(intro:
imagine this was PAULA ZAHN who got kidnapped,
you would not hear the end of it................)
ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE NOW
or
Joy Sweeps France as Journalist Returns
Agence France Presse, Arab News
PARIS, 13 June 2005 — French journalist Florence Aubenas and her Iraqi interpreter returned home to emotional welcomes yesterday after they were released from a five-month hostage ordeal in Iraq, triggering a joyful wave of relief across France and beyond.
Aubenas, a 44-year-old senior reporter for the newspaper Liberation, was being flown back to Paris on a small French air force jet due to arrive today.
Her interpreter, Hussein Hanun, was driven to his Baghdad home in a French embassy car, and was immediately embraced by his crying wife and family.
The pair were “in good health,” President Jacques Chirac said in a televised address after French officials announced the release.
“On behalf of everyone, I want to express to Florence Aubenas and Hussein Hanun our happiness and that of the entire nation to know that they are free,” he said.
It emerged Aubenas and Hanun were released in Baghdad on Saturday in circumstances yet to be clarified. French authorities did not identify the hostage-takers.
The government denied suggestions that a ransom was exchanged for the pair’s release.
“No ransom was paid,” government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope told the Europe 1 radio station.
Chirac and Aubenas’s family were to greet the journalist at the Villacoubly military airbase southwest of the French capital, under the glare of news cameras.
She was being accompanied by Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy on the flight, which picked her up in Cyprus where she had transferred from another aircraft that had flown her out of Baghdad.
The head of France’s DGSE foreign intelligence service, Pierre Brochand, was also on the plane, conducting a debriefing of Aubenas that management at the Liberation daily said would continue for several days after her return.
Expressions of happiness and congratulation flowed from French politicians and media, and from farther afield.
Chirac paid homage to an “exceptional” public campaign that had pressed for the pair’s release, as well as to Aubenas’s family and to the French intelligence and military services deployed.
The managing editor of the left-wing Liberation, Antoine de Gaudemar, said: “We are completely swept away with joy at Liberation. It’s a huge relief after five months of nightmare.”
Aubenas’s mother, Jacqueline, said “we’re so happy” at the news and added that Chirac had telephoned her Saturday to give her the news but had asked that the family keep it quiet.
“Florence is a very strong person. Certainly she must be affected by her detention, but Florence will become Florence very quickly. I have total confidence in my daughter,” she told LCI Television.
A senior reporter for Liberation, Aubenas, 44, covered many of the world’s most challenging crisis points in her 18 years at the daily, such as Rwanda, Afghanistan and Kosovo.
On her latest assignment to Iraq, Aubenas was reporting on the fate of Iraqis driven out of their homes after the US military assault on the city of Fallujah.
The journalist and her interpreter were abducted in Baghdad on January 5 as they left their hotel.
The last time the French public had seen Aubenas was March 1, when a video was released of her looking gaunt and desperate and pleading for help.
In the video, she made a direct appeal to a renegade MP in Chirac’s ruling party, Didier Julia, who headed up an unofficial negotiation team that worked in parallel with government efforts to free two other French reporters taken hostage who were finally released in December.
That connection, and the unknowns surrounding the manner in which France secured Aubenas’s release, raised questions as to whether a ransom was paid.
On Saturday, the head of the Paris-based media rights group Reporters Without Borders, Robert Menard, voiced the suspicion, saying that Aubenas’s hostage-takers had made a ransom demand of $15 million within three weeks of the abduction.
“There is no hostage release without something in return and, among the demands, there is obviously a demand for money,” he said.
But, after the French Foreign Ministry retorted that his comments “about a so-called ransom in no way correspond with the reality,” Menard issued a statement saying he had “badly expressed himself.”
For Chirac, Aubenas’s release was a timely and major boost for his flagging political fortunes. His authority has been severely weakened by last month’s rejection of a referendum on whether to adopt the EU constitution, his popularity is at an all-time low, and his newly reshuffled government is limping along under the command of new Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin.
To be seen greeting the freed journalist would give his image a badly needed boost, especially ahead of an EU summit on Thursday at which he and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are expected to get into a bruising battle over the EU budget, and more generally over the future of the European bloc.
Meanwhile, two Romanian journalists freed in Iraq broke their silence over their own ordeal and release they had maintained because of the behind-the-scenes efforts to liberate Aubenas.
“We are incredibly happy that she has been freed, because we were held in the same place for almost a month and a half, from the first of April,” journalist Marie-Jeanne Ion told Romania’s Realitatea TV. “Florence was remarkable throughout. She constantly encouraged us. She is amazingly strong.”
Sorin Miscoci, the cameraman held with Ion and a third Romanian journalist, said “we have kept quiet about the details of our captivity in Iraq precisely because we hoped that Florence would be released.”
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Marie-Jeanne ION - Romanian reporter - in picture below
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