Word: kouchner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Sarkozy's subsequent decision to cancel a post-Olympic meeting with the Dalai Lama in France. Though the French President initially said that "it's not up to China to fix my agenda", he wound up declining and sent his wife Carla Bruni and Foreign Affairs Minister Bernard Kouchner instead. By the time the day of the meeting rolled around, the French press was reporting that the Dalai Lama had become so disgusted at Sarkozy's cave-in that the Tibetan leader feigned an illness to avoid having to greet the Plan B delegation. (In vain: he wound up hosting...
There is no quick military solution. With 17,000 troops on the ground, the U.N. force may be the largest the world organization is currently fielding but those peacekeepers have not been able to fulfill even their limited mandate of protecting civilians. Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, has called for the European Union to send reinforcements. This might serve as good out-of-theater training exercise for the European troops but an extra 2,000 boots on the ground - even if the 27-member body could agree on the mission - would do little to address the root causes...
...during the Rwanda genocide. Both Hutu and Tutsi groups are remnants of refugee militias that fled to Congo during and after the genocidal conflicts in Rwanda. "This is a massacre such as Africa has probably never seen, which is taking place virtually before our eyes," French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told Europe 1 radio before departing Paris for DRC on Friday...
...Kouchner is wrong. Africa has seen such a massacre before - in the exact same place, over the last 10 years. An estimated 5 million people have died as a result of conflict in Congo's east, a place whose warring factions have stymied the world just as badly as have those in Darfur or Somalia. Fighting between the rebel forces, led by Gen. Laurent Nkunda, an ethnic Tutsi, and Congolese troops had raged for months. It became clear in June that a January peace deal between the government and the rebels was collapsing, but little was done. "I've been...
...missing now. Plainly, there are material aspects of modern American life that still inspire admiration from overseas, and features of American innovation that nobody else can match. But I spend about half my time outside the U.S., and I have to say that in many ways, like Bernard Kouchner, I think that the magic is gone. You want modern transportation systems? Try France or Japan. New airports? Half the cities of Asia. The old assumption that American culture would sweep the planet no longer holds good. In Africa and Asia, they don't cluster round TVs to watch baseball...