Doctors without Borders on the Situation in Tripoli

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Sep 2, 2011 Libya
[Médecins Sans Frontières logo.] [Médecins Sans Frontières logo.]

Doctors without Borders on the Situation in Tripoli

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following report was issued by Médecins Sans Frontières on August 28, 2011. It was recently published on Médecins Sans Frontières Australia.]

Libya: “Almost all of the hospitals around the city are receiving wounded”
Libya / 25.08.11

A three-person Médecins Sans Frontières team is currently in Tripoli with supplies and is starting to support facilities that are already overwhelmed with patients wounded in the fighting currently taking place in the Libyan capital. Médecins Sans Frontières has also dispatched teams to Zlitan, east of Tripoli, and Al Zawiyah, to the west, to support hospitals faced with an influx of wounded. Speaking from Tripoli, Jonathan Whittall, Médecins Sans Frontières head of mission, describes the situation on the ground.

What is the situation like right now?

What we’re dealing with at the moment are health facilities in Tripoli that were already stretched even before the clashes erupted this week. Hospitals had shortages of personnel, due to the fact that many foreign medical staff who worked in the health system had already fled Libya. And hospitals had shortages of medical supplies because of the sanctions imposed on the country. The health system was already struggling to deal with the wounded coming from the frontline outside of Tripoli.

For the last three weeks, medical staff have been focusing almost exclusively on emergency cases and just haven’t been able to deal with any other medical problem the population has faced such as chronic diseases, emergency C-sections, and other medical conditions. The care really just hasn’t been available. When you add this to the clashes and fighting that’s broken out this week in Tripoli — and it has been extremely intense in some parts of the city — then you have a situation where already overstretched hospitals are trying to cope with the influx of wounded, and they just don’t have the support they need in terms of personnel or supplies.

What is the situation like in the hospitals you have been able to assess?

Almost all of the hospitals around the city are receiving wounded, but some of the hospitals have not been accessible due to the fighting, which means that other hospitals have an added burden. Now that the city is beginning to calm down a little bit, the hospitals are beginning to deal with the patients who weren’t able to reach them before. That’s not only the recently wounded, but it’s also the injured who have been too afraid to travel by road, along with other emergency cases.

The hospitals that I’ve visited since the clashes started are often quite chaotic scenes with many doctors and nurses unable to reach the hospital because either they live in areas that are still not secure or they can’t travel through the city from one side to another. There’s a shortage of health workers inside the facilities, but there is a huge number of people who are responding as volunteers and who are going to the hospitals to try and support and assist where they can. But this is creating quite a chaotic environment.

The hospitals that I’ve been to have been full of wounded – gunshot wounded – in the emergency departments as well as the other wards. In one health facility that I visited, they had converted some houses next to the clinic into an inpatient department. For example, in the one house I went into, patients were lying on the floor, lying on the desks that were left inside the house and had been converted into a makeshift ward for patients to stay. But because of the shortage of staff, there was no nursing staff and the patients were essentially caring for themselves. In another facility, I saw wounded people waiting outside the hospital to get into the emergency room.

Are there other obstacles to providing aid beyond the fighting?

The problem that’s facing ambulances is that there’s a massive fuel shortage in Tripoli. The fuel is not able to come in yet across from Tunisia. This is a big concern because electricity is very sporadic, so generators are being used to run hospitals, but hospitals have quite limited reserves of fuel.

How is Médecins Sans Frontières responding to the situation?

The medical situation requires a very quick response, which is why we’re bringing in additional teams and supplies. More staff arrived with supplies and more will come tomorrow. We will start supporting health facilities immediately. There are still clashes happening in parts of the city today and this will definitely have an impact on the medical needs.

The health facilities are stretched, but by no means are they completely collapsed or not functioning at all. Health workers are treating the injured, they are responding to the needs of their community, but they are, of course, facing massive challenges. It’s not a matter of competence or willingness. It’s a matter of needing the support to be able to better address the very urgent and overwhelming needs they’re faced with.

Has there been any let up in the intensity of the fighting?

Now it’s quieter. Three days ago I wouldn’t have been able to talk to you on the phone because of the constant gunfire and shelling outside. Today the fact that I can speak to you without hiding behind a wall is progress.

But it’s such a fluid situation, such a rapidly evolving situation. It’s been four days now and I can’t begin to explain the changes I’ve seen in Tripoli. It’s been extremely quick, the way in which the violence erupted within Tripoli and the way in which the city is now changing. We have to remain extremely vigilant in how things develop in the coming days.

In one of the hospitals that we haven’t been able to access because of ongoing fighting, we’ve heard of a critical situation with patients who are unable to be seen by medical staff because they can’t reach the hospital, because of fighting happening in the areas around it. It is absolutely essential in the coming days that all hospitals need to be accessible to patients. Health workers must be allowed to reach medical facilities and the sanctity of these structures must be respected by combatants on all sides of the fighting.

Médecins Sans Frontières is an international medical humanitarian organisation that has been working in Libya since February 25, 2011. To ensure the independence of its medical work, Médecins Sans Frontières relies solely on private financial donations to fund its activities in Libya and does not accept funding from any government, donor agency, nor from any military or politically affiliated group. Today, the Médecins Sans Frontières team in Libya is made up of 44 Libyan staff and 30 international staff and is currently providing medical care, mental health care, surgical services, and pharmacy support in the cities of Tripoli, Misrata, Zlintan, Yefren, and Benghazi.
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Jadaliyya Reports By :
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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412