A Plain-speaking Marriage Of Principles And Power
The Sunday Age
Sunday October 28, 2007
France's candid Foreign Minister is ruffling a few diplomatic feathers, writes Jacqueline Maley.
IF DIPLOMACY is a byword for conversational delicacy and artful subterfuge, then Bernard Kouchner has signed up for the wrong gig. There is nothing artful about France's foreign minister. He has spoken openly of war with Iran, and is a Socialist appointed by a right-wing President. He is a medical doctor and committed humanitarian who advocates military intervention where human rights are being abused. And when his countrymen took international umbrage over the US invasion of Iraq, the 67-year-old was firmly on the side of the American occupiers. "I don't want to hide behind diplomatic niceties," he said. "You will not hear me making bizarre statements like 'high-intensity conflicts'. The Americans mention 'surgical strikes'. My goodness!"You can almost imagine the curl of his Gallic lip. Kouchner, who in 1971 co-founded the charity Medicins Sans Frontieres, does not hide his contempt for activists-turned-politicians who lose their convictions as soon as they win power. He is determined not to be one of them. "After 40 years as a human rights activist, I cannot simply toss my moral principles overboard, just because I am now the foreign minister," he told German newspaper Der Spiegel earlier this month.Kouchner's zeal can perhaps be attributed to his familiarity with war zones. As a young doctor he worked for the Red Cross in the 1968 Nigerian civil war, and in 1979 he chartered a cargo ship to rescue Vietnamese boat people adrift in the South China Sea. In 1992, when he was France's health minister, he was famously photographed wading ashore from a relief boat to a famine-ridden Somalia, carrying a sack of rice on his back. "I have been fighting for peace for the past 40 years. I have seen the wounded and the dead, at the front, under fire. I know what I'm talking about," he said.Kouchner is also a realist. Which is why, despite being a committed Socialist and having served as a minister in Socialist governments, he accepted the foreign ministership offered him by hard-right French President Nicolas Sarkozy in May. "I was convinced that constantly criticising is counterproductive," he said of his decision, which led to his expulsion from the French Socialist Party. "I wouldn't have accepted any position other than that of foreign minister. I asked Sarkozy whether I would have political free rein . . . He said I would, and this agreement has remained in place."His free rein got off to an unusual start when, in August, Kouchner took a three-day trip to Iraq, the first visit by a French foreign minister since 1988. Time magazine called it a "clear signal to Washington that France is determined to continue mending diplomatic relations that deteriorated, in large part, over Iraq". Kouchner has always supported the US intervention in Iraq, on the grounds that the human rights abuses of Saddam Hussein's regime had to be halted by whatever means possible. He is a long-time advocate for what he calls humanitarian intervention, and has recently intimated that it may one day soon be justified in Iran, a sentiment putting him more in line with Bush Administration hawks than his former Socialist stablemates. Denis MacShane, a British MP and skiing buddy of Kouchner's, describes his friend as "a pure 1968 generation lad". "He was on the left then, in the communist party, but he gave that up as he saw the horrors of Soviet socialism crushing freedoms. Like many of the 1968 generation, he has wanted to marry principles and power, and that is the most difficult of consummations known to mankind."It will be interesting to see how Kouchner manages that consummation going forward. He has already drawn fire for what other diplomats see as blunders. In August, he criticised the Iraqi Government and hinted that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki should resign. In September, when he visited Russia on a diplomatic mission, he ruffled feathers in the Kremlin by paying homage to murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya, an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin. More controversially, Kouchner recently invoked the "w" word when speaking about relations with Iran. "We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war," he said in an interview last month on French TV.He later stressed he was talking about a hypothetical worst-case scenario and that negotiations with Iran should continue, but he has called for tougher sanctions on the regime. MacShane insists "Kouchner understands the need for compromise". Shouting slogans has never been his style. He's always looked for implementable, concrete but principled solutions. Fittingly for a French diplomat and a middle-class Socialist, his off-duty passions are skiing and entertaining. He and his wife, Christine Ockrent, a French television journalist, have a holiday house in Corsica."If you have a dinner invitation with him, there's a good chance he'll turn up late because he's been doing some television interview," MacShane says. "He's a workaholic."But once their host has arrived, his guests are guaranteed "good, classic French food, nice French wine and talk", he says. "The guy just wants to talk."
© 2007 The Sunday Age