FRANCAISMedical Emergency Relief International - History
1993-1999
-January 1993, United Kingdom: three friends with a medical background and some experience in humanitarian organisations, Nicholas Mellor, a scientist, Chris Besse, a doctor, and Mark Dalton, a logistician, decide to found an emergency relief NGO. The initial idea was to open a British section of MSF. However, the Dutch headquarters did not feel the need for an operational agency in London, only a fund-raising one. Merlin, which is not helped either by Oxfam or SCF, can only rely on itself and launches its first programme. In the midst of the fighting in ex-Yugoslavia, it delivers food rations to Sarajevo.
-From 1997, Liberia: Merlin sets up a programme in a country devastated by civil war. From 1999 onwards, the situation deteriorates again. In June 2003, some of the organisation’s supplies are plundered by the governmental forces in Monrovia, which is surrounded by the rebels. After the negotiated departure of President Charles Taylor in August, Merlin’s director in Liberia, Karen Goodman Jones, deems the security conditions insufficient to carry out a transfer to the suburbs of the displaced populations in the capital. She especially criticises the strategy of the ICRC, which concentrates its relief efforts on camps on the periphery of the city so as to relieve the town centre of its congestion and to reopen primary schools.
-From 1998, Russia: after two years in the region, Merlin leaves Chechnya in 1998 following the plunder of its offices and several attacks against its employees. Yet the organisation stays in Russia, where it provides vital healthcare and social support to former prisoners and other patients suffering from tuberculosis in the city of Dzerzhinsk, 240 miles east of Moscow. The relations with the authorites prove to be difficult. In May 2005, the government prepares a new law on foreign NGOs and accuses Merlin of spying for Britain.
