Doctors Without Borders: Humanitarian Quests, Impossible Dreams of Médecins Sans Frontières

4. MSF Greece Ostracized

CHAPTER FOUR MSF Greece Ostracized To: All The Foreign Media Correspondents Invitation to Press Conference MSF Greece: Problematic Concerning The Humanitarian Movement Oslo, 6 December 1999. The recent expulsion of Doctors Without Borders /MSF Greece from the International Council of the organization because of their decision to provide humanitarian assistance towards the victims of both sides of the Kosovo crisis, did not leave the whole movement untouched [sic]. The forthcoming Nobel Peace Prize nomination to MSF is a great honor and reward for thousands of volunteers and millions of donors who support the activities of the organization worldwide. The contribution of MSF Greece—with their 10 years of active involvement , the commitment and action of more than 200 volunteers and the support of their 100,000 individual donors—in the award of the Nobel Prize is already well recognized, although the International Office has decided not to invite MSF Greece to the nomination ceremony. Moreover, MSF Greece seizes the 74 Growing Pains opportunity to raise issues concerning [the] problematic not only within MSF but also in the whole humanitarian movement. This problematic will be the main point of discussion with you during the Press conference which will be held Friday 10 December 1999, at 9:00 a.m., at the Norwegian International Press Centre (“Saga” room), Vestbannenplassen, near the Town Hall. With this announcement, the Greek section of MSF invited members of the international press to attend a conference about an internal crisis roiling MSF. The conference—which was presided over by the president of MSF Greece, Odysseas Boudouris, its honorary president, Sotiris Papaspyropoulos, its vice president, Demetrios Pyrros, and the Greek writer Antonis Samarakis, described in the announcement, composed in English, as MSF Greece’s “Spiritual [i.e., intellectual] Ambassador”—took place in Oslo, Norway, close to its Town Hall where, only a few hours later, MSF was to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. MSF Greece had triggered this crisis on May 7, 1999, when it sent a convoy of MSF vehicles carrying medical supplies, and allegedly flying Greek flags, into Kosovo, in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, where they delivered these supplies to the Pristina Hospital. This had occurred in the midst of a war in Kosovo between ethnic Albanians fighting for their autonomy and Serbian forces fighting to hold on to the province. Police, militia, and soldiers of the regime of Slobodan Milošević, president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, were conducting a campaign of forced migration and terror against Albanians. Simultaneously, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was bombing military positions in Kosovo and Serbia to “prevent a humanitarian disaster” and assert “humanitarian values.” This expulsion of the Greek section was a unique event in MSF’s history. It took eight years of critical and self-critical analysis, debate, and negotiation before MSF Greece was reintegrated into the MSF movement in mid-January 2007. Its singularity notwithstanding, this MSF Greece episode—its origins, the different ways in which it was perceived and understood by Greek and by non-Greek members of MSF, and MSF’s action in response to it—is relevant to recurrent MSF challenges in organization, governance, decision-making, and the implementation of its operational and humanitarian principles. The Greek controversy sheds light on some of the cultural and organizational difficulties of fulfilling international and transnational precepts—even for a movement like MSF, whose foundation is based on a “without borders” vision—and of MSF Greece Ostracized 75 upholding principles of “neutrality” and “impartiality” in the midst of a conflagration like the Kosovo War. The History of MSF Greece in MSF The “unilateral” MSF Greece mission into Kosovo had historical roots in the Greek section’s relationship to other MSF sections and to the movement as a whole. In 1990, a small group of Greek physicians petitioned MSF France to create a Greek section. At a meeting of MSF’s International Council on October 11–12, 1990, all agreed to establish it as a “section in the process of construction ” (section en voie de construction) to function under the sponsorship (parrainage) of MSF France. MSF Greece would remain under the supervision of MSF France—its “mother-section”—until it had reached a number of objectives indicating its “maturity.” By 1994, although MSF Greece admitted that it still had some “points of weakness” with regard to the training and technical competence of its members , it not only considered itself to have...