Activist says U.N. acted too slowly on Niger

August 1, 2005
CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/africa/08/01/niger.activist.reut/index.html
TAHOUA, Niger (Reuters) -- A top humanitarian activist accused the United Nations on Monday of reacting slowly to Niger's hunger crisis, saying rich-world tolerance for African suffering dulled the response.
Bernard Kouchner, who founded the medical organization Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, said the U.N. agency responsible for food aid -- the World Food Program -- should have acted faster.
I say very clearly: The United Nations system didn't give us sufficient warning. Moreover, they did not react sufficiently, he told Reuters in an interview.
There is a World Food Program. I would really have liked them to have been more attentive; they were there before the others, but not enough, he said, speaking in Niger's town of Tahoua, which lies in one of the hardest-hit areas.
Drought and locusts ravaged last October's harvest, leaving an estimated 3.6 million people in the West African country short of food and threatening the lives of tens of thousands of starving children.
The U.N. agency says it made a plan to tackle the food crisis, but a slow response from international donors to its repeated appeals for cash and problems buying food in the region limited its ability to respond.
But Kouchner said U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan personally should have done more to draw attention to the crisis, which worsened as the Live 8 concerts and the Group of Eight summit in Scotland in July focused on Africa.
'We need action'
The excellent rock stars Bob Geldof and Bono were supposed to attract the attention on Africa, meanwhile African children were dying, he said, referring to the artists behind the Live 8 concerts that took place around the world.
So it's OK for bullshit, music, and let's say talkative people like the politicians, but action, we need action.
Kouchner said his native France in particular had not lived up to a special duty to help its former colony.
Too late, too weak, and not romantic and militant enough, Kouchner said, when asked to describe France's response to the emergency.
Because it's the former colonial power it has a special responsibility, and it did not do enough.
On a visit to Tahoua, 340 miles (500 kilometers) northeast of the capital Niamey, French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy told Reuters on Saturday that France was increasing aid to Niger and argued that the entire international community bore a shared responsibility for the late response.
A former health minister in France, Kouchner said he was pleased that Douste-Blazy had visited and that the French government had allowed his group to hire aircraft from a French base in Chad for a reasonable price to help deliver aid.
Kouchner founded Doctors Without Borders in 1971 a few years after working as a doctor during the Biafra civil war in Niger's neighbor Nigeria.
He has just visited a clinic for malnourished children in the southern town of Maradi, where he said the emaciated limbs and swollen bellies of children reminded him of victims of war-induced hunger during the Biafra civil war.
I still have memories of children in my hands 40 years ago, he said. It was the same children I had in my hands. ... Europe, and certainly my country France, we have to do more than the others, because they were waiting for us here.