FRANCAISSecours populaire français - History
1970-1979
-From 1973, Chile: Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship forbids the SPF to intervene in Chile. Therefore, the SPF charters a boat, the Anjouan, to provide assistance through Caritas-Germany, which the Chilean military suspect less of being Marxists. In France, the SPF also deals with incoming refugees and supporters of Salvador Allende’s socialist government, not to mention the armed opposition. In the Victoria suburbs of Santiago, an SPF departmental committee decides to sponsor a “terrorist”, “Marbella” Rodrigues, who used to attack banks to fund the Lautaro group and who was machine-gunned by the police and crippled for life as she was trying to make her companion escape from prison. In his book, Gilbert Avril, a veteran from the SPF, shows some doubts retrospectively: “were we really acting as a humanitarian association by supporting people individually like that?”
-1974, Iraq: the SPF, which had provided an ambulance, stops to assist the Kurdish rebels of General Mustapha Barzani when the Iraqi Communist Party decides to quit opposition and to support the Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad.
-From 1976, Lebanon: the SPF sends a boat and provides relief with doctors from Eastern Europe only in areas controlled by the Syrian army and its allies. The organisation then sets up an air bridge in June-September 1982. During a truce between the Syrians and General Michel Aoun in 1987, it manages to give aid to almost all parts of Lebanon, except for the Bekaa plain controlled by the Hezbollah: Tyr, Nabatieh and Tripoli for the Muslims, Eastern Beirut for the Christians, the Chouf mountains for the Druze. In October 1991, Georges Valbon develops for the SPF a dental programme with subsidies from the general council of the French department of Seine-Saint-Denis that he once presided: a specialized centre opens in Beirut’s Achrafieh suburbs. All these efforts are maintained by Doctor Ismaïl Hassouneh, who will later become an SPF national secretary and who represents the Lebanese Secours populaire in France. Chaired by a former ambassador, Salah Steitieh, then by a lawyer, Sleimane Sleimane, this organisation was launched in 1973. At the beginning of the 1990s, it allegedly has 20,000 members, employs 50 doctors on a full time basis, administers health centres on 80% of the Lebanese territory and cures the poor as a priority, including Palestinian refugees.
-November 1979-March 1980, Cambodia: after the Vietnamese army invades the country, and after Pol Pot’s killers, responsible for a genocide, leave it, the SPF charters six planes for the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea. The organisation only works on the Vietnamese side, not in Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand. It pleads for the recognition in Geneva of Heng Samrin’s regime new Red Cross, created by the Vietnamese in Phnom Penh and whose representative in the UN and the League of Red Crosses is still a Pol Pot exile. As the SPF maintains good relations with Samrin government, it is able to get visas for the French Red Cross in order to start a programme against tuberculosis.
