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2. Origins, Schisms, Crises
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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CHAPTER TWO Origins, Schisms, Crises The roots of Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders extend back to the passionate debates of left-wing French intellectuals after World War II, and to the moral anguish and indignation of young physicians from that milieu serving with the International Red Cross during the Nigerian civil war of the late 1960s. Following the liberation of France in 1944 from its occupation by Nazi Germany, “for a period of about twelve years . . . the issue of communism—its practice, its meaning, its claims upon the future—dominated political and philosophical conversation” among the French intelligentsia, the historian Tony Judt writes: The terms of public discussion were shaped by the position one adopted on the behavior of foreign and domestic Communists, and most of the problems of contemporary France were analyzed in terms of a political or ethical position taken with half an eye towards that of Communists and their ideology. . . . The Vichy interlude had served to delegitimize the intellectuals of the Right . . . , while the experience of war and resistance had radicalized the language, if not the practices, of the Left.1 44 Growing Pains “The prestige of the Soviet Union and the French Communist Party was enormous among the French intelligentsia, who were attracted both by the rationalist element in Marxism—the vision of progress and the explanation of history —and by its appeal to faith—the triumph of the oppressed,” the polymath social scientist Stanley Hoffmann has commented.2 In the mid-1950s, two sets of events precipitated a shift away from this engagement with European Communism and radicalism. On the one hand, there was the death of Joseph Stalin and the disillusioning impact of Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” denouncing Stalin and the failings and crimes of Stalinism at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. On the other, there was the accelerating wave of anticolonial movements and decolonization engulfing Africa,3 Asia, and Latin America, which brought in their wake a new preoccupation with the so-called Third World. In the late 1960s, a post-Stalinist “New Left” movement led by middle-class student youth emerged on the French intellectual scene. Its conception of alienation, liberation, and revolution extended to the Third World, whose political leaders it heroized as true revolutionaries. The movement reached its climax in the May 1968 student uprisings in French universities and the accompanying nationwide general strike of French workers. Enter Médecins Sans Frontières The thirteen young Frenchmen (physicians and several medical journalists)4 who founded Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) on December 22, 1971, were “inheritors ” of this history, as Xavier Emmanuelli, one of its “founding fathers,” eloquently testified: [W]e were descendants of the ranks of the idealistic Left. Students in medicine, sons of medical families, medicine for us was already idealized; but above all, we had as reference the great antifascist struggles, the heroes of the Resistance, and we grew up in the wake and the mythology of the world war. We had masters, struggles, landmarks. [Moreover,] the French have always considered an adventure in Africa as educational , and . . . still have a secret emotional esteem for the continent. We had a colonial past.5 At the beginning of the 1960s, I was young, and I wanted a destiny. [34.203.242.200] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:40 GMT) Origins, Schisms, Crises 45 I was filled with the epic of this century. I ardently wanted to become a son of the adventure, a navigator of the tragic, and to face the blaze of revolution. But I was only a medical student. . . . It seemed to me essential to belong to the race of rebels, of those who had struggled to change the world, and it was completely natural that when my classmates approached me, I joined the Communist Party.6 A key element in MSF’s historically grounded myth of origin portrays its original members as a small group of young “French doctors,” working as volunteers for the French branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross during the Nigerian civil war of 1967–1970, in the seceded southern province of Biafra, whose inhabitants were primarily of Igbo tribal origins. These physicians blamed the famine-stricken plight of the Igbos that they had seen firsthand on the “genocidal” intentions of the Nigerian government in blocking the distribution of food to them.7 They wanted to denounce the government publicly, but they were constrained from...