Word: kouchner
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...ground offensive is still likely. For the past two days, Israeli leaders have said they will not agree to an early cease-fire and instead want to cripple Hamas permanently. Sources in Israel's Defense Ministry said Defense Minister Ehud Barak gave France's Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, a polite "no" to his request for a 48-hour cease-fire. But today, as the voices of well-known Israeli writers joined the call for an immediate end to hostilities, the idea of a cease-fire was still being debated, according to the Defense Ministry sources. It's probably no coincidence...
...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...