NOT that Bernard Kouchner had lacked enemies. Nevertheless after his troubling statement suggesting that human rights issues could be an impediment to his work, the French foreign minister can now only look forward to seeing that list growing.

To be honest, the comment has caught unawares Kouchner’s friends and foes alike. It comes from a man who himself has been, for nearly half a century now, an indefatigable warrior for human rights. Then he had the cheek to do this, retort furiously his detractors, on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and, worse, in the country which considers itself the birthplace of the concept. The censorious, self-righteous crowd just can’t believe its ears.

Senior readers will remember Bernard Kouchner’s black and white photographs in Time and other news magazines, way back in the 1960s, shaking hands with the likes of Ché Guevara and Fidel Castro. The slight and sprightly young revolutionary with his characteristic bob of blond hair, once he had finished his medical studies, founded in 1971 the charity organisation Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) and eight years later Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World), both well-known today in the non-French speaking world by the informal, expedient sobriquet, ‘French doctors’.

He once again drew plaudits from his admirers, and sneers from what had by then already grown into a sizeable crowd of adversaries, when in 1992 footage was repeatedly telecast over all French networks showing Kouchner carrying sacks of rice on his back for the Somali refugees. “This is too much!” cried his critics indignantly.

During the heat of the war in the 1980s Kouchner had crossed the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan a number of times, bringing medical succour to the suffering, among other things. He made one last trip as a humanitarian worker when the war had just finished. His shalwar-kameez, flowing beard and the woollen Afghan cap however failed to impress Mullah Omar and Kouchner was dryly thanked for his contribution and informed that his job was over and that he did not need to come back any more.

Little did the Taliban leader know that while he himself would be hiding, perhaps for the remainder of his days, in the mountains, the French doctor was to become the foreign minister of his country and was to routinely visit Afghanistan every now and then.

If many of his former friends, today embarrassed by their receding hairlines and pot bellies, hate Bernard Kouchner that is perfectly understandable too. At 69, he still sports the same bob of boyish blond hair and a teenager’s waistline.

But, more seriously, Kouchner’s controversial remark also came in the wake of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s encounter with the Dalai Lama in Poland, something bitterly criticised by the Chinese leaders who also threatened to end the tens of billions of dollars a year worth of trade deals with France.

Kouchner had already angered his Socialist Party colleagues who are still to get over from the ignominy of his accepting the offer of foreign minister’s job from their arch-enemy Nicolas Sarkozy. He did that once again in a newspaper interview in these words: “One cannot define foreign policy as purely a human rights issue. While managing the affairs of a country one has to distance himself from a certain measure of naïveté.”

To make matters worse, Kouchner also offered his mea culpa by admitting it was an error on his part suggesting to President Sarkozy to appoint a junior minister exclusively to handle human rights.

Just imagine the horror of the situation in these contrite and politically correct times as the job was given to the Senegal-born Rama Yade whom Sarkozy had once introduced to President George Bush as “my Condoleezza Rice”!

While Rama Yade herself admitted that she was no simpleton to confound foreign policy with human rights, Hélène Flautre, a Green Party member of the European Parliament qualified Kouchner’s remarks as “scandalous” and “intolerable.”

Considered dispassionately however, all this is centuries-old polemics. For one country to interfere in the affairs of another under a moralising pretext is acceptable to one line of thinking exemplified by the concept of ‘right to intervene’ advanced as early as in 1625 by the Italian jurist Hugo Grotius but developed into a veritable political movement in 1979 by the French philosopher Jean-François Revel whose disciple Bernard Kouchner himself happens to be.

The question was most aptly raised by Prof Allan Bloom, the author of The Closing of the American Mind (1987), an exceptionally articulate critique of modern intellectual trends, who had asked a somewhat troublesome opponent what he would have done, had he been a British administrator in India, to stop a widow from burning herself to death at the cremation ceremony of her dead husband.

The answer, “If I were British, I wouldn’t be in India in the first place” caused some laughter during the intellectual gathering, but Bloom thought the man had only succeeded in deflecting a direct question.

Bernard Kouchner has today learned the hard way, with his year-old experience as the head pilot of French diplomacy, that when you deal with a foreign country, it is a lot more than human rights that you have on your plate.

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

THE White House has reluctantly decided to prop up America’s motor industry by providing $17.4bn of emergency funding to avert a disastrous collapse of Detroit’s leading car manufacturers.

President Bush used taxpayers’ money to provide a three-month financial reprieve for General Motors and Chrysler in return for swingeing wage cuts among factory workers which provoked immediate anguish among unions.

From an initial fund of $13.4bn, GM will get $9.4bn and Chrysler will receive $4bn. The treasury will make a further $4bn available to GM in February. Detroit’s third major firm, Ford, told the administration that it could get by without a handout.

Bush said without the money manufacturers faced the prospect of disorderly bankruptcy and liquidation. Experts believe the loss of one of Detroit’s “big three” would cause more than a million job losses among suppliers and contractors.

The decision ends a month of bitter political wrangling in which motor industry bosses shuttled between Detroit and Washington to plead for aid.

Congress failed to agree on a legislative rescue plan a week ago, leaving an executive order from the White House as the last hope.

The money will come from the government’s $700bn economic bailout fund intended to support struggling banks. But the money comes with tight strings attached, which angered Detroit politicians and the UAW car workers’ union.

Under the deal, GM and Chrysler must cut workers’ wages and benefits to the level of counterparts at Japanese manufacturers by the end of next year, a timetable which employees view as unfair. In a direct challenge to Bush’s authority, the UAW said it would appeal to president-elect Barack Obama to change the terms when he takes office next month. “While we appreciate that President Bush has taken the emergency action needed to help America’s auto companies weather the current financial crisis, we are disappointed that he has added unfair conditions singling out workers,” said the UAW president, Ron Gettelfinger.

His view was echoed by John Dingell, a congressman representing the car manufacturing city of Dearborn, who said: “It is irresponsible during a time of economic crisis for the White House to insist that workers take further wage cuts on top of the historic concession they have already made.”

The White House’s terms were put before carmakers late on Thursday and agreed in late-night discussions. They give the treasury significant involvement in day-to-day decisions at GM and Chrysler.

In return for the money, the firms must prove by the end of March that they are financially viable, with prospects for long-term profits.

They will have to sell their private jets, halt bonus payments to senior executives and seek government approval of transactions worth more than $100m. They must even tell the US treasury of any deviations from expenses policy on minutiae such as travel, Christmas parties and conferences.

GM’s chief executive, Rick Wagoner, said there had been little room for negotiation after a “stunning slowdown” in business.

The White House’s intervention came on the day Chrysler shut its manufacturing operation of 30 factories for an extended Christmas break of a month, temporarily laying off 46,000 workers.

— The Guardian, London