Word: kouchner
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...Ceausescu, who fled with his wife. TV newsreaders in Bucharest claimed last week that 80,000 people or more were killed in the struggle that began with the slaughter in Timisoara; Western diplomats thought the death toll was far smaller -- perhaps thousands, but not tens of thousands. Bernard Kouchner, France's Secretary of State for Humanitarian Affairs, who visited Bucharest last week, said the Rumanian Ministry of Health could confirm only 746 deaths and some 1,800 wounded. An exact figure may never be learned...
Around the world, in war zones and areas stricken by natural disasters, a special breed of doctors and nurses are infusing the Hippocratic oath with new force, risking their lives out of a commitment to what Dr. Bernard Kouchner, one of the founders of the movement, calls "the duty to interfere." Volunteer medics are treating tribespeople for malaria and tuberculosis in East Africa, performing amputations on victims of land mines in Sri Lanka, building clean-water systems in El Salvador and operating surgical clinics, often under gunfire, in the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon...
...horror of events in Biafra unfolded, Kouchner became convinced that Recamier was right. When Nigerian forces closed in on the hospital where Kouchner was working, the doctors asked to evacuate their patients. The Red Cross ordered them to stay on the grounds that they would be safer in a hospital under the Geneva Conventions. As the troops drew near, many patients bolted into the forest. "It was unbelievable," recalls Kouchner, who is now France's Secretary of State for Humanitarian Action. "Some of them were | carrying their own plasma bags. Others had been operated on, and their intestines were hanging...
...understood. "I know it is not possible to save everybody in the world," says Dr. Jean-Louis Menciere, a French anesthesiologist working in Sri Lanka, "but to do something about it is better than doing nothing." As more and more people become committed to the idea that, as Bernard Kouchner puts it, "mankind's suffering belongs to all men," the day may not be far off when there will be a substantial pool of medical personnel at the ready, prepared to alleviate pain and promote better health, wherever the need exists...