“Fix” journalists

It was in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris that the Maison des Journalistes was set up 20 years ago, which has since welcomed journalists from all over the world. They are housed and accompanied during their exile in France, following death threats for having exercised their profession and applied freedom of information in their own country. Wednesday September 14, franceinfo and the MDJ marked these two decades by giving them the floor in front of a crowded 104 studio and moved by the strength of the stories.

It is often a decision taken in a few minutes on instinct, a militia comes with the order to kill, a bombardment has just hit the neighboring building, the prison sentence without trial is near. The journalist has little time to go, leave his house, his neighborhood, flee like a thief, find the channels of exfiltration to arrive thousands of kilometers from home in a Paris for so say unknown.

In their mechanics, the stories are all alike, the hasty departure, the arrival in Paris, the banks of the Seine and the standing buildings, finding a roof and the Maison des Journalistes, this incredible refuge, the MDJ (Maison des Journalistes) which offers a bedroom, a toilet area, a large dining room with kitchen where everyone comes to have their meal, it is the cuisine of the world that we sniff with its spices that come from everywhere, and there are smiles, psychological and financial support, legal aid to regularize the situation, and then French lessons to promote integration.

“The Maison des Journalistes is more than a roof, emphasizes Beraat, who fled the Erdogan regime, it is also the possibility of writing”. The room is vital to survive, not to sleep in the street, but the important thing for the Turkish journalist is to write and find his journalistic skin. In Turkey, he is denied this right. Unconsciously, he is an outlaw since his country gives him this status. So as for the Maison des Journalistes, he can finally concentrate on writing columns published on the online journal of the MDJ, he then finds his raison d’être.

Arriving in a country where you are nothing at all anymore – nobody knows you, you don’t speak the language, you don’t have the codes – the friends, the family, the house left behind, it’s traumatic, but above all devaluing.

For Ghys (Congo Brazza) and Élise (Burundi) who were imprisoned in their country, simply because of writings or reports that displeased the regime, they must regain their dignity as journalists. No, they are not criminals, no they are not militant activists. We constantly sent this image back to them, which ended up sticking to their skin.

Élise is convinced that she escaped death. Warned that they were coming to kidnap her to kill her, she just had time to take her two children, leave everything and hide in the suburbs of Bujumbura. She organizes her escape, entrusts her children to friends, and arrives in Paris. She will learn there that her colleague and friend, Jean Bigirimana, was arrested by the Burundian intelligence services, and we never saw him again. It was six years ago.

“Repair” this condition of journalist, viscerally attached to the individual: Najiba who comes from Kabul does not see himself doing anything else in his life. On August 15, 2021, the Afghan journalist, who works at AFP in Kabul, leaves the office and comes across the Taliban who have taken control of the street. She won’t hesitate. She will slip into the growing stream of Afghans fleeing towards the airport. In five minutes, she collected the belongings that sum up the essence of her life, threw them in a suitcase and locked the door of her large apartment in Kabul. To be a woman and a journalist under the Taliban was guaranteed repression, if not more.

The months that followed in Afghanistan proved him right, women saw their spaces shrink, and doing journalism was dangerous for them. Najiba arrived prostrate in Paris. For a month, she will remain recluse in her thoughts, and then she will learn to walk again, to breathe, and to let herself be won over by this bliss of freedom. In Paris, she is a woman, she is free, but French is a difficult language to learn! Without this practice, she cannot claim a job in an editorial office. But knowing that the rooms of the MDJ all bear the name of a media is a comfort.

The French press is interested in these exiles from information. She is united, but that does not give a job. Authorizations are needed, Anna does not yet have the document that would allow her to apply for a paid job. But helped by Reporters Without Borders in her dealings with the prefecture, and relentlessly trying to master French, she wants to keep hope alive.

Anna fled Moscow last March. The Russian parliament, by its vote of March 4, banned her from any journalistic practice, and then there are the threats that she evokes in half-word on which it is useless to dwell.

On the stage at 104, she especially wants to emphasize that she is speaking next to a Ukrainian, Nadia – another journalist who has come to testify – and that thus finding in a public place, a Russian and a Ukrainian, one next to the other, sharing the same values ​​in a world that opposes their two peoples, it’s gratifying.

The room applauds. Nadia speaks, she is shaking a little. Her kyiv radio stopped broadcasting, she left her apartment, the bombings in the middle of the night, she arrived in Paris, she had to relearn how to breathe, no longer jump at the sound of a siren, and no longer be afraid airplanes in the sky.

For its 20th anniversary, the MDJ calls for donationsshe only lives from that.