Doctors Without Borders is a left-wing advocacy group disguised as a humanitarian organization. And like most such groups, it's not in it for the goodwill.
The international aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (or Doctors Without Borders) said on Wednesday that it had fired 19 people connected to 24 sexual harassment cases last year, per Reuters. The group has investigated 40 complaints of sexual misconduct, it says.
The actual numbers may be even higher.
During 2017, it said 146 complaints were received from the field. Of those, 40 involved abuse and/or harassment and were investigated internally.
“Of these 40 cases, 24 were cases of sexual harassment or abuse,” the group said in a statement.
“Two of these were situations of sexual abuse or harassment by MSF staff against non-MSF staff (patients or members of the community). In total, out of the 24 cases of sexual harassment or abuse, 19 people were dismissed.”
While the Reuters report emphasizes that's out of 40,000 people. Those numbers are still on the high side for one year for a professional humanitarian organization. Most of them were apparently internal. Unlike the Peace Corps, which has its own reckoning coming before long because its allegations had gone public years before the #MeToo movement took off.
In today's article, I also delve into the multiple humanitarian org scandals in Haiti, including the recent one involving Oxfam.
Oxfam’s Haiti director was using the villa rented by the charity to host prostitutes. Senior Oxfam aid workers had exploited women and possibly even children. Oxfam had covered up the scandal in ’11 and tried sweeping it under the rug. And now it’s offering awkwardly unconvincing apologies.
While the Haitians suffered, Oxfam aid workers lived it up in a style worthy of Bill Clinton and the UN. “These girls wearing Oxfam T-shirts, running around half-naked, it was like a full-on Caligula orgy. It was unbelievable. It was crazy,” a London Times source stated.
An Oxfam spokesfiend explained that the cops hadn’t been called because it was “extremely unlikely that reporting these incidents to the police would lead to any action being taken.” Fear that the police will do nothing is generally why organizations don’t report crimes committed by their members to the authorities. That and a deep concern that their donors will stop subsidizing their child rape villas.
"I don’t think it was in anyone’s best interest to be describing the details of the behaviour in a way that was actually going to draw extreme attention to it,” Oxfam’s boss said.
It certainly wasn’t in Oxfam’s interest, but it might have been in the interest of the Haitians it was claiming to help.
They're all here to help. Themselves.