Elliott Leyton - Touched By Fire: Doctors Without Borders in a Third World Crisis

ALSO BY ELLIOTT LEYTON

The Compact (ed.)

The One Blood

Bureaucracy and World View (with Don Handelman)

Violence and Public Anxiety
(with William OGrady and James Overton)

Serial Murder (ed.)

Dying Hard

The Myth of Delinquency

Hunting Humans

Sole Survivor

Men of Blood

Text copyright 1998 by Elliott Leyton
Photographs 1998 by Greg Locke

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Leyton, Elliott, 1939
Touched by fire : Doctors Without Borders in a third world crisis

Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-7710-5305-3
eBook ISBN: 978-1-55199-589-2

1. Doctors Without Borders (Association). 2. Genocide Rwanda History 20th century. 3. Rwanda History Civil War, 1994 Medical care. I. Locke, Greg. II. Title.

DT 450 435. L 49 1998 967.57104 C 98-930203-2

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

McClelland & Stewart Inc.
The Canadian Publishers
75 Sherbourne Street,
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9

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Why do the front-line medical, nursing, and support personnel in international aid agencies take such astonishing personal risks in their emergency work in the Third World? Do humanitarian organizations deserve the billions of dollars they receive each year from the industrialized world? Does this vast expenditure offer any significant return, either to the intended beneficiaries or to the donors? As the first sustained inside look at the humanitarian industrys most illustrious emergency medical teams Doctors Without Borders this book struggles to answer these questions.

The idea for this volume and the art exhibit that both parallels and complements it germinated during idle conversations between a photographer, an anthropologist, and an artist. Each brought to the discussions a distinctive background and perspective: Greg Locke, a seasoned international photo-journalist at ease in the Third World; Elliott Leyton, an academic specialist in human aggression; and Bonnie Leyton, a well-known Newfoundland artist.

Our proposal to examine the motivations, dilemmas, risks, and achievements of these emergency medical teams did not become reality until we were given the status of unpaid temporary staff members with Doctors Without Borders (better known to the rest of the world as Mdecins Sans Frontires or, more simply, MSF ). In the process, we became a small part of the effort that was about to be launched to meet Rwandas post-genocidal refugee crisis. We arrived in Rwanda in November 1996 just as the murderous Interhamwe militia, licking its wounds in neighbouring Zaire after its resounding defeat in 199495, fell back under increased military pressure from the Rwandan government and its Zairean allies and allowed hundreds of thousands of displaced Rwandans from the separate Tutsi and Hutu diasporas to flood back into Rwanda. Simultaneously, Zaire which had given shelter to so many Interhamwe killers and warlords descended even further into anarchy and eventual collapse.

This was a potentially dangerous situation for everyone, but we were very lucky. We left Rwanda with only a hand grenade thrown as a warning into the garden behind our tent in Gisenyi (an avertissement, said the French radio operator, Balzac, signalling with characteristic foresight the brutality that was to come); an ignored body of a dead boy on the road below the MSF teams house; and heavy anti-aircraft fire at the circling American reconnaissance airplane overhead. Locke endured more than our simple anxiety: he walked twenty kilometres through the baking Zairean countryside in one day to find and follow MSF workers; and he contracted malaria in the flooded and mosquito-infested refugee camps on the Somalia-Kenya border.

Yet it was only weeks after we left Rwanda that Interhamwe death squads having tried but failed to breach the gates of our MSF house burst into an adjacent medical compound and murdered three unarmed Spanish Mdicos del Mundo medical workers and three Rwandan soldiers, as well as dozens of civilians. Many more Interhamwe massacres of Tutsi refugees, clergy, and children were to follow with Tutsi children being separated from their Hutu schoolmates and then shot dead in the classroom.

Even before this trip, Bonnie Leyton and Greg Locke shared the modern and civilized sensibility that an encounter with other societies is inherently enriching and ennobling even intoxicating. This was never the case with Elliott Leyton, who insisted that exotic travel was merely a dumb rehearsal and reprise of the imperial spirit, and the humanitarian industry was a kind of glamorous make-work scheme for the First Worlds middle classes. We all had much to learn from one another in that autumn of 1996 as we orbited through Central Africa in our claustrophobic MSF capsule.

One of the many things that held us together was our admiration for what would be the model for this book John Berger and Jean Mohrs A Seventh Man, a symphony of text and photographs that we emulated in this bloodier locale. We wish therefore to emphasize that this book is the product of a

No one who works with MSF survives the experience emotionally or financially unscathed. Elliott Leyton is therefore especially grateful (as is Greg Locke) to McClelland & Stewart, his Canadian publishers for a quarter-century notably Douglas Gibson and Jonathan Webb not only for the grave concerns they expressed about our safety, but also for the advance that was offered when our finances were in their most perilous state. In addition, Memorial Universitys Office of Research awarded Elliott Leyton a grant from its Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council fund; while Terrence Murphy, Ronald Schwartz, and Ben Chapman offered many kindnesses. Both Greg Locke and Bonnie Leyton wish to acknowledge the assistance of Ann Anderson, the Canada/Newfoundland Agreement on Economic Renewal, and the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council. Locke also wishes to thank Sue Hammond, Ann Locke, and Fred Locke.

Most of all, we are indebted to on-the-ground MSF personnel in Kenya, Canada, Rwanda, Somalia, Zaire, and the Netherlands. It is true that the mentality of many MSF press officers and bureaucrats seemed indistinguishable from their cynical and manipulative counterparts in any bureaucratic sector whether corporate, government, media, or university. Yet the medical workers and support staff in the field were the most splendid group of big-hearted and monomaniacal, introverted and sanctimonious, cosmopolitan and disputatious, socially awkward and self-critical, dogmatic and courageous characters we have ever encountered. It would be invidious to single out individuals by name, and tedious to list them all, but they surely know who they are.