DECEMBER 2007
Sarko and the ghosts
of May '68:
Kouchner's media medicine
ZNET (USA)
by Diana Johnstone; November 13, 2007
In the last major speech of his successful presidential
campaign, Nicolas
Sarkozy launched into a bizarre attack on May 1968.
"May 1968 imposed
intellectual and moral relativism on us all," he
declared. The heirs of May
'68 imposed the idea that there was no longer any
difference between good
and evil, truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness.
"The heritage of May
1968 introduced cynicism into society and politics."
Sarkozy even blamed the legacy of May '68 for immoral
business practices:
the cult of money, short term profit, speculation, the
abuses of finance
capitalism. The May '68 attack on ethical standards
helped to "weaken the
morality of capitalism, to prepare the ground for the
unscrupulous
capitalism of golden parachutes for rogue bosses".
Did this mean that the new president plans to lead France
back to its
stodgy, morally pristine pre-May '68 past? Certainly not.
Nicolas Sarkozy,
who was an apolitical, television-addicted teenager in
May 1968, living in a
bourgeois milieu aghast at the disorder in the streets,
is himself an
exemplary heir of the ambiguous May '68 he castigated in
his electoral
diatribe.
The power of media images
May '68 in France was a social explosion that shook the
country into its
own version of the contemporary phase of Western
development. Whatever the
diverse intentions and illusions of its participants, the
most extraordinary
aspect of May '68 was its own reflection in the media.
The most potent
lesson was the extraordinary power of media images.
Nobody has absorbed that
lesson more thoroughly and profitably than Nicolas
Sarkozy.
The most fundamental of the many contradictions
crisscrossing the French
May '68 upheaval opposed the disciplined Communist Party
to the radical
students. The students' discovery of their own power to
shake the very
structures of the state created the widespread illusion
of an imminent
revolution. With seven million workers on strike, the
Communist Party used
its influence to steer the massive workers' strike into a
compromise deal
with de Gaulle's panicky government. Whether or not their
own revolution was
a fantasy, the May '68 generation blamed the Communists
for betraying it by
settling for mere wage raises and union benefits. As a
result,
anti-communism is a significant part of the ideological
heritage of the May
'68 generation.
A serious strand of the radical movement tried to carry
the revolution
into the factories. A more successful strand went into
the media. The
"revolution" moved its center of gravity from
the working class and third
world liberation to the more personal and middle class
issues of a "new
left" focused on sexual liberation, identity
politics, ecology and human
rights.
The new Right takes over the old New Left
In his first days as President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy
has demonstrated
that new left values are perfectly compatible with the
modern right. Sarkozy
has grabbed hold of those "values" and run away
with them.
* Parity between men and women. Sarkozy has put together
a government with
eight male and seven female cabinet ministers. Women
occupy the two major
posts dealing with law and order: Justice and the
Interior. In the West,
there is no longer any real difference between left and
right when it comes
to women's equality.
* Racial and ethnic equality. Sarkozy has appointed
Rachida Dati, a
41-year-old daughter of North African immigrants, as
Minister of Justice.
This is in line with his proclaimed desire to adopt a
policy of "positive
discrimination" in favor of ethnic minorities, on
the model of affirmative
action in the United States. Dati's father was an
immigrant factory worker
from Morocco and her mother is Algerian. This photogenic
iron lady will be
in charge of carrying through Sarkozy's highly
controversial judicial
reforms, intended to crack down even harder on juvenile
crime in the
banlieues from which she came.
* Ecology. The environment has been promoted from a minor
ministry with
scarcely any budget to the ranking cabinet post: a new
Ministry of Ecology
and Sustainable Development under former prime minister
Alain Juppé. This
may have delivered the coup de grace to the French green
party, les Verts,
already on the ropes after a miserable showing in the
first round of the
presidential elections. The universal recognition of
global warming and its
perils, far from strengthening the Greens, has pulled the
rug out from under
them - at least for now. The new government will adopt
environment-
fiscal measures to the hope of stimulating a new business
cycle, in contrast
to restrictive "green" projects often portrayed
as anti-growth and thus
implying an unpopular lowering of the standard of living.
* Human rights. This is by far the most dangerously
ambiguous of these
"values" that Sarkozy has lifted from the
post-economic left. By his choice
of Bernard Kouchner as foreign minister, Sarkozy has
scrapped "realism" in
favor of "humanitarian intervention" as the
basis of French foreign policy.
The good news is that the world has changed so that even
the right
embraces such progressive causes.
The bad news is that universally accepted values can, by
their very
nature, be used for a range of purposes, even as pretexts
for oppression and
war.
Kouchner: from medicine to media
Presenting Kouchner's appointment as a generous
"opening to the left" is
the bitterest joke Sarkozy has played so far on the
Socialist Party. If the
French Socialist Party is embarrassed, it has only itself
to blame. Because
of his media fame, the Socialists have let him use the
party to advance his
career, even though his "socialism" has
consisted in advising them to drop
socialism completely, and once into the European
Parliament on a Socialist
ticket he joined another group, the Left Radicals.
Kouchner has not "gone over to the right": that
is where he has been for
about three decades, but the Socialist Party has been too
opportunistic to
pay attention. 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". In May 1968,
Kouchner jumped into the political fray as a strike
leader in the medical
faculty of the University of Paris. His opposition to the
establishment did
not last long. Four months later, he joined a medical
team organized by the
French government to provide humanitarian aid to the
short-lived
secessionist republic of Biafra. This medical mission was
the humanitarian
side of an undercover French intervention that also
provided military aid to
the Biafra rebels, whose breakaway region in southeastern
Nigeria happened
to include the country's vast oil resources.
In May 1967, following escalating conflict between
Nigerian army officers
belonging to the Christian Igbo (or Ibo) ethnic group and
Muslim Hausas,
Igbo leaders proclaimed their own independent Republic of
Biafra. A bloody
civil war ensued. Biafra received covert military and
other aid from France,
South Africa, Portugal and Israel. Armed by Britain and
the Soviet Union,
the Nigerian army succeeded in imposing an economic
blockade to starve
Biafra into submission. By January 1970, the Igbo
resistance collapsed, and
the oil-rich area was reincorporated into Nigeria.
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.
Initially, under the impact of comparisons with Nazi
genocide in World War
II, this new approach was welcomed as more moral than the
old Red Cross
discretion. The catch is that it is based on two
questionable assumptions.
First, the Manichean assumption that in every conflict,
there is a "good"
side made up of victims and a "bad" side that
wants to kill them all. And
second, that Western intervention, aroused by the media,
can solve these
problems by force. Little by little, the
"realistic" school of thought that
casts doubt on these assumptions has been discredited as
immoral.
The Biafra tragedy set a pattern. One or more Western
powers back a
minority secession. The existing regime cracks down
brutally on the rebels,
all the more in that it suspects the Western backers of
trying to exploit
the rebellion in order to rip off territory or resources
for their own
purposes. Humanitarian workers sound the alarm and
photographers send
heart-rending images of human suffering to Western media.
Western
humanitarians describe the tragedy as
"genocide" and call for military
intervention. Whether or not intervention ensues, the
populations involved
continue to be victims of mutual hatred, which is
intensified by the media
dramatization.
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"
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.[1]
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 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." [2]
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"
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"
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.
Nor do the victims of harsh military rule in Myanmar
inspire his crusading
zeal, at least not in 2003, when he was paid 25,000 euros
by the French
petroleum company Total to write a report on Total's
activities in that
country. The 19-page report, written after a short guided
tour through Total
facilities, defended Total's construction of a gas
pipeline in Myanmar from
accusations that the company was profiting from the
government's use of
slave labor in construction projects. Now, it may be that
the company was as
innocent as Kouchner said. But it is certain that
Kouchner was not chosen
for his investigative thoroughness, but for his
"humanitarian" reputation.
It is not surprising, then, that following his
appointment as Foreign
Minister, Médecins sans Frontières has publicly called
on Kouchner to stop
using its brand name as a way to establish his
humanitarian credentials. In
reality, Kouchner has long since stopped being anything
but a publicist for
selective intervention.
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. [3] It doesn't occur to him that
the Cheney-Wolfowitz
crowd considered that scaring the American people into
the illusion of
"self-defense"
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.
Next, Kouchner got into the Darfur act by proposing that
French armed
forces in Chad create a "humanitarian corridor"
to protect humanitarian aid
to victims of the Darfur conflict in neighboring Sudan.
The very same French
humanitarian organizations that provided the initial
moral foundation for
Kouchner's intervention advocacy immediately disavowed
this idea as
inappropriate.
Denis Lemasson of Médécins sans Frontières, which
currently has 2,000
workers aiding civilians in Darfur, called Kouchner's
proposal "dangerous",
because of the confusion it would create between military
and humanitarian
operations. Any military intervention would force the
withdrawal of most aid
organizations and make the situation worse than it is
today, he stressed.
All the French aid organizations - MsF, Action contre la
Faim, Solidarités
and even Médecins du Monde (MdM) -- agree that the only
possible way to end
the civil war between the Sudanese army, Janajaweed
militia and various
rebel groups must be a political settlement, not military
intervention. MdM
president Pierre Micheletti points out that the
population is scattered
"like leopard spots" across a region the size
of France, in enclaves
controlled by one side or another, with no front lines.
Lemasson observes that past experiences of
"humanitarian interference"
confirm their worries. The American
"military-humanitar
Somalia in 1992, the "security zones" in
Bosnia, all created illusions and
led to disaster. And, adds Alain Boinet, the head of
Solidarités, the
failure in Iraq proves that peace cannot be imposed.
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.
Endnotes
1. Diana Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, Monthly Review Press,
p.74.
2. Bernard Kouchner, Les Guerriers de la Paix, Paris,
Grasset, 2004,
pp.373-374.
3. "Il faut bien le dire, à la décharge des
Américains, que leur hâte à
intervenir eût été moins marquée si, face à eux, ils
n'avaient pas trouvé un
pays, la France, qui, en brandissant la menace du veto,
les a forcés à
accélérer le pas." Le Figaro, October 4, 2003.
http://www.zmag.