Humanitarian mandates, Central American refugee camps, and the Cold War
In the summer of 1988, refugee leaders in San Antonio, a small camp of about 1,500 Salvadoran refugees in Honduras, wrote to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to demand that Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) staff be withdrawn from the camp. MSF staff, the refugees claimed, were providing inadequate medical care, were overly restrictive with medicine, and were not operating in accordance with humanitarian values.
By August, matters had escalated, with refugees blocking MSF from entering all three Salvadoran refugee camps in Honduras. In one incident, an MSF team who attempted to enter San Antonio was ambushed by refugees. In what a UNHCR report described as a premeditated attack, refugees damaged the team’s vehicle, ultimately forcing them to abandon it and leave. As is clear from UNHCR and MSF reports, hunger strikes, mass protests against visiting UNHCR officials, and the refusal of those in San Antonio to allow sick refugees to be treated by MSF staff in the nearby village, all added to the severity of the situation. Refugees, meanwhile, took out advertisements in local newspapers denouncing MSF as an unhumanitarian organisation.
For its part, MSF leadership rejected as slanderous any suggestion of improper medical care, pointing to the fact that health indicators were stronger in the camps than amongst the wider Honduran population. One MSF report lamented the ‘over-medicalised’ nature of Central American society, in which patients were unhappy unless prescribed medicine. At the same time, although UNHCR officials supported MSF in its dispute with the Salvadoran refugees, its representative in Honduras expressed concerns that MSF rotated its staff out of Honduras too quickly and that many lacked adequate Spanish.
Attempts by the UNHCR to facilitate negotiations between MSF and refugee leaders failed. Shortly afterwards, MSF’s board voted to withdraw from the Salvadoran refugee programme. While MSF framed this decision as a morally righteous one, refugee leaders framed it as a victory for the refugee community.
On one level, the incident shows how refugees can shape the aid they receive, subverting the power dynamics between aid giver and recipient. The dispute was not, however, solely about medical care and was, in fact, deeply political. Beyond refugee agency, the case study demonstrates how, while global and regional politics can often constrain the actions of humanitarian workers, they also shape humanitarians’ very conceptualisation of their mandate.
To fully understand the refugee–MSF dispute, an understanding of 1980s Honduras is needed. The approximately 19,000 Salvadoran refugees in Honduras had fled from the unrelenting terror meted out by Salvadoran military and paramilitary forces as these state security forces, with Washington’s backing and assistance, waged an anti-communist war against the population and the leftist guerrilla groups, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). In the context of Cold War Central America, the Honduran government saw the Salvadoran refugees, with their presumed links to the FMLN, as subversive and threatening. As such, refugees were confined to closed camps guarded by the Honduran military which, on several occasions, attacked and killed refugees and relief workers.
International visitors from El Salvador solidarity organisations and church groups, among others, as well as many relief workers (including some within MSF) soon praised the Salvadoran camps for their high degree of organisation. UNHCR officials endorsed the camps as a model and many observers noted the seemingly democratic nature of the camps’ governance structures, which were run via a highly participatory committee structure. UNHCR officials also encouraged the development of the refugee community’s capacity for self-governance. With the assistance of Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and Caritas, refugees formed a highly collective society, launching literacy programmes, training as health workers, and working in the camps’ workshops. Meanwhile, many refugees saw the camps as more than places of refuge, instead viewing them as spaces from which to contribute to the FMLN’s struggle, whether by giving testimony to journalists and solidarity activists of Salvadoran military atrocities, or by smuggling food and other supplies across the border to El Salvador.
Seeking to cut off FMLN supply routes, the Ronald Reagan administration sent State Department consultant Robert Gersony to Honduras to investigate the refugee camps’ links to the organisation. Yet instead of expressing concern over cross-border movements, Gersony’s main preoccupation was with the human rights situation within the camps, particularly Colomoncagua, home to about 8,000 refugees. Refugee leaders, Gersony claimed, ran Colomoncagua in a ‘Khmer Rouge’ style, stifling dissent and even executing those who refused to conform to their demands.
This was a view very much shared by Rony Brauman, then MSF President. Indeed, aware that Gersony was a functionary of the US State Department, Colomoncagua’s refugees refused to be interviewed by him. As a result, his report was largely based on interviews conducted with relief staff in Honduras. Notably, the Khmer Rouge analogy was used not just by Gersony, but also by Brauman. As Brauman later recalled, the increasingly authoritarian refugee leaders sought to strip MSF of its independence and dignity.
Most relief staff , particularly from CRS and Caritas, but also some within MSF, did not, however, share this view. Rather, when UNHCR officials requested that staff from other aid agencies prevent refugees from expelling MSF, many refused. In fact, in one meeting with members of the International Council for Voluntary Agencies (ICVA) - an umbrella group to which MSF did not belong - representatives suggested that refugees should be free to choose who could, and could not, work in the camps. As a UNHCR report frustratedly noted, ICVA members saw MSF as a ‘lone rider’ and were unwilling to support it.
For their part, refugee complaints regarding the standard of MSF’s medical care belied deeper issues. In disputes with the UNHCR and the Honduran government, MSF leadership had been less supportive of the refugees’ position than other agencies. While other agencies had supported the refugees in their demands that the camps not be moved away from the Salvadoran border (something which would, by design, have made contributing to the FMLN’s campaign more difficult) MSF had not.
How best to understand such differences? Brauman’s Khmer Rouge comparison is instructive here. Convinced from experiences in Cambodia and Ethiopia that humanitarian agencies were often blind to the excesses of the Left, Brauman approached the situation as a self-avowed anti-communist. Contending that the refugees accused MSF of promoting bourgeois academic knowledge by guarding the doctors’ right to prescribe drugs, he compared the ideological situation in the camps to that in North Korea and Albania.
Yet in contrast to Brauman, many aid workers interpreted their humanitarian duty to mean standing in solidarity with refugees as an oppressed group. In the zero-sum logic of the Cold War, criticising the refugee leadership meant somehow endorsing the other side: the Salvadoran and Honduran militaries and, by extension, US policy in Central America. Here, too, wider issues were at play. Many of those siding most strongly with the refugees came from faith-based agencies, and Liberation Theology informed their interpretations of their mandate. Others, horrified at the brutality of the Salvadoran military’s campaign, so strongly identified with resistance to it that they found themselves unable to criticise refugee leaders, even at critical moments.
Notably, while UNHCR officials did share some of MSF’s concerns, they differed in their understanding of events. An ideological commitment to Marxism was, in Brauman’s view, at the heart of the refugee leadership’s behaviour. From his perspective, it was therefore unsurprising that refugee leaders displayed dictatorial tendencies. But senior UNHCR officials saw this as a one-sided interpretation. They attributed events not to ideology but to the impact of Honduran policy, which had forced the refugees to live in a closed camp environment for nearly a decade with no alternative solution in sight.
That such divisions took place in the context of the late 1980s is notable. A humanitarianism which prioritised individual refugee rights versus humanitarianism as an expression of solidarity chimes with the growth, at this stage, of human rights as a lens by which to view the world. Certainly, it speaks to Samuel Moyn’s description by which ‘Westerners left the dream of revolution behind’ and concentrated instead on an ‘internationalism revolving around individual rights’.[1] Yet, the position of MSF and that of other agencies were both products of the Cold War; one fell into Cold War binaries, seeing the FMLN as analogous to the Khmer Rouge, while the other saw public criticism of the refugee leadership as implicitly giving support to the Salvadoran Right and its backers.
This, of course, is just one snapshot of life within Salvadoran refugee camps during the 1980s. Notably, in oral history interviews with former refugees, many do not even recall the MSF dispute, instead fondly recalling some individual MSF staff. In contrast, the dispute is vividly remembered by many former relief staff, and it still elicits strongly contrasting reactions. Indeed, MSF has used this as a case study to help volunteers understand the organisation’s culture of advocacy. Numerous scholars have helped shed the view of refugee camps as ahistorical places of bare-life, but it is also clear that historicising events within refugee camps has much to tell us about the realities of humanitarianism.
This blogpost draws on a recent article in Cold War History: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14682745.2024.2306394?src=exp-la
[1] Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 2010): 4 & 8
Header image courtesy of Steve Cagan: http://stevecagan.com
