When newly elected French president Nicolas Sarkozy named Bernard Kouchner Minister for Foreign Affairs in May 2007 there were few eyebrows raised. It had been an open secret in French political circles for weeks beforehand and it later transpired that Sarkozy had offered Kouchner the job before the election – an election during which Kouchner had endorsed Sarkozy’s Socialist opponent Royal. Rony Brauman, director of Médecins sans frontières, the NGO Kouchner is so often erroneously reported as being the founder of (he was, in fact, one of a dozen or so co-founders), snapped at a reporter when asked for his opinion on Kouchner’s ascension to France’s top diplomat’s job. Brauman, who, like MSF, has had an uneasy relationship with Kouchner since they parted ways in 1979, said ‘that’s what Kouchner always wanted to be.’ It was a curt, almost weary, dismissal by one of the few public figures in France who openly holds a jaundiced view of the doctor-turned-politician.

Another man who has a far from sanguine view of Kouchner is Pierre Péan, whose Le monde selon K. is a lusty, acerbic and often wildly funny take-down of the man who, in the eyes of the French public, seems to be incapable of doing wrong. In the annual poll conducted by Paris Match where French people vote for their favourite French personality (there is indeed a bewildering strain of innocence among the French that only people who have lived in France can truly detect), Kouchner is regularly in the top five, often kept off the top only by the later Abbé Pierre, the Catholic priest, who for fifty years campaigned on behalf of France’s homeless. Kouchner and Abbé Pierre even collaborated on a book a few years before the priest’s death. It may be this glaring popularity that irks Péan so much and he spends much of the book trying to redress this perceived injustice. The book can get wearisome at times as further examples of Kouchner’s mendaciousness pile up; if one is looking for an impartial biography of Kouchner, this is not it. There is precious little shade in Péan’s account; it is rather an attempt to provide an antidote to the overly saccharine public image of his subject.

For this reason, it is a book unlikely to ever be translated into English. It is, as Anglophone journalists based in Paris tend to say, a bit too ‘franco-français’. Péan’s assumes a background knowledge of Kouchner’s career that few English speakers would have. Kouchner is only vaguely known internationally. Many would now be able to pin him as France’s foreign minister but previously it has been his association with Médecins sans frontières and a flurry of pseudo-diplomatic activity in the early 1990s in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda that put him in the international spotlight. But if the assault on Kouchner’s character conducted by Péan (for that is what it is, however righteous it may be) might elude international readers this does not make the book less pertinent for all that.

It is pertient because Kouchner has had a profound impact on shifts in foreign policy among western powers over the last twenty years. He has, in effect, willed his own take on world affairs into the corridors of power. And Péan, like many French advocates of traditional diplomacy, does not like this. At the centre of Kouchner’s creed is the ‘droit d’ingérence’, the ‘right to interfere’, which he views as an essential retainer for strong powers. It is primarily formulated as the right to interfere for humanitarian reasons and was something that was a casus belli for many on the liberal left during the Bosnian war, the Rwandan genocide and which finally triggered a war in 1999 when NATO bombed Yugoslavia, ostensibly to prevent massacres in Kosovo. And in all three cases, Kouchner was a key player. He promulgated points of view in the press that were quickly relayed by well-meaning but ill-informed journalists; points of view that were on the face of it, born of decency and humanitarian concern but usually a gross simplification of complex political struggles.

Kouchner had already behaved in a dubious fashion at the time of the international intervention in Somalia in 1992 when, as Minister for Health, he organised a ‘Sacks of Rice for Somalia’ drive to send rice to needy families in the war-torn country. At first glance a laudable intention but not really one that should fall under the remit of a government ministry and certainly not one such as Health. Defence minister, Pierre Joxe was furious at Kouchner’s interference and was only dissuaded from resigning by a President François Mitterand who was already beginning to fall under Kouchner’s spell. Teachers in France’s state schools were also indignant that their places of work should be used for media-friendly government-run charity drives. As Joxe said, there were dozens of Somalias around the world and all should be treated with the same diplomatic rigour and neutrality.

It was in Rwanda that Kouchner’s Manichean mindset fatally coloured his calls for an intervention. Péan does not deny the extermination of 800,000 or so Tutsis by Hutu militants but he disputes the claims by Kouchner and others that it was a premeditated genocide. He also points out that some 40,000 innocent Hutus were similarly slaughtered by troops loyal to the Rwandan Patriot Front of current Rwandan President Paul Kagame. He also points out Kagame’s probable guilt in the shooting down of the plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana and the president of Burundi Cyprien Ntaryami (both Hutus) on the 6th of April 1994, which triggered the genocide. Kagame and eight of his inner circle were issued arrest warrants in 2007 by French investigating magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière for their alleged role in the attack, which claimed the lives of three French nationals.
Kouchner and Sarkozy have both stymied the investigation since then, even allowing one of the suspects, Rose Kabuye, a Kagame aide to walk free on bail after her orchestrated arrest last summer (orchestrated to have access to the prosecution files).

Péan’s scepticism about Kouchner’s motives is well-founded; in one chapter he demolishes Kouchner’s proprietorial attitude towards Rwanda (the minister is fond of repeating ‘I was there’). He provides ample evidence that Kouchner allowed himself to be dangerously taken in by Kagame even as the latter was ordering massacres of civilians and even ordering the shooting on a UN vehicle carrying Kouchner himself, something Kouchner inexplicably blamed on government troops despite knowing the contrary was true. Kagame in particular is accused of ordering the massacre at Kibagabaga, just north of Kigali, the discovery of which so marked Kouchner’s spirits, but which he assumed was the work of the Hutus. Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian UN commander who later wrote an anguished account of his time in Rwanda, is similarly scathing of Kouchner.

Kagame’s track record as President since 1994 further belies his image nurtured in the west by fools and knaves alike as a benign resistance fighter who has succeeded in reunifying post-genocide Rwanda. He has rather been the motor for the most destructive war of contemporary times in eastern Congo, which has claimed the lives of an estimated 5.4 million people. He has variously played off the rebels led by Laurent Nkunde and the Congolese army against one another and also carried out raids on Congolese territory ostensibly to pursue renegade Rwandan Hutu rebels but which has ensured Rwanda has been able to control eastern Congo’s rich mineral wealth. It is also estimated by Howard French in a recent essay in the New York Review of Books that the forceful displacement of Hutu refugees could have contributed to the deaths of up to 600,000 people, the vast majority of whom had no hand in the 1994 genocide.

Kouchner is not alone in this almost criminal negligence of the facts; the Clinton regime was wilfully dismissive of reports of a humanitarian crisis. Howard French even singles out current American ambassador to the UN Susan Rice for saying that the Americans were choosing to look the other way. But Péan is galled by Kouchner late-formed interest in Rwanda. The minister, it seemed showed no interest in the east African country in the four years preceding the genocide when the government he was part of was engaged in talks aimed at averting an armed Tutsi rebellion. It was only when things got nasty on the ground that he made the trip to Kigali, where he all too willingly surrendered himself to as dubious a character as Kagame. Kouchner appears to be more at ease with the cut-and-thrust of humanitarian outrage, where black and white are clearly defined. In some respects he views such crises as football matches. He showed little interest in the mundane diplomatic niceties of the impending crisis and was presumably unaware that an earlier, forgotten genocide in 1972 resulted in the slaughter of 300,000 Hutus by Tutsi extremists in neighbouring Burundi, which has an ethnic divide of similar proportions.

Kouchner’s wordview of heroes and villains similarly coloured his take on the ethnic conflict in former Yugoslavia, where, as Péan charges, Kouchner and his allies undertook a shocking mass demonisation of the Serbian nation. As with Rwanda, this is not to ignore the crimes committed by Serbia and its satellites in Bosnia, Croatia or Kosovo but it demonstrates a disturbing tendency to take sides on the part of a man who would later be given an arbitrating role as UN Special Representative in Kosovo in the years following the 1999 war. His extra-marital relationship with a Kosovar woman also brought into question his impartiality in presiding over Kosovar and Serb populations, not least when International Criminal Tribunal Prosecutor Carla del Ponte complained of being frustrated by Kouchner’s office in her attempts to bring alleged Kosovar war criminals to justice.

One of the most troubling legacies of Kouchner’s diplomatic influence has been this conflation of humanitarian concerns and governmental responsibilities. It is something that Kouchner first got a taste of during the Biafran war when he worked as a doctor tending to the secessionist Biafrans in their struggle against the Nigerian federal government. Kouchner bewailed the treatment of the Biafrans yet was himself flown into the territory on planes containing arms provided by the de Gaulle government of the day. France supported Biafra at the time, but for reasons of cold realpolitik rather than the worthier ones espoused by Kouchner.

Péan has little time for this morphing of diplomacy and geostrategy into the service of humanitarianism. Not because he is unfeeling but he realises the primal need to keep both separate in the service of each (and NGOs such as Médecins sans frontières and the Red Cross agree). But Péan does ascribe Machiavellian motives to Kouchner nonetheless. Kouchner and a cohort of French intellectuals such the nouveaux philosophes André Glucksmann, Bernard Henry-Levy and Alain Finkielkraut are seen as card-carrying Atlanticists intent on undermining French diplomatic influence. Péan used ill-advised language in desribing this coterie (all Jewish) as ‘cosmopolitan’, which the media-savvy Kouchner latched on to deflect many of the salient charges levelled at him by Péan. Kouchner, aware of the anti-semitic connotation of the word ‘cosmopolitan’ as used by anti-Dreyfusards, said to the National Assembly, ‘when you are called “cosmopolitan” in difficult times, you know what you are dealing with’. Never mind that there is little that can be even construed as anti-semitism in Pean’s book. But his tone can sometimes get the better of him. Such as when he misjudges the US political landscape by labelling Kouchner a neocon. But Kouchner is more the wide-eyed ‘Quiet American’ archetype, almost a Candide figure in his shambling across the world.

This is not to dismiss him as an innocent – he certainly isn’t – but it places him rather in the camp of the interventionist US Democrat, a man who has always used the media to maximum effect (and ignored certain conflicts that he considered of lesser media interest) in much the way a war was generated over the news in Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog. Kouchner’s wife is Christine Ockrent, one of France’ most influential journalists and his access to the airwaves has always been eased by this relationship as has his ability to intimidate journalistic opponents. Ockrent has been accused of sacking a number of journalists at the international news channel France24 and the radio channel Radio France International, both of which she is the director of, who have displeased Kouchner, including one who did so during a live interview. Péan devotes a chapter to this episode and he has an axe to grind, as a number of the principals are close personal friends of his. But the tone notwithstanding the account does provide a disconcerting catalogue of strong-arming by a man who likes so much to play the nice guy.

Péan’s book grates from time to time with the stridency of its tone and his rather silly anti-Americanism (he gleefully refers to Kouchner again and again in English as the ‘French doctor’ even though I have never heard anyone in the English-speaking world call him this). But it provides a stern and vital corrective to the media soft-pedalling that Kouchner is so often the beneficiary of. We may not agree entirely with Péan’s stance that Kouchner as Foreign Minister is a grave danger to France but his analysis has particular resonance following Kouchner’s breathtaking remarks on Israel and Iran last week, which amazingly drew little fire internationally. Kouchner attempted to play good cop to Israel’s bad one, saying that time was running out for Iran, and that ‘Israel will react as soon as they know clearly that there is a threat’. It’s a familiar reworking of traditional diplomacy but nonetheless an alarming escalation in tone. Who knows, maybe he will in time morph into Péan’s necon, dispensing tough medicine to chosen victims rather than intervening to help them?