Bernard Kouchner: Media Doc of "Humanitarian Intervention"

[Errigal]

Some quick "best of" clips from an article on Bernard Kouchner, his role in Yugoslavia etc. Very interesting IMO.

June 4, 2007

Bernard Kouchner: Media Doc of "Humanitarian Intervention"

Sarko and the Ghosts of May 1968

By DIANA JOHNSTONE
Paris.

[...]
. May 1968 was probably the last time Kouchner was really on the left, but he has been dining out on that reputation ever since, as charter member of the media elite known as the "caviar left".

[...]

Kouchner rapidly shifted from doctoring to propaganda. Back in Paris in 1969, he cooperated with French intelligence services to found a Committee against "genocide in Biafra". Certainly the civilians of Biafra suffered a terrible famine, but the use of the term "genocide" serves a political purpose by portraying a conflict over control of territory as a one-sided assault aimed at exterminating a population.

The use of humanitarian missions to arouse international sympathy for one side of a conflict marked a sharp break with the International Red Cross tradition of maintaining strict neutrality in conflicts, in order to gain access to war zones. In December 1971, thirteen doctors who had worked in Biafra broke with the Red Cross to form Médecins sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders). Kouchner was the co-founder who from then on devoted himself most assiduously to the publicity side.

[...]

Throughout the 1970s, a decade during which an array of far left grouplets wore themselves out, preparing the way for the anticommunist ideological offensive led by the "new philosophers", Kouchner discovered the political usefulness of catastrophe journalism. The climax came in 1979, when he joined with the new philosophers in an ostensibly humanitarian gesture, "a boat for Vietnam". By calling media attention to the plight of Vietnamese "boat people", fleeing the economic misery of their war-ravaged country, the French humanitarians made no significant contribution to the wellbeing of the long-suffering Vietnamese. However, they had found an acceptable way to denounce what they called "the Vietnamese gulag", thus turning sympathy away from the Vietnamese liberation movement that had won almost universal admiration during its resistance to the U.S. war. By ignoring the factor of economic hardship caused by years of U.S. bombing, the gesture was a significant step in redefining "the left" as concerned exclusively and militantly with "human rights", regardless of context. It is scarcely an accident that this coincided with the "human rights" campaign led by President Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski to recover U.S. moral standing after the Vietnamese disaster.

By this time, Kouchner's exploitation of his role as co-founder of Médecins sans Frontières as humanitarian credentials for his political propaganda had caused a fierce rift within the organization. Kouchner left MsF to create a rival group, Médecins du Monde (MdM, World Doctors), which has pursued the Kouchner line of espousing "humanitarian intervention", including military intervention.

In January and February of 1993, Médecins du Monde spent around two million dollars in a publicity campaign, including some 300,000 posters and TV spots featuring film stars Jane Birkin and Michel Piccoli, designed to identify Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic with Hitler and the Bosnian Serb prison camps with Nazi extermination camps. (See my book Fools' Crusade, Monthly Review Press, p.74.)
This advertising campaign was replete with factual lies. But for Kouchner, moral zeal clearly outranks truthfulness on the value scale. The original idea to identify temporary Bosnian Serb prison camps as the equivalent of Nazi death camps came from the leader of the Bosnian Muslims, Alija Izetbegovic. In 2003, Kouchner visited Izetbegovic on his death bed, where the following exchange, (as recounted by Kouchner in his Les Guerriers de la Paix, Paris, Grasset, 2004, pp.373-374.) took place in the presence of Richard Holbrooke:

Kouchner: "You remember President Mitterrand's visit? In the course of that conversation you spoke of the existence of 'extermination camps' in Bosnia. You repeated that in front of the journalists. That provoked considerable emotion throughout the world. François sent me to Omarska and we opened other prisons. They were horrible places, but people were not systematically exterminated. Did you know that?

Izetbegovic "Yes. I thought that my revelations could precipitate bombings. Yes, I tried, but the assertion was false. There were no extermination camps whatever the horror of those places."

Kouchner concludes: "The conversation was magnificent, that man at death's door hid nothing from us of his historic role. Richard and I expressed our immense admiration."

For Kouchner, the fact that an "historic role" is based on falsification elicits only admiration. The Yugoslav wars of disintegration were the ideal occasion to put into practice what by then had become his trademark doctrine of "humanitarian intervention". This coincided perfectly with the United States need to provide NATO with a new post-Cold War doctrine allowing the military alliance to survive and expand. The doctrine went into full action in March 1999, when NATO began its two and a half month bombing of Yugoslavia. As his reward, Kouchner was given the post of United Nations high commissioner in charge of civil administration of occupied Kosovo (UNMIK). As virtual dictator of Kosovo from July 2, 1999, to January 2001, Kouchner demonstrated the nature of his "humanitarianism": fawning favoritism toward the NATO-designated "victims", that is, the Albanian majority, along with sporadic efforts to use his dashing charm to placate representatives of the besieged Serbs. The result was disastrous. Instead of promoting reconciliation and mutual understanding, he allowed the province to slip ever further under the control of armed clans and gangsters, who have terrorized non-Albanians with impunity ever since.
Kouchner is a selective humanitarian. The victims who arouse his indignation always just happen to be favored by French or U.S. imperial interests: the Biafrans, the non-communist Vietnamese, the Albanians of Kosovo. He never got so excited by the plight of Nicaraguan victims of U.S.-backed Contra murders and sabotage in the 1980s, nor about ethnic cleansing of Serbs and Roma in Kosovo after he took over, much less about Palestinian victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing.

[...]

A Franco-American axis of good?
The prospect of this lightweight publicity-hound as foreign minister of France is both alarming and comical. It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry.
If you want someone to justify a military intervention, Kouchner is your man. Had he been running the Quai d'Orsay in March 2003, his contribution to the Iraqi débacle would have been to advise George W. Bush to drop the "weapons of mass destruction" stuff, and wage his war for "human rights", in order to "get rid of the dictator, Saddam Hussein". At least, that it what he has said repeatedly since. Kouchner thinks it's a shame GWB used the wrong pretext for destroying Iraq. He even blamed France for "forcing" the United States to speed up the invasion by brandishing the threat of a UN Security Council veto. It doesn't occur to him that the Cheney-Wolfowitz crowd considered that scaring the American people into the illusion of "self-defense", would work better than appealing to their altruism. In either case, Iraq is in ruins, which doesn't seem to disturb France's most famous career humanitarian.
So far, there is no clear indication that Sarkozy wants to involve France in a war. So what, then, is the use of Kouchner? Certainly, his experience as head of the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) did nothing to alter the impression that he is much less gifted at administration than at self-promotion. But that is the main talent of his new boss, who is not one to want to share the limelight. Aside from helping Sarkozy's party sweep the forthcoming parliamentary elections, it is not certain what is the use of Kouchner or how long he may be kept on the job.


He has started off in typical fashion, making off-the-wall statements designed to sound good in the media. The creation of a special international tribunal to try the (unidentified) assassins of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, "shows the will of the international community to reinforce the stability of Lebanon", according to Kouchner. In reality, the international politicization of the case is almost certain to further destabilize that country. Kouchner went on to say that the special tribunal corresponded to "the wishes of the Lebanese people, of all sides and all religious beliefs", which again is simply not true. Perhaps up to half the Lebanese people suspect that an international tribunal sponsored by the Western powers is being set up to be used as an instrument for blaming Syria, as a pretext for war and to incriminate Hezbollah, constantly described as "Syria's ally". This Western-sponsored tribunal will certainly not take into consideration the widely held suspicion that the Israelis, or Hariri's right-wing domestic enemies, or both, had more to do with the recent wave of assassinations than Syria, which has been the main loser in the Hariri affair.

[...]



So Kouchner has arrived too late. He is too late to jump on the Bush bandwagon to hell in Iraq. He is already thoroughly discredited among those who know what "humanitarian intervention" is really all about, and who have tended to revert to the old Red Cross model of neutrality in order to gain access to victims. He retains his popularity in the general public only because his carefully cultivated media image has not been put to a publicly scrutinized reality test.


Kouchner may be a comic figure, but his comedy conceals two tragedies. One is the tragedy of the hopes for genuine social change that flourished in May '68, only to be dashed forty years later by the alliance between a Sarkozy who repudiates them and a Kouchner who is their parody. The other is the tragedy of what French foreign policy could and should have been, briefly glimpsed during the memorable February 14, 2003, speech of Dominique de Villepin to the United Nations Security Council. Contrary to rules and to custom, the gathering burst into applause. It seemed, for a moment, that France could be a voice for reason, for realism, for peace, and for a better world.


Such a France was and is desperately needed. But what we've got instead is another poodle.

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