Bernard Kouchner, former United Nations Special Representative for Kosovo and French Minister of Health, promoted international health care access and coverage at Harvard’s Public School of Health last night, showing reverence to Dr. Jonathan Mann, a world-renowned AIDS researcher and champion of human rights.
Kouchner, a practicing physician and humanitarian, has begun a worldwide campaign to introduce the ‘right to intervene’ into international law and U.N. practice. He is the founder of ‘Doctors without Borders,’ an organization that provides medical interventions in areas where none exist.
‘In the beginning, people called us ‘Doctors without Diplomas’ they scoffed at our work,’ Kouchner said with a smile. ‘They said we had no right to take care of refugees in the Vietnam War, for example … but was their opinion based on politics or public health?’
A four-member panel spoke last night to honor Mann in front of a crowd of more than 100 students and Harvard faculty in addition to those viewing the event via a live internet broadcast. Mann, who was killed in a plane crash in five years ago on his way to a WHO conference, ‘was particularly interested in the impact of health policies on human rights, the health effects of human rights violations and the inextricable connection between promoting and protecting health and rights,’ according to Barry Bloom, dean of Harvard School of Public Health.
‘No person exemplifies his spirit better than Bernard Kouchner a major political figure and activist who questions authority and has the ability to inspire others,’ he said.
‘Jonathan Mann would have loved Doctors without Borders,’ Kouchner said. ‘It is an honor and a reward to have been given the privilege to introduce this pioneer of public health and human rights – he transformed the world of healthcare and initiated a world response to the AIDS epidemic, leading us in global policy.’
Kouchner said the organization sees all patients as patients, regardless of borders, and attempts to ‘put priority of the poor into action.’
‘When supervising playgrounds in troubled areas of Africa, I’ll never forget the emptiness I would feel in my hands when lifting a Somalian child literally dying of hunger,’ he said.
Kouchner stated his mixed feelings of current U.S. policy, taking a stance similar to most of Europe, in a brief discussion of the impending war in Iraq.
‘I would like to address the suffering of Iraq’s people; they want to be liberated,’ he said. ‘Despite the fact that I hate war, and that U.S. should do all that it can to prevent it, think about the fact that Hussein killed a half-million of his own people!’
In closing, Kouchner stressed that a society can be judged by the way it treats its outcasts, leaving his audience to ponder the question ‘who is responsible for the suffering of others?’
He will be traveling extensively to the world’s developing countries and organizing humanitarian operations.
‘We will carry on Dr. Mann’s vision of action – this planet of disease no longer knows any border,’ he said. ‘How can we treat everyone? We will start one by one … then thousands by thousands.’
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
