BY JOHN LAUGHLAND
JANUARY 01, 2010 ISSUE
The history of neoconservatism has been well documented as a
trajectory from Left to Right and specifically from anti-Stalinist
Left to pro-war and anti-conservative Right.
The story is usually told about Americans because, of course, it is
in the United States that the movement has become strongest. But
the phenomenon has long existed in Europe, too. Just look at the
foreign minister of France, Bernard Kouchner.
Kouchner was appointed to one of France’s highest offices of
state in 2007 by the newly elected president, Nicolas Sarkozy. He
had supported Sarkozy’s Socialist opponent during the
campaign, as he was a member of the Socialist Party and had served
only in Socialist governments in the past. (His party duly expelled
him for accepting the new job.) But Kouchner is not just an
opportunist who jumped ship. He is a self-styled progressive who
has systematically supported war, supposedly for humanitarian
purposes, ever since the late 1960s. His partnership with the
neocon Sarkozy was quite natural.
In February of last year, however, Kouchner’s reputation came
under attack after Pierre Pean, a leading French investigative
journalist, published an expose entitled Le Monde Selon K. Pean
charged Kouchner with all sorts of political, ideological, and
financial malfeasance. The book caused a sensation in Paris. Firing
back, Kouchner suggested that Pean harbored an anti-Semitic hatred
against him and rallied important friends to his defense, including
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Fashionable neocon litterateur Bernard Henri
Levy called Péan “a dwarf.”
The sourness of the response was not surprising. Kouchner is well
liked in France. He is one of that strange breed of politician that
manages to cultivate the image of not really being a politician at
all. Instead, he is widely credited as a doctor, his other
profession, even though he has been in politics longer. Indeed, he
has blended his two callings into one.
Kouchner cut his medico-political teeth in Biafra, the province of
Nigeria where a vicious war of secession broke out in 1967.
Although a member of the Communist Party at the time, he remained
strangely aloof from the events of May 1968, denouncing them as
“an individualist revolution.” In August of that year,
the newly qualified doctor replied to a newspaper advertisement
calling for medics to go to Biafra under the auspices of the Red
Cross. He was there by the beginning of September, and this was to
prove his baptism of fire.
Kouchner and his colleagues did good work, but their sympathy for
the victims of war quickly turned into active military support for
the Biafran cause. An embargo on flights having been broken by
Caritas and the Red Cross, planes carrying arms duly flew in from
neighboring Gabon alongside the ones carrying medical supplies. In
a highly unethical confusion of medicine and politics—one
that was to form the cornerstone of Kouchner’s career for
decades to come—he and his Red Cross colleagues looked the
other way, occasionally used the military planes themselves, and
called for their hospital staff to be armed so they could better
fight for Biafran independence.
In other words, for Kouchner, neutral humanitarianism was rubbish.
The war was a just cause that had to be fought for. In a
semi-anonymous interview given to an African newspaper, “Dr.
K.” denounced the very concept of neutrality on which the Red
Cross had operated ever since its creation more than 100 years
previously. He called for the Geneva Conventions to be changed so
that medics could take sides in war. At the end of 1968, Kouchner
openly transformed his physician’s role into an activist one
when he created the Committee for the Fight Against the Genocide in
Biafra. He denounced “the horrors of this conflict
perpetrated by Lagos in league with imperialist powers.” The
French doctor’s personal brand of atrocity propaganda was
born.
When Biafra fell to Nigerian forces in January 1970, Kouchner wrote
an article replete with exaggerations and oversimplifications,
saying that the Biafran “genocide” was the worst
massacre in the world since the Holocaust. He was to reuse this
simple formula on many occasions. The fact that his battle for
Biafra coincided exactly with the geopolitical support de
Gaulle’s government was then giving to the Biafrans (against
the support given to Nigeria by Britain and America) did not bother
him. Nor did the fact that both sides were fighting for control of
the oil reserves off the Nigerian coast. In his article,
Kouchner—who had always admired de Gaulle’s minister of
culture, Andre Malraux, precisely because he had fought with the
International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War—attacked the
Left for having abandoned the concept of “a
people’s war” (la
guerre populaire) and adopting what he denounced as a
smug and morally disgraceful pacifism.
It was the political militancy of those doctors who made friends
during the Biafran war and who remained in touch once back in Paris
that led to the creation of
“Medecins Sans Frontieres” (Doctors Without
Borders) in 1972. The idea was to create a “commando”
of doctors who could travel at short notice to conflict zones.
(Note the military metaphor of the sort that Kouchner was to use
throughout his life, for instance, in his autobiographical Warriors of
Peace.)
While some of the members wanted to perform short urgent missions
and others longer-term ones, Kouchner’s position was the most
radical of all. What mattered to him was the media. Kouchner loved
nothing more than promoting a cause—and himself in the
process. He eventually stormed out of MSF in 1979 and created a new
association,
Medecins du Monde (Doctors of the World) in 1980.
Demographer Emmanuel Todd nicknamed Kouchner’s new group
“Soldiers Without Borders” in 2007, in an article
wondering what sort of a physician systematically prefers war to
peace.
The bad blood between MSF and Kouchner has persisted for decades.
In 2008, for instance, the man who had by then become French
foreign minister said that French NGO’s were keeping him
informed about the situation in the Gaza Strip and affording him a
channel of contact with Hamas. The claim instantly put the French
organizations’ work in jeopardy. The president of MSF issued
a furious denial and returned a donation of 120,000 euros that it
had just received from Kouchner’s ministry. In spite of this,
Kouchner has managed to maintain the illusion that he is still
somehow connected to MSF.
Nine years after he created
Medecins du Monde, Kouchner was rewarded for his
politico-humanitarian activism by being appointed secretary of
state for humanitarian action in the government of the newly
re-elected Socialist president Francois Mitterrand. Having served
de Gaulle’s policy in the past, Kouchner served the new
regime with equal ease. He vocally supported the first Gulf War in
1991, in spite of its unpopularity in France, and he looked the
other way as the Coalition bombed Iraq into a humanitarian
catastrophe. He attacked in the press those “pacifists who
are happy to accommodate the methods of the strongman of Baghdad,
thereby comforting one of the bloodiest dictatorships on
earth.” He called for French foreign policy to be based on
“morality” and denounced opponents of his policy as
Communists, Greens, and even anti-Semites. He was the first to
formulate the “right of intervention” in the
war’s aftermath and organized an airdrop of food and aid to
the Iraqi Kurds.
Like so many of Kouchner’s stunts, this one was bitterly
attacked, not only by his numerous rivals within government but by
then honorary president of MSF, Xavier Emmanuelli, who wrote of his
disgust at seeing genuine suffering transformed by Kouchner into a
spectacle for domestic television consumption. In order to
publicize the drops of food aid, journalists and heavy broadcasting
equipment were transported to remote Kurdish villages so that the
“generosity” could be filmed and beamed all over the
world. The fact that fights broke out over the aid packages and
that scores of people were killed when the drops fell on their
heads or into minefields did not bother Kouchner. He later adorned
the front cover of his book with a photograph of himself looking
out of the window of a helicopter, apparently at Kurdistan, wearing
the concerned expression of an Olympian
humanitarian.
In 1992, Kouchner took up the cause of Somalia. He organized a
campaign in all of France’s 74,000 schools in which every
child was asked to bring a kilogram of rice to school for starving
Somalis. The project was run with the Ministry of Education, the
French railroad network SNCF, and the Post Office. When the rice
was delivered to East Africa, Kouchner made sure the TV cameras
were there. It was here that he staged one of his most notorious
publicity stunts, when he rolled up his trousers and waded into the
water to carry bags of rice onto the beach on his back. This was
but the “humanitarian” curtain-raiser to what would
become the disastrous U.S. expedition to Somalia, “Operation
Restore Hope,” which started the very day of the broadcast,
Dec. 5, 1992.
Not coincidentally, Kouchner also took a high-profile position on
the Bosnian war, just as the United States and fashionable opinion
were swinging behind the Muslim cause. In June 1992, three months
into the war, Kouchner and Mitterrand flew to Sarajevo, a surprise
visit that hugely strengthened Kouchner’s position within the
government. When the story about Serbian “concentration
camps” broke in August, Kouchner was in his element: good
versus evil based on ridiculous parallels with the Nazi
Holocaust. In early
1993, Medecins du Monde spent an estimated $2 million
on a publicity campaign demonizing the Serbs, using the
controversial pictures of the Omarska camp taken by the British
channel ITN and including posters showing pictures of Hitler and
Milosevic in case anyone had missed the point. Kouchner was later
to admit that the campaign he sponsored had been based on a lie. In Warriors of
Peace, Kouchner recounts a conversation with the dying Bosnian
President Alija Izetbegovic, who admitted in 2003 that the camps
had not been “extermination camps” at all and that he
had pretended otherwise in order to curry sympathy and military
support from the West.
But it was over the Rwanda genocide in 1994 that Kouchner started
to make serious enemies in France. One of them was Pierre Péan. A
veteran journalist who has written books on a wide range of
subjects, including an excellent account of François
Mitterrand’s youthful work for the Vichy government, Péan
disagreed violently with the popular view of Rwanda. He did not
deny that Hutus had killed Tutsis in large numbers, but he insisted
that the reverse was also true. He further resented, like many
others, the political instrumentalization of the genocide to
blacken France’s name.
Pean produced a book on Rwanda and became an implacable opponent of
the RPF regime in Kigali under President Paul Kagame. Pean branded
Kagame a dictator and a mass murderer and noted that the Rwandan
government had on several occasions formally accused France of
complicity in the genocide. Diplomatic relations with France were
broken off in 2006 when a French judge issued arrest warrants for
members of Kagame’s entourage on the basis that the president
ordered the assassination of the two Hutu presidents (of Rwanda and
Burundi) in April 1994, the event that all agree sparked the
conflict. Following his close study of the Rwanda story, Pean
turned his ire directly on Kouchner to produce Le Monde
Selon K.
It is easy to see why Péan’s book caused a stir. His chapter
on Kouchner and Rwanda is particularly effective and full of anger.
With meticulous attention to detail and use of maps, Péan shows how
Kouchner’s claims to have visited a Tutsi massacre site in
1994 were precisely wrong: the killings in that particular village
were in fact committed by Tutsis against Hutus. The great supporter
of intervention had inverted victim and
perpetrator.
Unfortunately, Péan’s work also descends into spitefulness.
He dwells at length on Kouchner’s influence trafficking, for
which his wife is said to be the principal instrument. Surprisingly
for a man who presents himself as a selfless humanitarian, Kouchner
is in fact one half of France’s most powerful power couple:
Christine Ockrent, his wife, is one of the most influential TV
journalists in France and head of the holding company that owns all
the radio and TV channels that France broadcasts abroad.
(Ironically, the charter of one of the channels in the group
specifically forbids it from becoming the voice of the Foreign
Ministry.) She is also a regular invitee to the meetings of the
Bilderberg Group and the European Council on Foreign Relations, a
very rare honor for a hack.
Pean accuses Ockrent of being incompetent and of sacking
journalists for political reasons. These claims are a little
tendentious, and he mars them by prurient and irrelevant attacks on
Ockrent’s (admittedly enormous) income. He concludes his
hatchet job by piling up allegations of simple cynicism on
Kouchner’s part. For instance, the great campaigner’s
company, B.K. Consulting, was paid 25,000 euros by the French oil
company Total to produce a report supporting its construction
projects in Burma, a country whose regime Kouchner had denounced in
1994 as “a narco-dictatorship.” Péan also alleges that,
when he became a member of the European Parliament in 1994,
Kouchner deliberately registered his holiday house in Corsica as
his permanent address so that he could cash in on extra travel
expenses.
Pean’s attack on Kouchner is uneven and marred by some
inaccuracies. But his argument is sound. Kouchner has for the last
40 years consistently supported war as the means to solve
humanitarian problems. He is a virulent interventionist who
denounces his opponents as accomplices of dictators. This no doubt
explains the cover photograph of Pean’s book. It shows
Kouchner standing in a slightly strained posture of camaraderie
with George W. Bush, each man with his arm clasped over the
other’s shoulder. Kouchner stares up admiringly at the man
who embodies his political ideals—or perhaps the man whose
ideals Kouchner invented.
John Laughland is
director of studies at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation
in Paris,
www.idc-europe.org
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