L’une des stars<\/em> de la crise, y compris sous la menace de la mitraille lundi dernier \u00e0 Gori, ville natale de Staline, c’est incontestablement le ministre fran\u00e7ais des affaires \u00e9trang\u00e8res. Citons John Lichfield, de The Independent<\/em>, tra\u00e7ant un portrait d\u00e9taill\u00e9 du ministre le 16 ao\u00fbt<\/a>. On y trouve des d\u00e9tails et des remarques, qui concernent la crise g\u00e9orgienne elle-m\u00eame, qui ne sont pas inint\u00e9ressants.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00abAfter visiting Georgia earlier that day<\/em> [11 August], M. Kouchner insisted on flying to the northern, officially Russian, half of Ossetia to show concern for the suffering of both sides. They are all poor sods, he said. Against the advice of senior French diplomats but with the approval of the Elys\u00e9e Palace he visited victims of Georgian agression in one of the nine camps for South Ossetian refugees set up by Moscow.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbKouchner’s visit was to receive enormous play on all Russian TV stations that night, just as the French diplomats had feared that it would. A local religious leader came forward purely by accident? to address the French Foreign Minister. Russia was quite right to have sent in its troops, the man of religion said. A great country like Russia had a moral right of intervention to save the South Ossetians from Georgian oppression and violence.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbM. Kouchner replied, rather uncomfortably, that the concept of a moral right of intervention was a French idea. In truth, it is a Kouchner idea.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t()<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbThe Kouchner doctrine that morality cannot stop at borders; that politics, and not just medicine, should be sans fronti\u00e8res when confronted with extreme wickedness used to be a minority position. It has now become widely accepted but also widely hijacked: by George Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq (a war that Kouchner defended) and, most recently, by Russians in Georgia.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbM. Kouchner was recently reported in Le Monde to have become depressed by his role at the Quai d’Orsay. Much of the real foreign policy of France in the past 15 months has been conducted by President Sarkozy and his advisers at the Elys\u00e9e Palace, sometimes in direct confrontation with M. Kouchner’s own values-led approach. His attempts to put Kouchnerism into official practice his suggestions that humanitarian aid should be imposed on Sudan or Burma came to nothing.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbThe Georgian conflict has re-energised him, his friends say. M. Kouchner believes that the European Union presided over by France until the year’s end has been given another chance to prove its importance by defending its values in its own backyard. In the early 1990s, Kouchner was in favour of international military intervention against the Serbs but failed to budge the pro-Serb President Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand. This time around, Bernard Kouchner finds himself in the unfamiliar and perhaps unsuitable role of mediator and negotiator, rather than moralist, activist or campaigner.<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n