Camps, refugees, IDPs

On Thursday, April 4, 2024 at 6:30pm, the CRASH team welcomed Emilie Medeiros, Eloïs Voisin and Raphaël Torlach for a conference/debate on the situation of the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. This conference was prepared and moderated by Michaël Neuman.

On Thursday 11 January 2024 at 6.30pm, the CRASH team welcomed artist Rachid Koraïchi, forensic anthropologist Jose-Pablo Baraybar and anthropologists Filippo Furri and Silvia Di Meo for a round table discussion on missing and dead migrants and their identification. This conference, prepared with Michaël Neuman, was moderated by Sarah Chateau.

In Groupe URD's new issue of "Humanitaires en mouvement" (n°25), Michaël Neuman describes rescue operations in the Mediterranean and the strategies put in place by MSF to adapt to the constraints imposed by governments.

This article was published in the London Review of books website on September 8, 2023. The former evokes the dire conditions in which roughly 1 000 000 Rohingyas live in Cox’s Bazar, the largest refugee camp in the world. In this coastal district in south-east Bangladesh, the humanitarian deployment is impressive, but commitment by donors is waning. Between March and June, monthly food allocations fell from $12 to $8 per person. The difficulties of accessing care, the social control to which they are subjected and the lack of prospects are many reasons explaining the perils faced by the Rohingya population.

Michaël Neuman describes his visit to Goma’s IDP camps, where he spent two weeks. He shares his dismay at the low level of assistance provided by the aid sector, especially when we recall that the Sphere standards, born precisely out of the failure of the humanitarian response in this same region of Goma in the mid-1990s, were conceived and championed by all of us.

On April 12 2021, we were delighted to welcome Karen Akoka, political scientist and sociologist, fresh from her publication in November of “Asylum and Exile. A History of the Refugee/Migrant Distinction" (La Découverte, 2020). The author described and analyzed the trajectory of OFPRA, the French institution founded in 1952 and responsible for granting refugee status; she provided an insight into how the history of the distinction between migrants and refugees was established in France. This conference was prepared and moderated by Michaël Neuman.

Michaël Neuman spent ten days in Libya with Médecins Sans Frontières teams working in detention centres for migrants. From his stay, he brings back the following impressions that illustrate the gloomy situation of the people who are held there, for months or years, and the even more difficult situation of all those subject to kidnapping and torture.

Médecins Sans Frontières and Crash were pleased to invite you to a screening, followed by a debate, of the documentary film  "La Ville Monde", directed by Antarès Bassis and produced by Les films du Balibari. The film, of which MSF is a partner, traces the trajectory of the La Linière camp in Grande-Synthe from its opening in March 2016 to the fire that destroyed it in April 2017. This event was prepared and moderated by Michaël Neuman.

In the summer of 2015, the French section of Médecins Sans Frontières started aid projects for migrant populations in Greece and France. The launch of these operations was the occasion for lively discussions within the association, both in terms of public positioning (how to justify an intervention in a rich country and not get lost in "political" territory?), and in terms of revising our operating methods, knowing that the primary needs of migrants were not primarily medical. Some people then recalled the association's militant practices in the 1990s, which were sometimes considered as abuses. By retracing the history of the French Mission, Michaël Neuman seeks to understand, with regard to the migration issue, the complex articulation between operational constraints, political positioning and militant practices.  

Dont acte, la politique de harcèlement judiciaire, administratif, politique aura eu raison de l’Aquarius, déployé entre 2015 et le milieu de l’année 2018 en mer Méditerranée.
Tribune de Mego Terzian (Médecin, président de Médecins sans frontières) et Michaël Neuman (Directeur d'études au CRASH de MSF) publiée le 07 décembre 2018 dans Le Monde.

The Crash team had the pleasure of welcoming Benjamin Boudou, politician and researcher at the Max Planck Institute, for a conference-debate on November 26, 2018. The meeting was prepared and moderated by Michaël Neuman.