page_title: Médecins Sans Frontières
section_title: Rwanda
hierarchical_section_title: Médecins Sans Frontières / New leadership / Rwanda
caption_attribution_description: U.S. Navy aerial photograph of the Mihanda refugee camp taken on Dec. 2, 1996. DoD photo. ID 961202-N-0000O-002
context_page_description: Médecins Sans Frontières, sometimes rendered in English as Doctors Without Borders, is an international humanitarian medical non-governmental organisation of French origin best known for its projects in conflict zones and in countries affected by endemic diseases. In 2019, the group was active in 70 countries with over 35,000 personnel mostly local doctors, nurses and other medical professionals, logistical experts, water and sanitation engineers and administrators. Private donors provide about 90% of the organisation's funding, while corporate donations provide the rest, giving MSF an annual budget of approximately US$1.63 billion.
  Médecins Sans Frontières was founded in 1971, in the aftermath of the Biafra secession, by a small group of French doctors and journalists who sought to expand accessibility to medical care across national boundaries and irrespective of race, religion, creed or political affiliation. To that end, the organisation emphasises "independence and impartiality", and explicitly precludes political, economic, or religious factors in its decision making.
context_section_description: When the genocide in Rwanda began in April 1994, some delegates of MSF working in the country were incorporated into the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) medical team for protection. Both groups succeeded in keeping all main hospitals in Rwanda's capital Kigali operational throughout the main period of the genocide. MSF, together with several other aid organisations, had to leave the country in 1995, although many MSF and ICRC volunteers worked together under the ICRC's rules of engagement, which held that neutrality was of the utmost importance. These events led to a debate within the organisation about the concept of balancing neutrality of humanitarian aid workers against their witnessing role. As a result of its Rwanda mission, the position of MSF with respect to neutrality moved closer to that of the ICRC, a remarkable development in the light of the origin of the organisation.
  The ICRC lost 56 and MSF lost almost one hundred of their respective local staff in Rwanda, and MSF-France, which had chosen to evacuate its team from the country (the local staff were forced to stay), denounced the murders and demanded that a French military intervention stop the genocide. MSF-France introduced the slogan "One cannot stop a genocide with doctors" to the media, and the controversial Opération Turquoise followed less than one month later. This intervention directly or indirectly resulted in movements of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees to Zaire and Tanzania in what became known as the Great Lakes refugee crisis, and subsequent cholera epidemics, starvation and more mass killings in the large groups of civilians. MSF-France returned to the area and provided medical aid to refugees in Goma.
  At the time of the genocide, competition between the medical efforts of MSF, the ICRC, and other aid groups had reached an all-time high, but the conditions in Rwanda prompted a drastic change in the way humanitarian organisations approached aid missions. The Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief Programmes was created by the ICRC in 1994 to provide a framework for humanitarian missions and MSF is a signatory of this code. The code advocates the provision of humanitarian aid only, and groups are urged not to serve any political or religious interest, or be used as a tool for foreign governments. MSF has since still found it necessary to condemn the actions of governments, such as in Chechnya in 1999, but has not demanded another military intervention since then.
caption: Aerial photograph of a Mihanda, Zaire refugee camp in 1996. Pictured are 500+ tents set up in the Mitumba Mountains.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS4 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2010:07:05 15:12:16", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "7588", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1307", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "975"}