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-1971-1975,
France: MSF is born out of Bernard Kouchner’s
GIMCU (Group of Medical and Surgical Emergency Intervention),
created in 1970 after the Biafra war, and the SMF (French
Medical Relief), also created in 1970, by Philippe Bernier
and Raymond Borel, two journalists from Tonus, a Journal
of the pharmaceutical group Winthrop. In 1968, Bernard
Kouchner had gone on behalf of the ICRC to Biafra and
informed against the blockade of the Nigerian governmental
troops. At the beginning, MSF has a small operational
capacity and doubts as whether best to focus its action
on development or emergency programmes. At first its
network provides doctors to Medicus Mundi,
the ICRC or Terre des Hommes, for whom MSF
starts to administer a medico-surgical centre and a
blood bank in Bangladesh in January 1972. The first
president of the association, Marcel Delcourt, quits
in August 1973 to become an advisor to the minister
of Foreign Affairs, Michel Jobert. He is first replaced
by Max Récamier, then in 1975 by Jacques Bérès,
a member of the “Biafrans” (as opposed to
the “Tonus clan”) who want to encourage
the publicising of MSF’s actions with Bernard
Kouchner.
-1972-1978, Nicaragua: in December 1972, MSF-France
is authorised to use a Transall by the minister of Defence,
Michel Debré, in order to rescue the victims
of an earthquake, in collaboration with the military
doctors of EMIR (Element médical d’intervention
rapide, i.e. Quick Medical Response Unit). The
volunteers get there too late, four days after the earthquake,
and observe that the President Anastasio Somoza’s
wife is reselling the medicine on the black market.
During the last hours of the dictatorship, in 1978,
MSF-France is present again, along with the FSLN (Sandinista
Front of National Liberation).
-From 1974, Iraq: in September 1974, Bernard Kouchner
sets up a relief programme financed and transported
by General Mustapha Barzani’s Kurdish resistance;
Philippe Bernier refuses to cash in the checks of this
armed movement. As the organisation is eager to preserve
its financial independence from the belligerents, it
eventually works in the region on its own funds. During
the first Gulf crisis, MSF-France decides, unlike the
Belgian and Dutch sections, not to open an office in
Kuwait, a country already assisted by the Americans
after the Iraqi occupation troops left in January 1991.
However within Operation Provide Comfort, MSF-France
works in close cooperation with the French and American
soldiers of Operation Libage which, from the
6th of April to the 28th of July, provides assistance
in the Iraqi Kurdistan from Turkey, in particular in
Cukurça. In April 2003, MSF-France medical teams
are in Baghdad while the American troops are launching
an attack on Saddam Hussein’s regime: two employees
are detained briefly by the dictator’s security
forces. Unlike Oxfam, the French Red Cross, ACF, MDM,
HI, PU, Solidarités and EMDH, the organisation
doesn’t protest against the US military intervention.
It considers that its purpose is not to condemn a war
but only to alleviate sufferings. Moreover, according
to Rony Brauman and Pierre Salignon, nothing proves
that Washington bombings are more devastating than Saddam
Hussein’s from a humanitarian point of view. After
the American victory, the organisation reduces its programmes
and denounces obstructions from the occupation authorities.
Unlike SCF or Christian Aid, MSF-UK refuses for instance
to be funded by belligerent states, especially the British
government.
-April-May 1975, Vietnam: while the American troops
are leaving the country, MSF-France briefly works in
the Anh Loï camp in Saigon and runs a medical programme
financed by the French Foreign Affairs ministry and
the Vietnamese diaspora in Paris on the request of an
NGO close to Hanoi’s regime, Aide à
l’enfance vietnamienne (Aid to Vietnamese
Children). Under the Communist pressure, the association
soon has to leave the country.
-1975-1979, Lebanon: MSF-France intervenes on the request
of the Palestinian Red Crescent and the Imam Moussa
Sadr, religious leader of the Shiite community who,
in a letter dated November 3rd 1975, offers to pay the
airplane tickets and to finance the medical equipment
for the operation. The association is then working in
Beirut, in the very centre of the besieged district
of Nabaa-Borj Hammond, a Shiite enclave that the medical
teams must leave when the hospital is shut down, at
the peak of the fighting in July 1976. MSF then deploys
its teams in the Christian zone but ends up withdrawing
when the security of the volunteers is no longer ensured.
-May 1976, Algeria: after having signed an agreement
with the ministry for health of the Sahrawi Democratic
Arab Republic, not recognised by Morocco, MSF-France
has to stop working in the refugee camps in Tindouf
which are under the strict control of the Front Polisario
guerrillas.
-From December 1976, Thailand: MSF-France starts by
working for the International Rescue Committee and World
Vision in the Khmer and Laotian refugee camps of Aranyaprathet
and Ban-Vinaï, then for Terre des Hommes
in those of Nam Yao and Chieng-Kong. The association
also takes part in a programme which aims to transplant
to French Guyana 500 Hmong from Laos, chosen on medical
aptitude criteria. Its aid work soon takes on a political
dimension since MSF denounces the genocide committed
by the Khmer Rouge, and continues to supply aid to the
Cambodian refugee camps that serve as supply bases for
Lon Nol’s pro American partisans. On February
2nd 1980, on the Poï-Pet border bridge which spans
the river Klong Luek, the organisation marches with
the media against the recent occupation of Cambodia
by the Vietnamese troops. In Cambodia, Hanoi wants indeed
to supervise the distribution of food, take the supplies
for its soldiers, and prevent the aid from reaching
the refugee camps held by the Khmer Rouge unless the
new government in Phnom Penh is first recognized by
the international community. MSF’s campaign becomes
ideological as it associates well-known anti communist
Americans such as the president of the International
Rescue Committee, Leo Cherne. At the time, some MSF-France
volunteers in the Kao I Dang camp do not hide their
political opinions either, as Patrice Franceschi, who
will fight along with the Mujaheddin against the Soviets
in Afghanistan, or Philippe de Dieuleveult, who will
disappear in the Zaire River rapids. Nevertheless, MSF-France
tries not to encourage the armed struggle against the
Vietnamese occupation, and withdraws quite quickly from
refugee camps held by the Khmer Rouge, guilty of genocide,
thus limiting its action to other sites.
-1977, France: MSF signs a convention with HSF (Hôpital
sans frontières, Hospitals without borders),
an organisation which provides mobile medical units
often transported by the Transaals of the French Air
Force. Founded in 1976 by Tony de Graaff and Guy Barthélemy
with the support of the International Rotary, this association
first knows but failures in Lebanon, where it cannot
set up a hospital with the necessary authorisations
from all the concerned parties. In his book, Guy Barthélemy,
friend of Doctor Albert Schweitzer in the 1950s, explains
that HSF sends medical teams in 1979 in the Angolan
refugee camps in Sandoa in Southen Zaire and in the
Red Khmer refugee camps in Sakeo in Western Thailand.
The association then differs from MSF and shuts down
due to bankruptcy in 2002.
-May-November 1978, Eritrea: on the request of the
Eritrean Relief Association and with the logistical
support of the Christians from the Eritrean Red Cross
on the EPLF (Eritrean People’s Liberation Front)
side, and the Muslims from the Eritrean Red Crescent
on the ELF (Eritrean Liberation Front) side, MSF tries
to open a surgical mission amongst the secessionist
rebels who oppose Ethiopian rule. But its teams don’t
have access to civilians and can only help fighters,
those of the EPLF to the detriment of those of the ELF.
MSF-France decides to quit, leaving the material to
the medical team of the EPLF.
-1978-1982, France: MSF is presided until 1980 by Claude
Malhuret, a former member of the Unified Socialist Party
(Michel Rocard’s PSU), then until 1982 by Xavier
Emmanuelli who had been expelled from the Communist
Party for having supported the Algerian independence
fighters of the FLN (National Liberation Front). In
the meantime, MSF starts developing fundraising in order
to ensure its financial independence. After having benefited
from a free advertising campaign offered by the agency
Ecom International in 1977, the association from 1984
onwards uses marketing techniques to encourage the generosity
of the French public. According to Myriam Donsimoni,
the MSF’s resources are multiplied by 36 between
1978 and 1980. Yet MSF refuses to support advertising
campaigns with a miserable tone, and carefully controls
its communication policy, which at first had been delegated
to professional agencies and photographers, as in the
book published by Claude Malhuret and Xavier Emmanuelli
in 1982. According to Joelle Tanguy, Executive Director
of MSF-USA since 1994, the formidable growth of the
movement can also be explained by the multiplication
of refugee camps, its main fields of intervention. The
global refugee population doubles between 1976 and 1979,
and, once again, between 1979 and 1982.
-1979, France: Bernard Kouchner, who was for a while
the editor of L’Événement
(a weekly news magazine created in 1966 by Emmanuel
d’Astier de la Vigerie), wants to promote humanitarian
causes through the media; he leaves MSF, which refuses
to charter a cargo, l’Île de Lumière,
to rescue Vietnamese boat people in the China Sea. After
Malaysia decides on the 15th November of 1978 to close
its Hai Kong coast to a drifting coaster carrying 2,564
Vietnamese refugees, Bernard Kouchner creates the committee
Un bateau pour le Vietnam (“a boat for
Vietnam”) in October 1979 and manages to rally
to the project the most well known Parisian intellectuals
of the time, including archrivals Jean-Paul Sartre and
Raymond Aron. But in an article entitled Un bateau
pour Saint Germain des Prés (“a boat
for Saint Germain des Prés”) and published
in the Quotidien du Médecin (“Doctor’s
Daily”) on 4th December of 1979, Xavier Emmanuelli
accuses Bernard Kouchner of making an exhibition of
himself and of politicising the debate with a French
intelligentsia which had for too long refused to see
the dramatic exodus of refugees since the Communists
came to power in Vietnam in 1975. The operation above
all risks prompting other boat people to take the sea,
at the risk of dying in a shipwreck, a pirate attack,
or from lack of food. Moreover, the refugee camps are
already overcrowded, notably that of Songkhla in Southern
Thailand. Finally, a boat has little chance in seeking
out the fragile little crafts used by the Vietnamese
in the middle of the ocean. In fact the Île
de Lumière soon forgets its initial mission
and reconverts itself into a hospital-ship, following
the example set by its German equivalent, the Port
de Lumière, whose on-board consultations
necessitate difficult to-and-fros from the mainland
because the boat is to big to moor off the Anambas archipelago.
-1980, Belgium: MSF opens its first operational section
out of France after having refused in 1979 to establish
an office in the United States. The objective is to
consolidate the movement first in Europe, so that it
can not be taken over by the Americans. Other sections
will follow, in the Netherlands (Artsen Zonder Grenzen)
in 1984, in Spain (Médicos Sin Fronteras),
Switzerland and Luxembourg in 1986, in Great Britain
(Doctors Without Borders), Australia, the United
States and Germany (Ärzte Ohne Grenzen)
in 1991, in Japan (Kokkyonakiishidan) in 1992,
in Italy (Medici Senza Frontiere), in 1993,
in Denmark (Læger Unden Grænser)
in 1998, as well as in Norway (Leger Uten Grenser),
Sweden (Läkare Utan Gränser), etc.
The MSF movement will also launch an international office
in Brussels, in 1991, and a fundraising centre in Dubai,
in the United Arab Emirates, in 1995. The whole organisation
will develop on the basis of common ethical rules regarding
the impartiality of aid. Vigilant, the international
office of MSF, for instance, will suspend and win its
trial in Athens against the Greek section, whose president
Odysseus Boudouris had not hidden his support to the
Serbs under the pretext of denouncing NATO’s bombings
(North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) in Kosovo in 1999.
-1980-1984, Chad: while the combatants of Hissène
Habré and Goukuni Oueddeï fight for the
control of the capital city, MSF uses a Transall of
the French army to go to N’djamena in collaboration
with the military doctors of EMIR in April 1980. Defeated,
Goukouni Oueddeï flees to the north, where he forms
a transitional government of national unity, the GUNT,
with the support of the Libyan army. In January 1984,
two Belgian volunteers from MSF, Christian Delzenne
and Marie-Chantal Roekens, are abducted and detained
during two months by Goukouni Oueddeï’s men,
who accuse them of working for the government in N’djamena.
-Since 1980, Afghanistan: MSF is one of the first NGOs
to cross the Pakistani border illegally and to reach
areas where rebels are fighting against the Red Army’s
occupation troops. Its knowledge of the country earns
one of its directors, Juliette Fournot, to testify in
front of the American Congress on the 4th of March 1985.
In Afghanistan, however, MSF teams, who can only move
under the Mujaheddin’s supervision, have to rent
mules at a high price, employ the personnel imposed
on them by the fighting factions, respect the separation
of sexes and put up with numerous robberies. They are
held hostage several times by warlords who seize food
supplies and demand that their combatants be taken care
of in priority. In her autobiography, a MSF nurse, Claire
Constant, tells for instance how in January 1981 she
was held prisoner by Hadji Nader, the Turkmen leader
in Hazara controlled territory. When the city of Bamian
is taken, in 1988, the organisation’s medical
personnel is also attacked by the Mustazaffin, a small
pro Iranian party composed of both Sunnites and Shiites.
MSF decides to withdraw fully from the country after
the assassination, in April 1990, of one of its logistics
officers, Frédéric Galland, who was probably
the victim of conflicting interests between two commanders,
Yaftal-a-Payin and Yaftal-Bala, who contested Basir
Khaled’s leadership in Badakhshan. With the end
of the pro-Soviet government and the arrival of the
Mujaheddin in Kabul in April 1992, MSF comes back to
work in Afghanistan, whether in fighting areas or during
emergencies like the earthquake of Rostaq, which kills
more then 2,300 people in the North East on the 4th
of February 1998. Once Kabul has fallen to the Taliban
fundamentalists on the 26th of September 1996, the new
regime imposes a strict application of the Koranic law,
the Sharia, and attempts to separate men and women in
medical structures. On the 6th of September 1997, an
order by the minister of Health compels women to be
treated in only one hospital in Kabul, Rabia Balkhi,
which is not completely functional. After negotiations
with the ICRC and the NGOs, the Taliban allow women
into other hospitals, though genders there are still
separated. But in April 1998, the authorities, trying
to control the recruitment of local staff and to select
the beneficiaries of relief programmes, compel the international
NGOs to regroup in a district of Kabul where they will
be more easily watched over. MSF expatriates are eventually
expelled from the country on the 20th of July 1998,
as they refuse to accept an agreement signed between
the Taliban and the United Nations on the 14th of May,
which discriminates against women. The American bombings
against Ossama Bin Laden’s camps do not make things
easier, and in August, all the NGOs expatriates have
to be evacuated anyway. During the following months,
the humanitarian workers who have withdrawn to Pakistan
try to negotiate together their return into the country,
while attempting not to compromise their free access
to the beneficiaries nor the choice of their collaborators,
especially regarding women personnel. Yet MSF negotiates
with the Taliban alone, without using the United Nations
channels. It again withdraws after the American bombings
in October 2001, while a relative stabilisation of the
situation in 2002 allows expatriates to be dispatched
throughout Afghanistan until an ICRC delegate is shot
by Islamic fundamentalists in Tirin Khot, north of Kandahar
on the 27th of March 2003. For safety reasons, the expatriate
staff of MSF in this region is then sent back to Herat
and Kabul. And the organisation stops its programs when
two locals, a Belgian co-ordinator (Hélène
de Beir), a Dutch logistician (Willem Kwint) and a Norwegian
doctor (Egyl Tynaes) working for MSF-Holland are ambushed
and killed by bandits or Taliban in the Northwestern
province of Badghis on the 2th of June 2004. As the
criminals are not arrested, MSF pulls out from the country
in August.
-February 1981, Iran: after an interview with ayatollah
Ruhollâh Khomeyni, who wishes to resume diplomatic
relationship with France through MSF, the organisation
refuses to be embedded in the Iranian army to take care
of soldiers wounded in the war against Iraq.
-April-December 1981, Turkey: two MSF-France volunteers,
Luc Devineau and Manaïck Lanternier, are accused
of helping Kurdish rebels. They are imprisoned for eight
months before being released after diplomatic pressures
on General Kenan Evren’s junta in power in Ankara.
-1982-1994, France: MSF’s new president is Rony
Brauman, a former Maoist militant of the Proletarian
Left Group in May 1968. The humanitarian vocation of
the organisation transcends political differences. MSF’s
vice-president is Alain Dubos, a royalist and a Tunisia-born
Frenchman expelled from Tunis in 1961 and a former member
of the OAS (Organisation of the Secret Army), which
opposed independence in Algeria in 1962. As for Alain
Destexhe, the general secretary of the international
MSF office from 1991 onwards, he belongs to the Liberal
Party (PRL) then the Reform Movement (MR) and is elected
at the Belgian Senate in 1995.
-From 1983, Angola: in Luanda, the MPLA (People’s
Movement for the Liberation of Angola) does not want
MSF to operate in areas under its control. The hostility
of the government, backed by the USSR, is probably due
to the organisation’s presence on the Mujaheddin’s
side against the Red Army in Afghanistan. So MSF works
underground among the UNITA (Union for a Total Independence
of Angola) rebels, who receive some support from Washington
and Pretoria’s racist regime. Described as “new
Right humanitarians” by researchers like David
Sogge, MSF teams are suspected to back the guerilla
while their chairman, Rony Brauman, is quoted in the
Economist Development Report of July 1984 as
having said that UNITA had built “the most impressive
village public health programme in black Africa”.
During several years, the relations between MSF and
the government in Luanda thus remain very tense, even
when the organisation is eventually allowed to work
from the capital city. In June 2002, two months after
the signature of a cease-fire with UNITA, MSF denounces
the MPLA’s war strategy, which forbids humanitarian
aid to starving areas controlled by the opposition.
The MPLA considers expelling the organisation and the
UN, criticised for the lack of response of the international
community and the slow progress of the World Food Programme,
complains about MSF’s “arrogance”.
The organisation, which stays in Angola, is confronted
with many difficulties. On the 29th of November 2002,
for instance, a child and six Angolan employees are
killed by a landmine on the road between Cunjamba and
Mavinga, to the south east of the country.
-1984-1985, Guatemala: MSF-France is expelled, officially
for “safety reasons”; French doctors return
to the country one year later.
-1984-1995, Mozambique: MSF-France works in a country
torn-apart by a civil war since it became independent
in 1975. The marxist Frelimo (Frente de Libertação
de Mozambique) government in Maputo forbids humanitarian
aid in the areas controlled by the Renamo guerrilla,
which is supported by the apartheid regime in Pretoria.
Unlike the authorities, who denounce an external aggression
by South Africa, MSF speaks about a civil war and is
thus perceived as a rightist organisation. Relations
are all the more difficult with the Mozambican government
because a MSF doctor, Bernard Pécoul, writes
in a Lancet article that "the food is largely blocked
in the port of Maputo", this just when the United
States Embassy claims that half the humanitarian aid
is hijacked and does not reach the victims of the conflict.
In a report released in March 1991, moreover, the organisation
accuses the Mozambican army of diverting relief and
forcing the civilians to gather near the garrisons to
serve as human shields against the guerrilla. After
the signature of peace agreements in Rome in December
1992, MSF-France leaves Mozambique in 1995.
-From April 1984, Ethiopia: MSF-France denounces the
deportations Colonel Mengistu Hailé Mariam’s
junta is undertaking in order to empty the north of
the country and to deprive the guerrillas from the peasants’
support. The French doctors witness the arson of Ibnet
camp, in March 1985, where there were 50,000 displaced
people, and the forced evacuations of Korem in December
1984, then in October 1985. MSF-France also condemns
the use of humanitarian logistics to transfer people
to the south: instead of carrying food to starving areas,
trucks are requisitioned to deport farmers from the
north. Disowned by MSF-Belgium, MSF-France is expelled
in December 1985; its belongings are seized by the dictatorship
or left to Save the Children. But as a consequence,
Europe and the United States decide to make further
aid conditional on the discontinuance of forced population
transfers and, thus pressured, the Ethiopian government
announces in 1986 that it will cease its resettlement
programs. After the regime falls in 1991, MSF comes
back to Ethiopia when a border war against Eritrea begins
in 1999. The working conditions remain difficult and
the organisation suspends its activities in the Somali
region of the Ogaden when a driver is killed and an
expatriate injured during an armed attack on the road
between Jijiga and Degah Bur on February 7th 2000. In
May 2003, the movement criticises once again the government
for the way it transfers, without any preparation, 15,000
people who had fled the drought and who, expelled from
the Shewe camp, are left alone in Bidre, in the Bale
region. With MSF-Holland in November, the warning also
concerns the Amhara region where the authorities want
to resettle two million people during the next three
years. The protest happens when a controversy opposes
the organisation and Addis-Ababa about a new and more
expensive malaria treatment. During a press conference
on the 23rd of December 2003, Health Minister Kebede
Tadesse thus denounces MSF “charlatans masquerading
as the sole agents of medical and scientific knowledge”.
Yet in July 2004, the Ethiopian Government changes its
drug policy and raises money with the United Nations
to buy the medicines introduced by MSF, which are more
effective.
-1985-1994, Salvador: MSF-France is briefly expulsed
in March 1985 but returns shortly afterwards. The association
is closely watched by the army. Four of its volunteers
are arrested on 3rd March of 1986, interrogated blindfolded
and held in secret before being released three days
later. In November 1989, again, the authorities ban
MSF-France from accessing the regions held by the guerrilla,
who has just led an important offensive against the
governmental troops. In 1994 the association finally
decides to close its mission in Salvador, the peace
negotiations being well underway.
-1985-1989, France: as its public utility is recognized
in June 1985, MSF creates, with Professor Emmanuel Le
Roy Ladurie and the writer Jean-François Revel,
a Libertés sans frontières Foundation
(“Liberties Without Borders”) to inform
against third world dictatorships, including Marxist
regimes. This initiative is modelled on the right-wing
Heritage Foundation, which financed Ronald Reagan’s
campaign in the US, and is condemned by MSF-Belgium,
which sues the head office in Paris and is allowed to
keep its name. The Libertés sans frontières
Foundation, presided by Claude Malhuret, is dissolved
in April 1989. It is then replaced by a more neutral
Foundation which takes the name of “Médecins
sans frontières” and which after being
recognised as of public utility in 1991 acquires a research
centre in 1995.
-March 1986, France: a member of the Parti Républicain,
Claude Malhuret quits MSF to become a secretary of state
in charge of human rights in Jacques Chirac’s
government. He takes in Jean-Christophe Rufin as an
advisor, and manages to have the French ambassador in
Addis-Ababa, José Paoli, leave Ethiopia. José
Paoli had denigrated MSF when the organisation had been
expelled by Colonel Mengistu Hailé Mariam’s
junta at the end of 1985. According to Olivier Weber,
a journalist at Le Point, Claude Malhuret considers
resigning because of his disagreement with the minister
of Home Affairs, Charles Pasqua, whose anti-riot police
provoked the death of a student, Malik Oussekine, during
a demonstration in Paris in December 1986. Claude Malhuret
will then become Vichy’s mayor and Member of Parliament.
-From 1987, France: following MDM, MSF starts a medical
mission in France. In 1999, the association takes part,
along with MDM, in the implementation of the law on
a universal medical cover.
-Since 1987, Somalia: while the President Siyad Barre
is more and more weakened by the armed opposition movements,
ten MSF employees are kidnapped in 1987 and taken to
Ethiopia before being released two weeks later. The
collapse of the regime and the departure of the dictator
in January 1991 do not end the conflict and many NGOs
leave Mogadishu. With the ICRC, MSF is one of the only
humanitarian organisations to carry on its programmes.
The security conditions keep deteriorating. In Mogadishu,
in particular, the association is regularly the victim
of robberies and when threatened with violence has to
reemploy a Somali previously dismissed for unlawful
behaviour. After the assassination of another local
employee, killed by criminals who wanted to take his
vehicle in August 1991, MSF-France decides to have armed
escorts. In 1991, the association thus pays out the
equivalent of $ 400,000 to Osman Ali “Ato”,
the right-hand man of one of the main warlords in the
capital. In April 1993, MSF-France quits Mogadishu;
at the same time the peace operation led by the United
Nations Mission in Somalia (UNOSOM) is in full swing.
MSF-Holland also withdraws from Baidoa on May 4th 1993.
Criticised for not having consulted other NGOs, the
association explains its departure in a book published
four months later by Rony Brauman: alongside the problem
of the protection racket by the fighters, the famine
of August 1992 in Baidoa had been stopped, the militarization
of relief aid was becoming problematic and the American
GIs’ arrival had caused a dangerous xenophobic
reaction towards foreign aid workers. The association
nevertheless continues its programmes in other regions
of the country and one of its doctors is murdered in
1997. In Puntland in the North-East of the country in
May 2002, MSF-France is in fact the only NGO to remain
in the midst of the fighting in Bosaso, when Colonel
Abdullah Yussuf takes control of the town. In the Lower
Juba region, in the South, the association also works
in difficult conditions: not only because of insecurity,
but also because of the need to permanently negotiate
with neighbouring Kenya, which wants to prevent an extension
of the fighting and which, for that reason, bans all
flights towards Somalia on June 20th 2003, thus compelling
MSF to protest and get a partial lift of the embargo
two weeks later.
-November 1988, Honduras: MSF-France withdraws from
Salvadorian refugee camps, where it started to work
after 1980 and which are used as supply bases by the
FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front). People
in the camps had gone on a hunger strike to demand more
assistance, though they had higher standards of living
than the locals. As a matter of fact, food surpluses
were sent to the FMLN in El Salvador. Political neutrality
was difficult to maintain. One of MSF-France doctors,
a Spanish woman, had been killed by the governmental
troops in El Salvador, where she had gone illegally
to help the FMLN. Meanwhile, the medical authorities
of Honduras had also used MSF-France cars to indoctrinate
and turn the Nicaraguan refugees against the Sandinistas.
-December 1988, Armenia: for the first time, MSF is
allowed by the USSR to go and rescue the victims of
an earthquake that made 20,000 casualties.
-March 1989, Yemen: MSF briefly intervenes after floods
and uses the relief items sent by a French military
plane and the Emergency Cell of the ministry of Foreign
Affairs in Paris.
-June 1989, China: because of the refusal of the authorities
in Peking, MSF can’t start a relief operation
to help the victims of the repression of the demonstrations
in Tien-an-men Square. But in July 1991, the organisation
is allowed to send medical teams during floods in Anhui,
Jiangsu, Hubei and Henan provinces.
-Since December 1989, Sudan: MSF-France leaves the
country after the death of two volunteers in a plane
of Aviation sans frontières shot by
the rebels or the governmental troops who want to eliminate
embarrassing witnesses. In November 1994, MSF-France
is then expelled from areas controlled by the SPLA (Sudan
People’s Liberation Army) after satellite pictures
of the guerrilla’s positions had been negotiated
with the Sudanese government by the minister of Home
Affairs in Paris, Charles Pasqua, in exchange for the
extradition of the terrorist Illitch Ramirez Sanchez,
aka Carlos. In July 1998 in the Western Upper Nile province,
MSF-Holland has also to pull out from the hospital in
Ler, which is attacked and looted by the SSUM (South
Sudan United Movement), Paulino Matiep’s governement
forces. In January 1999, another MSF-Holland hospital,
Kajo-Keijii in Equatoria, is bombed by the army. On
the 21st of August 2001, again, the SSUM kidnaps injured
combatants who were treated in MSF-France’s clinic
in Bentiu after they escaped from the guerrilla. On
the 9th of February 2002, a MSF-Holland nurse, James
Koang Mar, is also killed during the bombing of Nimne,
a center for displaced persons in Western Upper Nile.
Generally speaking, fights compel to stop humanitarian
programmes frequently, as did the teams from the Dutch
section of MSF in Thonyor and Dablual, to the south
of Ler in January 2003. Aid is often diverted within
Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), which organises humanitarian
interventions under the supervision of the governement,
and MSF-France decided to pull out from this framework
after the 1998 famine, when relief never reached the
victims.
-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.
-October 1991-October 1992, 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.
-January 2000, Equatorial Guinea: MSF-France stops
its operations as denounces the “cupidity”
of the government, which hinders the efforts of humanitarian
agencies.
-February 2000, Madagascar: MSF-France withdraws from
the Toliara province, and publicly accuses the authorities
of impeding assistance to the victims of a cholera epidemic.
-July 2000, Colombia: MSF closes a medical programme
in the Choco province after the abduction of a volunteer,
released six months later.
-From January 2001, Russia: an MSF volunteer, Kenny
Gluck, is abducted in Chechnya, where combatants are
fighting for independence against Moscow’s troops.
The increasing number of kidnappings and rackets leads
MSF-France to withdraw, leaving a clear field to the
Russian soldiers who are responsible for many abuses,
and who want to get rid of embarrassing witnesses. MSF
comes back to Chechnya in May 2002. But in August 2002,
it has to withdraw again from Chechnya, Ingushya and
Daguistan, where Nina Davydovitch, the person in charge
of the Russian NGO Druzha, and Arjan Erkel,
the Dutchman leading the MSF-Switzerland’s mission
in Makhachkala, have been abducted (both will be released
later, Arjan Erkel in April 2004). In a report made
public on the 6th of May 2003 in Moscow, the organization
denounces the Russian policy consisting in the forced
repatriation of the Chechen refugees in Ingushya. By
forbidding to build houses in the Ingushyan camps, Vladimir
Poutine’s government wishes to control humanitarian
aid and to attract refugees back to the Chechen Republic,
which is officially “pacified” by force.
MSF’s relations with Moscow become very difficult
and, on the 30th of September 2003, the movement’s
Belgian section must put an end to its programmes against
tuberculosis in Siberian prisons: the Health ministry
had refused to allow the use of special treatments,
though these were recommended by the WHO (World Health
Organisation).
-April 2004, Italy: on Lampedusa Island, the authorities
compel MSF to stop its programme in the warehousing
where illegal African immigrants are detained.
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