When pollsters recently asked French people what their dream profession is, the most prevalent answer (32 percent) was to be a medic with Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, Doctors without Borders), a French group that dispatches medical teams to world trouble spots to dispense health care in epidemics, civil wars, and natural catastrophes.
This surprising poll result shows how much MSF's doctors, nurses, and paramedics have stirred the French imagination since the organization was founded almost twenty years ago. The group was born of a frustration with diplomatic constraints on international agencies and groups, like the Red Cross, to work only with the permission of governments and to keep quiet about officially sanctioned atrocities.
Since then, MSF volunteers have paid a price for trying to save populations from hunger, thirst, disease, and the murderous intentions of dictatorships. Volunteers have been shot at, kidnapped, jailed, and injured, and some have been killed in accidents on Third World mountain roads.
French show business personalities like film actor Jean-Paul Belmondo have sponsored MSF fundraising campaigns. A series of six 90-minute television films with top actors dramatized MSF-style operations in Biafra, Burma, Lebanon, El Salvador, Afghanistan, and the South China Sea (to rescue Vietnamese boat people). The cause has become so popular that the French distributor of Kellogg's Foods is preparing its third annual promotion of MSF on boxes of cornflakes.
To go where others don't go
With the slogans "To go where others don't go" and "To bear witness," MSF gave birth to a new philosophy of humanitarian aid and human rights, Sans-Frontierisme (Without-borderism). The idea is that there is a duty, based on a "higher" law, to publicize and assist peoples in danger of death, whether their governments approve or not.
Sans-Frontierisme has spread beyond MSF to become a movement as well as an organization. Dozens of other Third World aid and witness groups have been created in France with Sans-Frontieres in their titles, such as Reporters, Veterinarians, Pilots, Architects, and Farmers. MSF itself spun off Libertes Sans Frontieres to reflect, publish, and conduct public debates on the link between fundamental freedoms and Third World development.
With an annual budget of $32 million (about 60 percent contributed by private individuals and 40 percent by contracts with international organizations like the World Health Organization and the European Community), MSF sends out about 800 medical volunteers a year to thirty countries. Two smaller French sister groups, Medecins Du Monde and Aide Medicale International, send out another 400 volunteers.
Autonomous MSF branches have also spread through Western Europe to Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Spain, and Switzerland. Others are being formed in Greece, Italy, and Portugal. The largest, with 350 field volunteers yearly, is in Belgium, whose government allows young doctors to fulfill their military service obligations with MSF. Former English MSF volunteers are forming a new British MSF-style group, Health
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