Shane Hillary J.

See AB Polsci-4A
Doctors without Borders/ Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF)
History
Amid the Parisian upheavals of May 1968, a group of young doctors decided to go and help
victims of wars and major disasters. They were known as the Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF),
known internationally in English as Doctors without Borders.
MSF was officially created on December 22, 1971. At the time, 300 volunteers made up mainly
of doctors, nurses, and other staff, including the 13 founding doctors and journalists.

Purpose
“Our purpose is to limit the devastations of war”

Mission Statement
 All people deserve or have the right to medical care.
 Medicine must remain neutral towards politics, race, religion, and the other beliefs of a
person.

Goals
 Provide Medical Care to all who need it.

 Follow the oath of doctor.

 Be indiscriminate about giving medical.

Nobel Peace Prize

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
in 1999. The judges chose MSF “in recognition of the organization’s pioneering humanitarian
work on several continents” and to honor our medical staff, who have worked in more than 80
countries and treated tens of millions of people.

The Big Dilemma

Docctors Without Borders was only six years old in 1977 when one of its physicians first broke
the organization’s rules against taking sides or bearing witness by denouncing Cambodia’s
Khmer Rouge for exterminating its people.
Here was the humanitarian’s dilemma: Do you keep your mouth shut so you can help the
victims? Or do you denounce the abusers and lose access to those who need you most?

For 40 years, the organization, which has been awarded the Nobel Prize for its courageous work
in war zones and in places devastated by catastrophes, has tried to have it both ways. At first,
the choices were fairly easy. Because 90 percent of the world’s displaced people were fleeing
militant socialist governments, relief groups during the cold war shared the same ideological
agenda as the Western democracies in which they were based.

When the Soviet Union fell, it was seen “as a fantastic opportunity” to crusade for human
rights, says Fabrice Weissman, research director of the MSF Foundation (the organization is
known by the initials of its French name, Médicins Sans Frontières). But then the politics got
muddier. “Aid came to be considered not as humanitarian relief, but to serve a political agenda
in nation-building projects,” Weissman says. As MSF tried to steer a neutral course, it found
that “one side thinks of you as leftist hippies,” while “the other thinks of you as colonial
imperialists.” In 2004, MSF left Afghanistan after five of its aid workers were murdered,
ostensibly by the Taliban. The killers had been identified, but the government did nothing to
prosecute them.