LONDON: I have searched the cuttings libraries but couldn’t find what Jacques Chirac said to provoke the scorn of Bernard Kouchner. Maybe it was his declaration to Saddam Hussein that ‘you are my personal friend. Let me assure you of my esteem, consideration, and bond’. It could have been his assurance to Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the kleptomaniac president-for-life of the Ivory Coast, that democracy was a ‘kind of luxury’ Africans couldn’t afford. Or maybe his support for Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Iran’s drive for the bomb.

For whatever reason, Kouchner said that Chirac was out of the loop. ‘It’s all very strange. As a doctor, I can’t say whether he’s in bad physical shape. But as a citizen, I can say he looks weaker and weaker.’

Many on the French left felt like that during France’s moral stagnation. They could not have suspected that Nicolas Sarkozy, Chirac’s conservative successor, would astonish the world by inviting Kouchner to clean up the Quay d’Orsay, from where Chirac’s foreign ministers negotiated so many grubby deals. Nor that the soixante-huitard, the founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres, the denouncer of state terror from Biafra to Cambodia and all points in between would astonish them by accepting.

French intellectuals are trying to recover their poise. I asked Bernard-Henri Levy what he made of his old friend’s transformation from leader of the 1968 generation to statesman. The usually confident philosopher looked uncharacteristically uncertain. He wasn’t sure how much room for manoeuvre the attention-grabbing Sarkozy would grant his old friend. (‘Sarkozy always likes to be at the centre of the photo,’ as Levy nicely put it.) But he was sure that Kouchner would use what time he had to bring aid to the victims of the near-genocide in Darfur, and may succeed.

The same thought is occurring to others watching the diplomatic revolution in Paris. Hilary Benn, the UK’s International Development secretary, is delighted that Kouchner’s first official act was to say the world has a duty to stop the crimes against humanity in Darfur. So too was Angela Merkel and the Bush administration, which faces public pressure on Darfur far greater than any European government has to cope with. (The janjaweed’s slaughter of Africans has become the great international cause of the black churches.)

In truth, it is getting late in the day for any kind of peacemaking. Until now, Darfur has been hobbled by the two external disabilities: the torpor of the United Nations and European Union and the reliance of the victims of the war on aid agencies.At first glance, it looks outrageous to accuse aid workers of contributing to the crisis. Brave men and women are risking their lives to keep the two million refugees alive. Last week the Disasters Emergency Committee launched an appeal for the public to support them. The rainy season is coming, the coalition of charities said, and will bring with it the double curse of swollen rivers, which will cut off refugees from aid, and flood waters spreading diarrhoea and malaria.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that you shouldn’t contribute, but you should do so with the knowledge that among the burdens the victims of unfashionable massacres endure is the media relying on the aid agencies for news. Unfortunately, the agencies’ commitment to emergency relief prevents them from blaming the perpetrators. They can criticise their own democratic governments incessantly because Benn won’t order British secret services to frogmarch the senior staff of the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (Cafod), say, into Belmarsh high security prison in south London and rough them up. But you will search Cafod’s website in vain for condemnations of Zimbabwe, Sudan or any other state that responds to criticism by silencing its critics.

A poll of aid agency staff working in Darfur, released by Reuters last week, confirmed that the worse a regime was the less the NGOs say about it. Four-fifths of the men and women on the ground said they dared not talk honestly about the attacks on civilians in western Sudan and two-thirds said they wouldn’t mention mass rapes.

“Speaking about touchy issues might result in restrictions and an order to leave the country which we do not want to risk, considering many people depend upon our support,” said one.

“All humanitarians are considered as spies against the government,” added a second. “If we speak openly... we find that the government will restrict our access to programme areas by delaying visas and travel permits.”

Kouchner is an attractive politician because he has never believed that aid workers should see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. With his appointment, the support for a harder line will grow.

The deadline for Khartoum to accept a hybrid peacekeeping force of UN and African Union troops is approaching, and Benn is warning that the world will not stand by if Khartoum refuses to help resolve the crisis. However, UN deadlines normally mean nothing. China has a Security Council veto and buys Sudanese oil. Its communists aren’t known for their enthusiasm for humanitarian intervention. The pressures to act which can be applied to democratic governments can’t be applied to them, but there is a slender hope that campaigners can use the 2008 Beijing Olympics to get to them. They have already renamed them the ‘Genocide Olympics’, and attacked their western sponsors.

When the irrepressible Mia Farrow heard that Steven Spielberg was helping to organise the ceremonies she asked: “Is Mr Spielberg, who founded the Shoah Foundation to record the testimony of survivors of the Holocaust, aware that China is bank-rolling Darfur’s genocide? Does Mr Spielberg really want to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games?”

She was a little over-wrought, but her questions were good ones for all that, and many others will be taking them up.

If the UN ducks the issue, the Americans will impose a unilateral travel ban on Sudanese leaders and freeze Sudanese assets. It was always going to do that; what is new and genuinely hopeful is that an invigorated European Union may surprise its former friends in the dictatorships by following suit.—Dawn / The Observer News Service