MSF documentary "From Action to Words"

What responsibility does a doctor have to speak out for his patient, when he has done all that he can but others have not? In 1971, that question faced young medical volunteers from Europe working in one of Africa's most brutal civil wars. It's the opening sequence from the MSF documentary "From Action to Words", which traces the development of a very particular kind of protest. Some of those young doctors decided that they could not remain silent when tens of thousands of civilians were dying from a campaign of starvation in Biafra, Nigeria. And the organisation they helped to found, Medecins Sans Frontieres, went on to confront many other atrocities where its voice was raised to alert or challenge the rest of us with painful realities and dilemmas.  

 

The film takes us back to some of the most frightening moments of recent world history with striking news footage and the haunted recollections of MSF workers who knew their efforts could not save those around them. "You can't stop a genocide with doctors" - and so in the Rwanda massacres MSF took the ultimate step of calling for international military action to stop the killers. It didn't happen of course and in many other conflicts since, MSF has seen the bitter consequences of foreign interference on allegedly humanitarian grounds. So the film traces the learning curve of an organisation that believes "We can't be sure that words will save, but we know full well that silence kills".

 

In the 21st century, those words have often been about access to essential medicines for the world's most vulnerable patients, or about the failure to confront the scourge of AIDS or drug resistant TB. The doctors do have borders; they don't talk about things they haven't touched in their work. But they still believe that unacceptable, unnecessary suffering should be denounced as well as treated in their clinics.