Le Monde de hoy día 19, publica una confesión pública de Bernard Kouchner con el título: "Por qué he aceptado". Y como estoy convencido de la necesidad de seguir de cerca lo que está pasando en Francia, aquí os lo traigo:
Tanto fuera de nuestras fronteras como en su interior, he sido siempre y continúo siendo un militante de todos estos combates que han sustentado la grandeza de nuestro país. Desde 1968, en Biafra como en la ONU y en Kosovo, pasando por "Médicos sin Fronteras", "Médicos del mundo" y otras muchas expresiones de la sociedad civil, he actuado en defensa de los mismos ideales de solidaridad y progreso. Como ministro, defenderé estos valores de la diplomacia francesa.Bernard Kouchner es ministro de asuntos exteriores y europeos de Francia.
En cerca de cuarenta años de acción humanitaria y batallas políticas en defensa de los derechos humanos, movilizamos el mundo en los ámbitos de la diplomacia, la salud o la protección de las minorías. Proseguiremos nuestros esfuerzos construyendo una mundialización más justa, una Europa más fuerte, y encontrando para Francia la ambición que le asigna su historia.
Siempre he sido y continúo siéndolo, un hombre libre, militante de una izquierda abierta, audaz, moderna, en una palabra socialdemócrata. Al aceptar hoy trabajar con gente que sobre muchos temas no piensa como yo, no renuncio a mis compromisos socialistas. Participé en la campaña de Ségolène Royal y voté por ella en las dos vueltas de la elección presidencial porque me parecía representar una oportunidad para la izquierda. Francia ha decidido: esta etapa ha sido ya superada. Seguiré reflexionando y actuando, con todos los espíritus abiertos, para que exista finalmente una socialdemocracia francesa.
La política exterior de nuestro país no es ni de derecha ni de izquierda. Defiende los intereses de Francia en un mundo que se reinventa cada día. Debe ser decidida e innovadora. Al hacerme el honor de proponerme dirigir la diplomacia de Francia, el Presidente de la República no se imaginó que me convirtiera en sarkozysta. Algunas de mis convicciones no son las suyas y recíprocamente. Esto anuncia, espero, felices cambios de estilo, de análisis y de época. A esta actitud le corresponde un hermoso nombre: apertura.
Sé que algunos de mis amigos me reprochan este nuevo compromiso. A éstos, les pido confianza: mis ideas y mi voluntad siguen siendo las mismas. Si un día me pillan en el flagrante delito de la renuncia, les pido que me lo echen en cara. Garantizo que ese momento no ha llegado.
No tengamos miedo del futuro; miremos más allá de los enfrentamentos partidistas. Formo parte de un Gobierno creado para actuar y para ser útil a Francia, a Europa y el mundo. Se me juzgará por mis resultados.
Claudio.
ResponderEliminarContinúo mi enlace de ayer.
El capítulo del libro de Berman dedicado a Kouchner está disponible (pdf) en:
http://www.softskull.com/files/PowerIdealists_sample.pdf
Claudio.
ResponderEliminarMe he colado.
El enlace era para el capítulo 3 y no para el 4 como yo creía.
Como penitencia, un fragmento del libro que da de lleno en lo que explica Luri.
Not a hair on Kouchner’s head was hurt during the invasion of Iraq, but this was a matter of mere luck. Annan dispatched his most experienced and skillful people into Baghdad, and one of those people was eventually going to be Kouchner himself. This, in Kouchner’s account, had more or less been already agreed. Kouchner had made the rounds in Washington; he had dined with Rumsfeld (who seemed to Kouchner full of illusions); he was ready to go. Meanwhile the head of the mission was Sergio Viera de Mello — the Brazilian diplomat who, back in his student days in 1968, had been duly expelled from France; and who, in his career at the UN, preceded Kouchner to Pristina and set up the headquarters. Annan dispatched some other top people from Kouchner’s old Pristina team, too — Jean-Sélim Kanaan, Fiona Watson, and Nadia Younès, with whom Kouchner had been especially close.
These people and their colleagues set up a UN headquarters in Baghdad, at the Canal Hotel. And, on August 19, 2003, the hotel was blown up by a car bomb. Every one of those individuals from Kouchner’s team — de Mello, Kanaan, Watson and Younès — was killed, together with nineteen other people. (One of those nineteen, I must report, was a college classmate of mine, Arthur Helton — a veteran of the 1968 uprising at Columbia University who had grown up to become one of America’s most heroic human-rights lawyers, a man who had fought for the rights of Vietnamese boat people, Haitian refugees, Palestinians, and refugees from around the world. He was the author of a book called The Price of Indifference.) Who ordered that bomb attack? For that matter, who was behind the ambush that had killed Michael Kelly several months earlier? Kouchner paused over this question, at least in regard to the Canal Hotel bombing in Baghdad. “Who killed our friends?” he wondered. And he answered, “Not moderate Islam, which I love and which teaches us a great deal about the link between generations and the art of life. Instead, it was the intolerance and religious extremism that I call Islamic fascism — the false virilities, the unalterable taste of certain people for the power of dictatorship.”
And what were those UN people and NGO volunteers, the idealists, doing in Baghdad? Kouchner proposed an explanation in The Warriors of Peace — his own explanation, an account of his own thinking, even if some of those people in Baghdad might have spoken about these issues in a different fashion, drawn from their own experiences and their own professional backgrounds. Kouchner wrote, “In September 1933, at the League of Nations, a German Jewish citizen, Mr. Berheim, protested against the Nazi pogroms. The representative of the Reich, Joseph Goebbels, declared without being sanctioned: `Sirs, a man’s house is his castle. We are a sovereign state. Let us do as we intend to do with our socialists, our pacifists, and our Jews.’ And the Nazis did as they intended....
“The Shoah took place, and those who knew, didn’t protest. After the conflict of 1939-45, our generation wanted to react. And thus was created — with the war and torture in Algeria, with Vietnam, with the convulsions of Communism, then the beginnings of Amnesty International — what André Glucksmann called a `humanism of Bad News.’ We didn’t want to see any more pictures of killings before we rose up in opposition. Ever since the 1950s, we were on the alert against injustices and massacres on five continents, inside the borders of recognized states. We were done with mere indignation and powerlessness.
“Intervention — the word was frightening, it seemed synonymous with rape. But nothing is more consensual, so long as intervention always responds to a cry for help.” Rape, consensualness — these were preposterous words. Still, it was clear enough what Kouchner meant to say. He wanted to be a Résistant, not a collabo — even if resisting meant shoving international law aside for a moment, and pushing his way into some other country. That was his reasoning, and he gave this reasoning a label, and the label was generational. “Our generation wanted to react,” he said. In this one passage Kouchner defined the moral logic of the people with backgrounds like his own; the logic of the people who had gone into the streets in the ‘60s and early ‘70s and had fought their battles, sometimes foolishly; the logic of people who may even have deluded themselves for a while with fantasies about Che Guevara or the PLO or some other guerrilla mania, and yet righted themselves, eventually; the logic of people who had come to realize that intervention in the Balkan War of the 1990s was the fulfillment of their own ideals, of their belief in a “humanism of Bad News,” and was not an act of imperialism. This one little passage of Kouchner’s was a sort of generational manifesto.
But it may be that, with the car-bombing of the UN mission in Baghdad, the airy concept known as “our generation” finally ceased to exist. Millions of people had gone through the experiences of the ‘60s, and a distinct cluster of the most prominent of those people had drawn some very similar lessons, and had traveled more or less the same path, from 1968 to NATO and the Kosovo War. But, by the summer of 2003, the single path had split in two directions. Some people in that cohort from ‘68 still favored the principles and militant spirit of humanitarian intervention, and other people wanted to be much more cautious and respectful of international law. The divergence between those paths was not necessarily very great. But if there was any chance at all of bringing those two paths together, this possibility got blown up by the car-bomb in Baghdad, with the destruction of the people whose job would have required them to labor night and day to reconcile the American-led overthrow of the dictator with the principles and legalities of the UN.
The story of the generation of 1968 ended there, surely. In Baghdad in August 2003. Nobody else was likely ever again to speak about “our generation” and its mission — not in regard to the generation of ‘68, anyway. Cohn-Bendit used to fantasize, back in the 1980s, about a ‘68ers’ International, a cohort of like-minded people in different countries who would invoke the shared principles of their own rebellions of long-ago and draw lessons from those experiences, and go on fighting for a better world. And something of that sort, a ‘68ers’ International, did exist, for a while. Kouchner and de Mello and their group in Pristina were the International’s action team. There was no team, now. Or, if such a generation did exist somewhere, if some group of people went on picturing themselves as a political generation because of a distinctive twist or impulse in their passion for social justice and freedom — if any such group existed (and surely such groups existed, they had to exist, history produces these groups willy-nilly, they already existed among the aid workers and the hard-suffering soldiers around the world), the members of that group were going to be a little younger. Or a lot younger — a new generation entirely. And this new generation was going to have to find its own arguments, its own way of speaking about some very old and wrenching and unsolvable arguments: about resistance, and collaboration. About totalitarianism, and anti-totalitarianism. About liberal and humanitarian intervention. About the humanism of Bad News. And about the tragedies that descend all too fatefully upon the people who struggle against tragedies — upon those people especially, the risk-takers, the resisters.
Sólo acierto a decir una cosa sobre estas palabras de Kouchner: Chapeau!
ResponderEliminarSaludos.
Yo sigo pensando que a los políticos hay que escuchar lo que dicen y juzgar por lo que HAN HECHO. Hasta ese momento únicamente confío en que la derecha casposa de nuestro país aprenda y practique francés.
ResponderEliminarY la izquierda petrusdom, y la izquierda. Que aprendieron francés en el 68 y todavía hablan con el mismo acento.
ResponderEliminarSin duda, "por sus obras los conoceréis". La buena voluntad, además, hay que darla por supuesta a todo el mundo. Pero me parece que en el siglo XXI hay que atreverse a pensar sin las fórmulas del XIX. Lo cual no quiere decir que no nos vayamos a equivocar, pero demonios, si nos equivocamos en El Café de Ocata, tampoco se va a hundir el mundo, así que atrevámonos a ser iconoclastas.
ResponderEliminarEspero que sea un buen ministro y que el hecho 'abra caminos', aquí -en Catalunya- siempre nos hemos mirado Francia con admiración, a veces incluso algo bobalicona.
ResponderEliminarCreo que los conceptos de derecha e izquierda, hoy, deberían ser revisados e incluso superados en algunos aspectos, en occidente, y aceptar gobiernos con personas válidas 'de los otros'puede resultar muy interesante. Veremos...
Más allá de la bondad en la elección ministerial, se le está reprochando un excesivo 'grandeur', por si interesa -también hay filósofos en el debate-:
ResponderEliminarhttp://forums.france5.fr/ripostes/Francois-Hollande-Jean-Pierre-Raffarin-le-grand-debat/etat-disgrace-sujet_35_1.htm
Te enlazo.
ResponderEliminarJúlia: Claro que interesa. Gracias por la información.
ResponderEliminarY lo mismo le digo a Claudio. Me gusta este intercambio de información.
Rafael. Bien venido a este café. Y gracias por el enlace.
ResponderEliminar