Refugees and Asylum 31100

Dr Bernard Kouchner, Special Representative and Head of the United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo was born 61 years ago in Avignon, France. The most singular aspect to Dr Kouchner's life is the variety of fields in which he has managed simultaneously to achieve success. And moreover, not a simple single success but a multiplicity of successes.

Humanitarian, Politician, Author, Administrator he seems to take them all in his stride and, what is more, to be on the whole modest about his achievements as he indicated during the course of a recent interview. "Am I successful? Well, I certainly have been during the course of my life. I've been unsuccessful, too, many times. As a politician, I've been a member of the French government for almost ten years. I think I wasn't too bad, otherwise I would have been fired. I am proud to have founded two important humanitarian organisations that defend and answer the needs of victims. My reason for putting humanitarian intervention into effect is simply prevention. I think that's the only way to stop war. It's the opposite of fighting a war. Problems should be treated before war breaks out. I've devoted my life to that ideal and sometimes it has worked, sometimes not."

Kouchner is probably best known as the founder of the medical and humanitarian charity 'Medecins sans Frontieres' of which he was President and Organiser from 1971 to 1979. MSF cut its teeth in the Nigerian civil war when images of starving Biafran children filled television screens across the world. Kouchner, not content simply to deplore the actuality, still less to take sides and attribute blame, reacted by inventing the concept of 'humanitarian intervention'. Since that time MSF has intervened wherever it has been needed - the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Latin America.

His creation of MSF was followed by the creation of four other volunteer humanitarian organisations of which the best known is 'Medicins du Monde' and humanitarian campaigns which hit headlines in all continents. In "A boat for Vietnam", the hospital ship "l'ile de Lumière" was sent to Bidong Island in Malaysia and the Anambas Islands in Indonesia to assist the boat people. Similar interventions "A boat for Lebanon" and a "A plane for the refugees from El Salvador" followed. "International Committee against piracy" and "Rice for Somalia" continued this work.

Enough work for anybody perhaps but at the same time Kouchner was busy pursuing a political career which was to take him via Social Affairs and the Foreign Office to Lionel Jospin's French cabinet as Minister for Health. As he says in the interview above he was a French government minister for more than ten years, but to ensure that he had not one moment of spare time Kouchner also managed to get himself elected to the European Parliament in 1994, become deputy chairman of his party and to found another social charity.

Most influential people commit their thoughts to paper, but Kouchner has done so more than most. He has managed to turn out on average a major book every three years while contributing substantially to newspapers and magazines. But on the basis that he appears capable of always doing at least three things at once, he has at the same time written numerous screenplays and television series under the pseudonym of Bernard Gridaine. He also co-founded the news magazines "L'Evenement" and "Actuel".

It was therefore from this milieu of political, humanitarian and literary activity that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan extracted Bernard Kouchner in July 1999 to become the head of UNMIK, the UN's Interim Administration in Kosovo.

Dr Bernard Kouchner is the recipient of several human rights awards, (one would hardly be in keeping with the emerging pattern) including the Dag Hammarskjold Prize (1979) and the Prix Europa (1984). By the same token Dr Kouchner is the father of four children.

Somebody once asked him whether he didn't find this immense workload which he has sustained for over thirty years rather indigestible. "You forget" he is supposed to have replied "that I qualified in gastroenterology. I am really a doctor of digestion".

Back to home page

Use browser back button to view more articles in this category