Bernard-Henri Lévy

With Marx given the boot in Russia by dissidents and in France by the New Philosophers, and with the revolutionary hopes of the generation of ’68 dampened by the ravages of China’s Cultural Revolution and then stamped out in the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, a fair number of human rights activists and intellectuals, including France’s Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), had come by the end of the 1970s to view humanitarianism as their preferred arena for the struggle against totalitarianism.
In 1979, Françoise Giroud, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Attali, Marek Halter, Alfred Kastler (a Nobel prize winner), Guy Sorman, myself, and others founded Action Internationale Contre la Faim (AICF).

As the organization’s first campaign, a campaign undertaken jointly with MSF (founded by Claude Malhuret and Rony Brauman), Lévy and several of our colleagues marched from Thailand to the Cambodian border to protest the refusal of the Vietnamese “liberators” of Cambodia to allow any humanitarian aid into the martyred country. The AICF’s second campaign came on the heels of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Lévy and Halter, camouflaged as mujahedin, supplied radio sets to the army of Commander Massoud. The AICF also supported a camp in Peshawar for Afghan refugees.
Then in 1984 a terrible drought, aggravated by the forced collectivization of land, brought a grinding famine to Ethiopia, then ruled by the Marxist government of Mengistu Haile Mariam. Remembering that 11 years before Emperor Haile Selassie had tried to conceal from the world a famine of similar proportions, an error that ended his thousand-year dynasty, Mengistu appealed for international aid. The death toll was already in the hundreds of thousands, the pictures were wrenching, and emotion was running high around the world. Lévy and I flew to Addis Ababa and from there traveled to the northern part of the country, to Makale, where huge camps of famine victims were springing up. From there we reached a remote village several hours’ drive south from Asmara, where no international aid had penetrated. It was there that we chose to establish the AICF emergency relief and feeding center. The center was soon up and running, serving thousands of rural people who had been on the brink of starvation. In addition to providing emergency aid, the AICF intended to drill several wells.
Returning to Ethiopia several weeks later to open additional centers in the regions of Tigre and Wollo, we passed through Makale to catch a plane to Addis Ababa. There we were astonished to see several large Soviet Antonov cargo planes land one after the other, raising clouds of dust on the dirt runway. They came to a stop on a laterite pad that had been fashioned by bulldozers and lowered a ramp from their rear cargo bay. We watched in amazement as hundreds of Tigre peasants, without any luggage whatsoever, walked silently, in single file, up the ramp and into the aircraft. Once the human cargo had been loaded the pilots closed the bays and took off as suddenly as they had arrived.
You did not have to be a genius to figure out that international aid had been bait to draw the starving Tigre rebels down from the mountains and high plateaus and into the humanitarian camps. In the end, the Ethiopian authorities rounded up and deported from the rebellious areas hundreds of thousands of desperate people whom aid had freed them from the burden of feeding. The deportees were sent to the insalubrious lowlands of Ethiopia where 200,000 (according to the lowest estimate) died of malnutrition, exhaustion, or disease.
The bottom line? Mengistu had put the famine to good political use. In the West we were then in the grip of “third-worldism,” whereby the plight of poor countries was seen to be the fault of faraway capitalists. The white man’s guilt took over where western colonialism had left off. Bob Geldof’s Band Aid organization brought together music’s greatest talents for giant concerts that raised money for Ethiopian relief. The stars of Hollywood, led by Quincy Jones, intoned “We are the world” with hand on heart and head in the clouds. In the midst of this concert of humanitarianism, a few voices piped up to denounce the political and military manipulation of the famine by the authorities in Addis Ababa, supported by their Soviet big brother. (How well we remember that earlier episode of famine as an instrument of class war that claimed millions of lives in the campaign against the kulaks in the Ukraine in 1932–33. But did the aid experts remember?)
Along with Brauman and a few others, Lévy spoke up. MSF was promptly thrown out of Ethiopia—without regard for the people they were helping. Geldof’s idealistic response to Lévy was “life above all, aid above all.” Bernard Kouchner attacked Lévy in the press, asking why Lévy, who was neither a doctor nor a humanitarian, was getting involved.
Lévy’s position even unleashed passions within AICF. Whatever the political context in which NGOs are forced to operate, many believed, whatever manipulation they face, humanitarians must continue to work at all costs to save endangered populations, even under the worst of circumstances. Lévy compared the situation of aid workers in Ethiopia to that of the British prisoners in the Bridge on the River Kwai. In Pierre Boulle’s novel and David Lean’s film, the leader of a band of British prisoners of war in Burma, proud of the bridge his men have built for their Japanese captors in the Burmese jungle, tries to stop its destruction by Allied forces.
The response to Lévy’s analogy was, in essence, “Keep your hands off my well!” We were both chased out of the AICF and quickly declared persona non grata in Addis. France’s ambassador to Ethiopia delivered the coup de grâce, casually revealing that he had just facilitated the visit to Ethiopia of Serge Thion, whom he described as “one of your alter egos.” He was speaking of Serge Thion, the Holocaust denier, the only Frenchman that the Khmer Rouge had invited to visit Cambodia under their reign of terror, the Serge Thion who had lauded the regime. What could that scavenger be planning to do in Ethiopia, we wondered, as we departed in anger and sorrow.
Gilles Hertzog

He is the Michel Cachin’s gran son, who was the co-creator of the communist party in France. Graduated in Science-Po, he has been a publisher during twenty-years at Plon. He is, now, co-director “La Règle du Jeu”, created by Bernard-Henri Lévy, from whom he is very close.

Translation by Steven Kennedy

Photo 1 : With Gilles Hertzog Asmara, the Eritrean capital (c) D.R.
Photo 2 : Ethiopia, 1984 (c) D.R.