Online NewsHour: Can you tell me about your last trip to Darfur, what did you see and what were the conditions in which people are living down there right now?
RealAudio | MP3

Dr. Christophe Fournier, International Council president of Doctors Without Borders: I was there in May. I've lived three regions in Darfur. As you probably know, Darfur is a very big territory made of three different regions and what struck me the most was probably the insecurity that the civilians are facing there, in their daily life.

The violence may not be the same as it was in 2003, in early 2004, but still the two million displaced people living in the big cities, living in the camps, risk attacks whenever they venture outside of the camps to collect firewood or water. And this is the case for the people who are in the displaced camps in the big cities. Outside of the camps in more isolated areas in more remote areas, still, of course, the populations are affected by violence. So I would say what struck me the most was this overall feeling of violence that is affecting the civilians there in Darfur.

Online NewsHour: Can you describe a day for somebody who is working down in Darfur?
RealAudio | MP3

Dr. Fournier: I will give you two different examples. For the doctors and the nurses who are working with Medecines Sans Frontieres who are working in the big, displaced population camps we are providing daily health care. What struck us, what is striking us is there is, ok, there is no big epidemic, or feed the children, having their respiratory infections and so on and so forth, but you can see this thinning of the population.

They are really scared of going outside their camps. I think about this woman, that I've seen in Southern Darfur, in one of these big camps. She had to escape from a village three years ago when her village was attacked by militias, and she lost her husband and her parents at that point. She was able to escape with four of her children. And after a long walk, being in several camps, she finally arrived in this camp, after two years, and she has access to some water, some food, not enough. And she has to go outside of the camp on a daily basis to collect some firewood and then try to sell this firewood to other people that are in the same camp. And she is totally, I mean, she has access to services, but she still remains totally afraid and scared about the violence outside of the camp and even during the nighttime in the camp where she is living with her four children.

So, the daily life there in the big camps is, ok, you have access to your basic needs, it is still very fragile, but still, the situation is one of being in kind of a prison there. And another situation, I remember these four people that we found when we were able to access a very isolated place and we found among other people in a health center these four people who have been injured. All of them had fractures of their members. One had a fracture of her pelvis and her shoulder since last December. And she was just waiting there to have access to health care and one day have access to surgical care that they need.

There are a lot of people who we have to organize and where we provide specific care. And those are the people who are in isolated place where we have very, very limited access to health care. And so for them we have to go through the different obstacles, groups that can affect our ability to access this population, reach this population and organize basic care for them.

Online NewsHour: What kind of medical conditions are you treating on the ground? What are people suffering from the most?
RealAudio | MP3

Dr. Fournier: What one has to understand is that thanks to the unprecedented relief operations that have been settled in Darfur, most of the 2 million of displaced population in the big camps in the big cities, have access to their basic needs such as food, water, shelter and primary health care. So as a result in these big camps, in the cities, the health status of the population is not of concern, for the time being. For the time being there is no major epidemic.

The health indicators in these cities are not that bad and we, in our clinics and our hospitals, we see, besides still a number of people being injured that we will treat surgically, we see children having respiratory infections having diarrhea and that sort of common diseases.

That is in the big cities. Now in the most remote places, in some isolated areas you will see more possibilities of course and you will find people who have absolutely no access to health care for months for some of them.

Online NewsHour: Can you describe some of the conditions your group is working under?
RealAudio | MP3

Dr. Fournier: First, one was to understand that our operation, our programs there in Darfur for MSF for Medecines Sans Frontieres is one of the biggest if not the biggest, operation in the world today. Over all it is a big, big operation for all humanitarian actors to have 13,000 humanitarian workers working there and for MSF it is more than 2,000 humanitarian workers that we have on the ground. So we have clinics in the IDP camps, we have mobile clinics to reach more isolated areas and we have also referral hospitals to provide emergency and surgical care.

Now if you ask me whether or not we are affected in our daily work by the insecurity I would say that yes we have been and are still affected by the insecurity. On the roads, because we have been attacked on the roads, even we had to evacuate some of the locations where we were working before because of attacks, because of clashes.

But one has to understand also that even if we are affected by this insecurity this is a daily struggle almost for us to still manage to go through and access isolated populations. To give you a very concrete example, if we have to go to a very isolated area and to access this area we have to go through certain regions where you will find different militias, different groups of populations that are all interested in getting something from you and potentially also, why not, looting your vehicle and so on and so forth. You will have to talk with all of them. If there are 10 different actors, 20 different actors you have to talk to all of them to make sure you go through and finally access the population you want to access. You do it independently of course from any armed forces and that is the way we manage to access the populations.

So if you ask me if the security is affecting our work yes, but still on a daily basis we manage to talk with all parties to the conflict and finally gain more and more access to areas where hundreds of thousands of people are being kept.

-- Interview by Meghann Farnsworth, Online NewsHour