I have searched the cuttings in libraries but couldn’t find what Jacques Chirac said to provoke the scorn of Bernard Kouchner. Maybe it was his declaration to Saddam Hussein that “you are my personal friend. Let me assure you of my esteem, consideration, and bond.” It could have been his assurance to Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the kleptomaniac president-for-life of the Ivory Coast, that democracy was a “kind of luxury” Africans couldn’t afford. Or maybe his support for Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Iran’s drive for the bomb.

For whatever reason, Kouchner said that Chirac was out of the loop. “It’s all very strange. As a doctor, I can’t say whether he’s in bad physical shape. But as a citizen, I can say he looks weaker and weaker.” Many on the French left felt like that during France’s moral stagnation. They could not have suspected that Nicolas Sarkozy, Chirac’s conservative successor, would astonish the world by inviting Kouchner to clean up the Quay d’Orsay, from where Chirac’s foreign ministers negotiated grubby deals. Nor that Soixante-Huitard, the founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres, the denouncer of state terror from Biafra to Cambodia and all points in between would astonish them by accepting.

Hilary Benn, the UK’s International Development Secretary, is delighted that Kouchner’s first official act was to say the world has a duty to stop the crimes against humanity in Darfur. So too was Angela Merkel and the Bush administration, which faces public pressure on Darfur far greater than any European government has to cope with. (The Janjaweed’s slaughter of Africans has become the great international cause of the black churches.) In truth, it is getting late in the day for any kind of peacemaking. Until now, Darfur has been hobbled by the two external disabilities: the torpor of the UN and EU and the reliance of the victims of the war on aid agencies.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that you shouldn’t help aid agencies, but you should do so with the knowledge that among the burdens the victims of unfashionable massacres endure is the media relying on the aid agencies for news. A poll of aid agency staff working in Darfur, released by Reuters last week, confirmed that the worse a regime was the less the NGOs say about it. Four-fifths of the men and women on the ground said they dared not talk honestly about the attacks on civilians in western Sudan and two-thirds said they wouldn’t mention mass rapes.

Meanwhile, the deadline for Khartoum to accept a UN-African Union peacekeeping troops is approaching. However, UN deadlines mean nothing. China has a Security Council veto and buys Sudanese oil. Its communists aren’t known for their enthusiasm for humanitarian intervention. If the UN ducks the issue, the Americans will impose a unilateral travel ban on Sudanese leaders and freeze Sudanese assets. It was always going to do that; what is new and genuinely hopeful is that an invigorated EU may surprise its former friends in the dictatorships by following suit. — The Guardian