockade on the rebels. Despite multiple peace agreements, the election of Charles Taylor in 1997 and the departure of the Ecomog troops, the situation does not get steady and deteriorates again from 2002 onwards. After the murders of three ADRA employees in March 2003, MSF temporarily evacuates Toe Town in the Grand Gedeh County near the Ivorian border. In May, as the port of Harper has just been taken over by the rebels, other medical teams have to leave, walking all the way to Tabou, on the border with Ivory Coast. Yet in Monrovia, the organisation decides to stay after foreign residents are evacuated by the French army on 9th June 2003. Unlike other NGOs, it doesn’t call for an international peace-keeping operation under the leadership of the Americans, who already support the rebels and who are not neutral against Charles Taylor.
-May 1991-June 2003, Sri Lanka: an MSF team is deliberately bombed by the army on a road near Madhu. Present in the country since 1986, the organisation works both on the governmental and on the Tamil Tigers sides, under an embargo. But it is easier to protest against the army abuses than against those of the rebels, who have locked their enclave and who are holding the population hostages. This is why MSF is regularly accused of collusion with the Tamil Tigers by the authorities or the press in Colombo. Besides, the rebels have in the past stolen MSF radios, tried to use its ambulance to get to the enemy, and mined a road so as to compel the medical teams to change route at the last moment, making the army suspicious in the process.
-From October 1991, ex-Yugoslavia: unlike the ICRC, which refuses to pay anything to the fighters, MSF evacuates injured persons from the city of Vukovar. On their way back, two nurses and a doctor of the organisation are injured when their convoy goes over a landmine on 18th October of 1991. During the siege of Dubrovnik the next month, MSF has also to give in to the racket of the Serb forces who claim 200 of 500 tons of food aid for the rest to be allowed to be handed out to the Croat population of the town. Observing that there is no real urgency in Dubrovnik after the evacuation of the civilian population, the organisation decides to remain on the side and to help refugees rather than to intervene in the heart of the conflict. In Bosnia, it is the Dutch section which takes over, whilst MSF-France, already in Sarajevo since May 1991, starts to work in Kosovo in October 1992. Championing NATO’s (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) military intervention against the troops of Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo in 1999, the association then withdraws from the relief effort to protest the inability of the international community to protect the Serb minority in the province.
-1992, France: in Mérignac near Bordeaux’s airport, MSF opens a warehouse to stock ready-to-use kits that are also sold to other NGOs with a profit margin of 15%. As soon as 1979, Jacques Pinel, a pharmacist back from refugee camps in Thailand, had suggested to rationalise the supply of medicine thanks to logisticians, about to become the organisation’s strike force and to constitute a good quarter of the volunteers abroad. The first purchase centre was established in 1986. In Belgium, MSF had also set up Transfer, an equivalent to Mérignac in France, and a Quick Intervention Unit capable of projecting emergency aid equipment, sometimes with the help of the Belgium Air Force C-130 planes.
-From 1993, South Africa: MSF-France keeps implementing programmes in Johannesburg. Even though the projects do not correspond to emergency needs, they justify maintaining a mission which serves as a hub to supply war-torn Mozambique and Angola; this presence is also symbolical as Nelson Mandela is elected in April 1994. MSF leaves the country in 1995, then comes back to help fight against AIDS. From its Cape Town clinic in Khayelitsha, where it can import generic medicine from Thailand, it backs TAC (Treatment Action Campaign), a South African NGO launched by Zackie Achmat and other AIDS victims on 10th December 1998, Human Right Day. And it campaigns for an access to basic medicine while eighteen big pharmaceutical firms try to prevent the production, at a lower price, of AIDS treatments still under licence. On the 19th of April 2001, thirty nine laboratories step back and give up suing the South African government against a law which allowed the use of generic drugs.
-1994, France: Philippe Biberson is elected as MSF’s president, and replaced by Jean-Hervé Bradol in 2000. For his part, Jean-Christophe Rufin, the former vice-president of MSF-France between 1990 and 1993, quits Lucette Michaud-Chevy’s cabinet, the minister in charge of Humanitarian action and human rights, and enters the minister of Defence’s cabinet, François Léotard. As far as he is concerned, Xavier Emmanuelli will become the secretary of state for Humanitarian action under President Jacques Chirac in May 1995, until June 1997.
-From April 1994, Rwanda: after briefly leaving Kigali between the 11th and the 13th of April, five days after the murder of President Juvénal Habyarimana, MSF-France comes back to work amidst massacres, even though five Tutsi employees have been killed. In Brussels, the president of MSF-Belgium, Reginald Morens, is one of the first to call the events a genocide, in the newspaper De Morgen, dated April 24th. While the medical teams in Kigali accept and bear the risks such a denunciation implies for their own security, the organisation launches a public campaign and asks the international community to intervene militarily to put an end to the atrocities. In Paris, in the newspaper Libération dated June 23rd, MSF-France claims a genocide cannot be stopped with doctors. When the refugees start flowing into Zaire, the organisation uses French military planes to carry from Bangui (Central Africa) and Nairobi (Kenya) expatriates and relief to the camps of Goma and Bukavu. But MSF also condemns the French army’s Operation Turquoise because of the relations Paris had with the killers of President Juvénal Habyarimana in Kigali (by means of pressures, the organisation will contribute to the creation of a parliamentary inquiry led by a socialist MP, Paul Quilès, in 1998; but the hearings, many of them made in private, will not enable to charge the government of Edouard Balladur, the Prime Minister during Operation Turquoise). In Rwanda, the relations of the humanitarian community with the new regime deteriorate. Under the false pretext of incompetence, MSF-France is expelled in december 1995 after denouncing the conditions of custody of the suspects of the 1994 genocide, and the massacre of the Kibeho camp by the Rwandese Patriotic Front’s army. MSF belongings are confiscated by the authorities.
-December 1994, Congo-Kinshasa, Tanzania: MSF-France demands in vain the arrest of the war criminals who infiltrated refugee camps in order to rearm and prepare for a new conquest of Rwanda after the regime of Juvénal Habyarimana fell in Kigali. Dividing camps in smaller entities would enable to control the situation more easily. And the intervention of an international police force might end the reign of terror of the militiamen. In order not to support “genociders”, MSF-France prefers to withdraw. The Dutch, Belgian, Swiss and Spanish sections of the movement decide to remain in Congo-Kinshasa, arguing that their presence may improve the conditions of access to the victims. They will leave too in 1995.
-From July 1995, ex Yugoslavia: the presence of humanitarian workers in the Srebrenica enclave worries MSF because it gives the wrong impression, that the United Nations are protecting the population, whereas the Serbs finally slaughter the surrounded Bosnians. MSF asks for an inquiry on the passive role the blue helmets played during the tragedy. In 1999, the UN advises member States to conduct their own investigation. In December 2000, the conclusions of a French parliamentary inquiry state that the Dutch battalion is responsible for not starting air raids to protect the civilians. In January 2003, in the Netherlands, a similar parliamentary inquiry does not conclude that the Dutch government is innocent, but it passes the buck by accusing the French General Bernard Janvier, the then commander of the UN forces in Bosnia, for not allowing air raids against the Serbs in time.
-From 1996, Burundi: MSF thinks about withdrawing because the Tutsi-dominated army starts to force thousands of Hutu civilians into appealing camps in February 1996. The organisation does not want to provide medicines and complicit support for the imprisonment of innocent people. It refuses to participate in the creation of new camps by building clinics or sanitation facilities. The sections of the movement that remain in the country limit their medical assistance and are eventually banned from the camps anyway. In 1999, MSF-France stops its programmes, informs against the situation and advocates the closure of the camps. In 2001, the activities are suspended again, that time in the Kayanza region, and the head of the MSF office in Bujumbura is expelled.
-From January 1997, Congo-Kinshasa: in the region of Bukavu and Shabunda, MSF-France stops researching and assisting the Rwandese pursued by Paul Kagamé’s APR (Rwandese Patriotic Army) and Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s AFDL (Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire). Indeed, these two military forces use humanitarian organisations to identify, attract and slaughter the refugees hidden in the forest. MSF does though set out to work in the Bunia region where the Rwandan and Ugandan occupation armies enhance the conflict between the local militias of the Hema and the Lendu. In June 2003, the association criticises the Operation Artémis which, under the responsibility of the European Union and the French military forces, only succeeds in making secure the town of Bunia, leaving the civilians in the neighbouring region defenceless. In March 2004 in Kitenge, northern Katanga, MSF teams, who witness the murder of a woman seeking help in front of their Anuarite clinic, also inform against the summary executions and looting committed by the Mayi-Mayi militias and the Congolese Armed Forces.
-12th of February 1997, United States, New York: on the recommendation of the Chilean Ambassador, Juan Somavia, MSF is one of the first NGOs to be consulted by the United Nations Security Council, along with the ICRC, Oxfam and CARE. With SCF, another interview of the same kind will take place in October 1998, more specifically about Sudan.
-From 1997, Congo-Brazzaville: MSF-France intervenes in the Makelekele hospital, in the southern part of the capital; it has to leave in April 1998. While refusing subsidies from the French Embassy in Brazzaville, MSF comes back in March 1999 and tries to assess the risks of a medical programme which attracts civilians when militias go on plundering the surrounding areas.
-1998, Timor-East: MSF is expelled by the Indonesian authorities which occupy the former Portuguese colony, independent since 1975.
-From 1998, Sierra Leone: unlike what it usually does, MSF refuses to leave the town of Bo whereas the United Nations, for once, have decided on a collective withdrawal in order to pressurise the combatants of the RUF (Revolutionary United Front), responsible of many abuses against civilians. MSF has been in the country since 1986; its position thwarts co-ordination attempts. In December 1999, several MSF volunteers are kept in custody by the RUF, which suspects them of supporting a demobilisation programme that the rebels do not want. However, in an official statement, MSF claims it is not involved in the disarmament process. The organisation accuses on the contrary the United Nations of negotiating with the leaders of the RUF: aid against their demobilisation.
-October 1998, North Korea: for lack of a free access to the victims, MSF withdraws from a country where it had been since 1995. Unlike other NGOs which consider that they contribute to peace by helping and preventing the fall of the regime, the organisation refuses to participate to the selection of populations who “deserve” to live or to die of hunger. After its withdrawal, it denounces the distributions of the World Food Programme that the UN cannot control, thus risking to support Pyongyang’s oppressing system. MSF also tries to assist North Korean refugees who illegally enter China.
-October 1999, Norway: the MSF movement is awarded the Nobel peace prize. Using its new notoriety, the organisation launches an international campaign for the developing countries to have an access to basic medicine.
