FRANCAISPharmaciens sans frontières - History
1985-1999
-From October 1985, France: PSF is created in the Puy de Dôme’s county by chemists who want good medicine to be available to everyone, and to train the medical staff of developing countries. This organisation gradually gets more professional, and widens its activities when it gives itself an international committee in 1994.
-From 1994, Israel/Palestine: PSF supplies health centres of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, while attempting to get medicine from local makers, in collaboration with the ministry of Health of the Palestinian Authority.
-November 1994, Congo-Kinshasa: along with MSF, CARE, MDM, Oxfam and IRC, PSF signs a petition denouncing physical threats and difficulties to have access to the refugee populations in the Goma region. Still, the Spanish section of PSF decides to remain in Rwandese refugee camps infiltrated by “genociders” preparing to regain their country, where the Rwandese Patriotic Front has just gained power. After Mobutu Sese Seko’s dictatorship has been overthrown in Kinshasa, PSF comes back to work in Lubao and Tshofa in Eastern Kasai, where the association must collaborate both with the rebels and the governmental troops.
-Since 1994, Kenya: in order to supply without interruption the countries at war in the region, PSF centralizes its purchasing channels in Nairobi and its stocks in Lokichokio on the Sudanese border. PSF looses track of many medicine during the distribution of goods in the South of Somalia and Sudan.
-1998, Afghanistan: being in the country since 1995, PSF decides to stop its activities in agreement with its financial backers and other NGOs as it is impossible to work with the fundamentalist taliban regime.
-Since 1995, ex-Yugoslavia: some PSF staff is kept for a while as hostages by the Serbs in Bosnia. In 1999, PSF withdraws briefly from Kosovo during NATO’s bombings (North Atlantic Treaty Organization).
