A Worthy Nobel, For A Change
PUDDINGTON, ARCH
A Worthy Nobel, for a Change Doctors Without Borders wins the Nobel Peace Prize. And rightfully so. BY ARCH PUDDINGTON IF THERE IS ANYTHING tO complain about in the selection of Doctors Without...
...Like other members of the French New Left, the doctors believed that morality lay with the forces of Third World revolution, that bourgeois democracy had failed, and that American imperialism constituted the world's greatest evil...
...Like the rest of the French Left, the doctors identified the United States as the aggressor in Southeast Asia and anticipated the restoration of a humane order once the Americans pulled out...
...and, of course, Yasser Arafat...
...The doctors saw the victims and heard the accounts of a murderous, insane egalitarian order under construction...
...Doctors Without Borders, by contrast, combined courageous humanitarian work in the world's most dangerous environments with a direct, unequivocal political message...
...As in Afghanistan, the doctors provided truthful reports about the real nature of the crisis...
...This required considerable bravery...
...Soon the Red Army sent helicopters to bomb the group's facilities and launched an effort to capture or kill its doctors...
...But it was the 1994 Rwanda genocide that sparked what may be the group's most consequential involvement in political debate...
...poverty, and general mayhem that afflicted the Third World during the Cold War's waning years...
...Next came Vietnam and Cambodia...
...Instead, the group's volunteers found themselves setting up makeshift hospitals on the Thai-Cambodian border to treat the refugees from Pol Pot's reign of terror...
...Medecins Sans Frontieres was founded in 1971 by young French doctors whose defining political experience had come in street battles during the 1968 student upheavals...
...Kouchner is now U.N...
...Especially when paying tribute to humanitarian relief work, the Nobel committee almost always chooses those who maintain a scrupulously non-ideological profile...
...The Soviets regarded relief agencies as a legitimate target, and looked on the doctors much as they regarded the CIA...
...In 1999, those responsible for the Nobel award made a choice that was not only laudable, but actually inspired...
...Since the end of the Cold War, Doctors Without Borders has continued to take on the hard cases— Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone...
...Medecins Sans Frontieres had even more influence in the debate over famine in Ethiopia...
...Having witnessed the shocking fallout of the world's passivity when Rwanda's majority Hutus went on a genocidal offensive against the Tutsis, Bernard Kouchner, one of the group's founders, launched a campaign for the doctrine of humanitarian intervention—the concept that the outside world has an obligation to override a country's sovereignty to prevent mass killings of civilians...
...Joseph Rot-blat, the founder of the Pugwash Conference and a man highly sympathetic to the Soviet Union...
...the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, whose Soviet branch functioned as a mouthpiece for official peace propaganda...
...His efforts are partly responsible for the relatively expeditious response to the crises in Kosovo and East Timor...
...With few Western journalists in Afghanistan, Mal-huret's report was influential, particularly his claim that the resistance might prevent a Soviet triumph if given sufficient outside assistance...
...Over the years, the group's leaders have moved on to careers in government and politics...
...Instead, the Nobel committee chose then to celebrate the likes of Rigoberta Menchu, the Guatemalan woman whose story of repression was as much fiction as truth...
...Then came the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...
...With Afghanistan, the transformation of Doctors Without Borders from acolytes of Sartre to apostles of Alexander Solzhenitsyn became complete...
...In a report that had a major impact on Western attitudes, Malhuret explained that the major cause of famine was the mass peasant resettlement, modeled on Stalin's forced collectivization of the Ukrainian countryside, with its toll of millions dead...
...The group should have received the honor 15 years ago, when its volunteers were repairing the shattered limbs of Afghan victims of Soviet land mines and treating famished Ethiopian peasants reduced to starvation by Communist economic policies...
...BY ARCH PUDDINGTON IF THERE IS ANYTHING tO complain about in the selection of Doctors Without Borders for this year's Nobel Peace Prize, it is the timing...
...Cambodia and Vietnam, where the exodus of the boat people was underway, forced the founders of Doctors Without Borders to reassess their cherished assumptions...
...Mal-huret left the organization in 1986 to serve as France's minister for human rights, a post created for him...
...administrator in Kosovo...
...They would soon learn otherwise...
...By Nobel standards, the award, even now, is almost a daring one...
...While most news accounts accepted the regime's explanation— lack of rain, poor soil, and overpopulation, not to mention the charge that the West had been too slow in sending aid—the doctors placed responsibility squarely on the regime's shoulders...
...That message, simply put, is that Communist totalitarianism was the root cause of the death, starvation, Arch Puddington, vice president for research at Freedom House, is the author of the forthcoming book Broadcasting Freedom: the Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (University Press of Kentucky...
...The lesson of that catastrophic war was that not even the most "progressive" regime would support the breakup of Africa's largest country, no matter what the human cost...
...In his youth, Brauman had blamed Brown, who is credited with preventing a Communist takeover of the French labor movement after World War II, for everything wrong in France...
...During the 1980s, Brauman spent many hours with Irving Brown, the American labor movement's international affairs director, after Brown fell terminally ill...
...The organization's anti-communism is all the more remarkable given its leftish beginnings in France...
...He is today a leader of the conservative Republican party and mayor of Vichy...
...They soon came to understand what the rest of the world's leftists refused to accept: that the Khmer Rouge "liberators" were waging a war of genocidal proportions against their own people...
...Decades later, Brauman came to believe that Brown had saved France from totalitarianism...
...The group was quickly on the scene, setting up hospitals and sending medical volunteers inside the war-torn country...
...Medecins Sans Frontieres deserved the Nobel Prize for its humanitarian work alone...
...The doctors received their first international experience in Biafra's struggle for independence from Nigeria...
...Malhuret detailed the tactics—^bombing of civilians, the leveling of villages, the widespread use of mines and booby traps—that undergirded Moscow's campaign...
...Malhuret's associate, Rony Brauman, rediscovered his Jewish roots...
...But because it dared to speak the truth about the political origins of human suffering, it made an additional, essential contribution to the peoples of the Third World by hastening the demise of a system that was responsible for many of the century's bloodiest atrocities...
...In 1984, Fo-reign Affairs published an article by the group's executive director, Claude Malhuret, which alerted the world to Moscow's terror and mass murder in Afghanistan...
...this once fervent supporter of the PLO went on to produce a documentary about Adolf Eichmann...
...But better late than never...
Vol. 5 • November 1999 • No. 8
