Alain Destexhe
| Alain Destexhe | |
|---|---|
| Senator, Brussels Parliament | |
|
In office 1995–2019 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
19 June 1958 Liège[1] |
| Nationality | Belgian |
| Political party | Mouvement réformateur (liberal) |
| Residence | Brussels |
| Alma mater | University of Liège , Paris Institute of Political Studies (France) |
| Website | www.destexhe.be |
Alain Destexhe (born 19 June 1958) is a Belgian liberal politician. He was a senator from 1995 to 2011, and remains a member of the Brussels Regional Parliament. Destexhe is a member of the liberal Reformist Movement and represents Belgium in the World Economic Forum. He was awarded the Prize of Liberty by Nova Civitas in 2006. He was Secretary-General of Médecins Sans Frontières from 1991 to 1995, and President of the International Crisis Group from 1997 to October 1999.[2][3]
Early life
Alain Destexhe graduated in Medicine from the University of Liège.[3] Later he graduated in International Affairs from the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris.
After his medical studies, he became volunteer for Médecins Sans Frontières (1985-1988).
He took part to different missions in the ground, notably :
– in a Salvadorian refugee camp (Mesa Grande) in Honduras ;
– in Guinea, following the death of the dictator Séjou Touré ;
– in Guatemala, on the boundary between government and guerrilla. His entire shift was expelled by the military regime ;
– in Sudan, with Tigre's refugees who fled their country in order to escape starvation in Ethiopia in 1995 ;
– in Djibouti.
From 1989 to 1991, he was the medical assistant director of Pasteur Vaccins (a branch of the Pasteur Institute and Mérieux Institute) in charge of Asia and Latin America.
In 1993, he was appointed for two years as the first General Secretary of the international network of Médecins Sans Frontières. He will be then confronted with many international crisis : Bosnia, Iraq (1st Gulf War), Rwanda (genocide, 1994), Somalia (famine).
From 1997 to 1999, he was President of the International Crisis Group.
Political career
Destexhe was elected a Senator in the Belgian federal election, 1995, and re-elected in 1999. He was re-elected for the new Mouvement Réformateur in 2003 and 2007 due to support from the Francophone electoral college, but failed to win re-election in 2010. After the 2014 elections, he was reelected in the Senate. He was also elected to the Parliament of the Brussels-Capital Region in 2004, and re-elected.[3][4]
One of the first noteworthy episode of his political career will be his participation to the commission of inquiry settled in Belgium regarding the genocide in Rwanda.
Destexhe was President of Parliamentarians for Global Action from 2005 to 2007.[1] He is a member of the AWEPA Governing Council.[5]
He is Vice-President of the Belgian delegation in the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU). In 2014 he was appointed as a Rapporteur on the destruction and degradation of our tangible and intangible heritage.
In 2014, he also became Vice-President of the Belgian delegation in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). He is a member of the ALDE Group and in January 2016, he was appointed as President of the Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee.
Author
Destexhe has published a number of books, including one, translated into English, dealing with the Rwandan Genocide. His book deals mainly with historical antecedents leading up to the mass killings in 1994 and who was to blame. Afterwards, his analyses of that era have been used in many parliamentary enquiries and investigation commissions. A 2004 exchange between Destexhe and Canadian general Roméo Dallaire, the military leader of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, can be see in the CBC documentary Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire. Destexhe stated that Dallaire failed to protect his troops and cost the lives of ten Belgian Blue Helmet soldiers in UN service.
He is also the author of several articles (New York Times, The Economist, Le Monde, Le Figaro) on human rights, international relations, international justice and humanitarian assistance.
Books
- Qui a tue nos paras? (1996)
- Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (1995), New York University Press and Pluto Press (originally Rwanda, essai sur le genocide, 1994)
- L'humanitaire impossible, ou, Deux siecles d'ambiguite (1993)
- Amerique centrale: Enjeux politiques (Questions au XXe siecle) (1989)
Notes
- 1 2 senate.be, Alain Destexhe - MR
- ↑ ICG, Fifteen Years on the Front Lines, 1995-2010
- 1 2 3 http://destexhe.blogs.com/cv_en_anglais/
- ↑ "Belgische Senaat" (in Dutch). Belgian Senate. Retrieved 10 June 2009.
- ↑ AWEPA, Governing Council, The Association of European Parliamentarians with Africa main page