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

3. “Nobel or Rebel?”

CHAPTER THREE “Nobel or Rebel?” On October 15, 1999, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced its decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 1999 to Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders “in recognition of the organization’s pioneering humanitarian work on several continents.” “Since its foundation in the early 1970s,” the committee’s statement continued, “Doctors Without Borders has adhered to the fundamental principle that all disaster victims, whether the disaster is natural or human in origin, have a right to professional assistance, given as quickly and efficiently as possible”: National boundaries and political circumstances or sympathies must have no influence on who is to receive humanitarian help. By maintaining a high degree of independence, the organization has succeeded in living up to these ideals. By intervening so rapidly, Doctors Without Borders calls public attention to humanitarian catastrophes, and by pointing to the causes of such catastrophes, the organization helps to form bodies of public opinion opposed to violations and abuses of power. 60 Growing Pains In critical situations, marked by violence and brutality, the humanitarian work of Doctor Without Borders enables the organization to create openings for contacts between the opposed parties. At the same time, each fearless and selfsacrificing helper shows each victim a human face, stands for respect for that person’s dignity, and is a source of hope for peace and reconciliation. Although MSF had been nominated for the Nobel Prize many times, and had been considered a runner-up on numerous past occasions, its members reacted to this announcement with collective astonishment, followed by an outburst of celebration. “Staff sang and danced in the hallways” of MSF’s Paris office, and others rushed out to buy crates of champagne.”1 In all the other national offices of MSF’s nineteen sections, and at its hundreds of field projects in more than eighty countries—with some cultural variation—“the scene was [much] the same.”2 In Tokyo, for example, as in Paris, members of the Japanese section of MSF “expressed surprise at the news saying, ‘I can’t believe it,’ and ‘Is that true?’ [and] then held a . . . celebration, toasting news of the award with sake and juice”3 —rather than with French champagne. However, this wave of excitement and jubilation was soon followed by disquietude and concern: The day of glory has arrived! It cannot be denied that it caused a warm glow of satisfaction. When the journalists broke the news on TV5, tears almost came to my eyes. A few telephone calls from the embassies, a few letters of congratulation from the UN, and there on the evening of 15 October, we were taking our place, somewhat with gritted teeth, in the Pantheon of Respectability. And then almost immediately I asked myself, why MSF?4 I know that this may cast a shadow over the joy of those MSFers who see the prize as a just reward. It is true that the prize warms your heart. But it is also true that the best way to silence a dissident is not to punish him but to reward him.”5 Today the borders which lie before us are not so much political and national; they are instead those of blind, criminal violence, and of medical exclusion. They radically reduce our capacity to intervene. And in order to face up to them, we must first tackle a third more insidious border, which is eating away at us from the inside, namely institutionalization.6 The Nobel Prize triggered a crisis of success inside MSF. The ensuing organization-wide stocktaking was deeply connected with MSF’s principles of “Nobel or Rebel?” 61 humanitarian action, its conception of itself as a movement, and its culture. This self-examination brought to the surface tensions among its national sections —particularly between MSF France and the others. MSF Debates Success On November 19, 1999, the board of directors of the Belgian section of MSF organized a debate at its Brussels headquarters on the theme “Nobel or Rebel: A Nobel Without a Cause?” The debate focused on why MSF had won the prize, whether MSF deserved it, and on the “dangers” of accepting it. The discussion was premised on MSF’s conception of itself as an actively engaged movement of “rebels” dedicated to a mission that was simultaneously medical, humanitarian , and moral. The notion of the “rebel” underlying it drew inspiration from Albert Camus’s conception of l’homme...