L'ex-otage
The wonderful news that the French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt is today safe, well and in the midst of her loved ones in or on her way to France, the country where she grew up, cannot be allowed to pass unnoticed here.
Rarely has an item of news made me happier than yesterday morning's first reports that she had been freed after more than six years as a hostage of Farc rebels.
It gave me a little more pleasure to read that her release was apparently achieved without bloodshed; it is surely a defeat for terrorism when terrorists are denied martyrdom at the moment their rotten endeavours fail.
The kidnapping of Betancourt aroused particular attention in France because she is not only French-Colombian but is blessed with a son and daughter, Mélanie and Lorenzo, who were determined to campaign relentlessly for her release. Their success in keeping their mother's name in the public consciousness - at least in the French and Spanish speaking worlds - was indirectly a factor in the outcome.
I followed their efforts when in Paris, and felt a warm glow while studying the joy and relief on their faces as they were reunited in Bogota with their mother.
The happy ending to Betancourt's kidnapping reminded me that there was always at least one hostage crisis on the go when I was living in France.
Soon after my arrival (summer of 2004), Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot were taken prisoner, while reporting in Iraq. They were hostages of people no less evil, however many of us deplore the conflict that inspired that evil, than Betancourt's captors.
There was always a suspicion that the men who abducted them had to dream up a reason for having done so once they realised their victims were French, France having been solidly against the war.
In desperation, they hit upon the fierce debate then raging in France about the foularde, the headwear worn by Muslim girls which, at the time, was about to be formally banned at school. Chirac's withdrawal of a democratically passed law was set as the price for the men's survival.
To their eternal credit, the vast majority of French Muslim schoolgirls, though against the ban on principle, attached a whole lot more weight to their sense of republican belonging and chose to identify with the general surge of sympathy for, and solidarity with, their kidnapped compatriots.
This was all the more remarkble when you consider how little effort is made in France to make the large Muslim population feel welcome. But French Muslim girls told me they wanted to do nothing to give the impression that they sympathised with people whose actions and demands besmirched their noble faith.
Not so long after Malbrunot and Chesnot were freed, other Iraqi kidnappers seized a third French journalist, Florence Aubenas. That crisis, merifcully, ended with the hostage's release.
As Ingrid Betancourt, so often assumed to be at death's door, enjoys her first full day of freedom, I salute her courage and steadfastness.
She is now one of France's four best-known former hostages. The other three are journalists and their trade and mine can hold its head up a little higher today following Betancourt's generous acknowledgement that she owes her life in part to the media.
What she means is that TV, radio and la presse écrite refused to become bored with her plight.
And whether a kidnapping ends with a successful rescue mission, as in her case, or behind-the-scenes deals, widely believed to have led to the journalists' safe return, it is that oxygen of publicity that makes people in power realise that turning their backs and doing nothing is not an option.
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