FRANCAISSecours populaire français - History
1980-1989
-October 1980, Algeria: the SPF sends essential goods to inhabitants of El Asnam, wrecked after an earthquake. This cataclysm provides the opportunity to launch a permanent network of emergency doctors. Yet the SPF favours long-term development actions.
-1981, France: during its congress in Tarbes, the SPF changes to Convergences the name of its journal, La Défense, which started as a weekly newsletter by the Secours rouge international and which became monthly in 1950. At the beginning of the 1960s, La Défense editor was Daniel Assalit, who had been jailed for two years for demonstrating against the French colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria.
-November 1983, El Salvador: Dominique Servais, an SPF doctor who was first involved helping the Salvadorian refugees, decides on her own to cross the border secretly to support the guerrilla. She has to go underground after she has witnessed villagers being massacred by the death squadrons of the military junta in power in San Salvador.
-1985, Ethiopia: after sending an expatriate doctor and food supplies during the 1984 famine, the SPF does not inform the media against deportations organized by Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam’s “Marxist” junta in order to empty the northern part of the country, so as to deprive guerrillas from the peasants’ support.
-1986, Byelorussia: the SPF sends aid to victims of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, in Ukraine. From Minsk with Claude Parsys, one of the former leaders of the France-USSR association, the SPF sponsors the stay in France of children touched by the radiations.
-From 1988, South Africa: the SPF campaigns for the liberation of Nelson Mandela and demonstrates in front of the South African embassy in Paris. In Johannesburg, the organisation builds classrooms and a nursery with Father Emmanuel Lafont in Soweto. In Port Elizabeth, it supports a refugees association, Tsitsikama. After Nelson Mandela is elected in 1994, it widens its action to the suburbs of Johannesburg with Ekhupoleni, an NGO which supports the victims of rape and violence.
